Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Dark Down East is proudly sponsored by Amica Insurance. The unexpected can happen at any moment, and Amica knows how important it is to be prepared. Whether it's auto, home, or life insurance, Amica has you covered. Their dedicated and knowledgeable representatives will work with you to make sure you have the right coverage in place to protect what matters most. You can feel confident that Amica is there for you. Visit amica.com to get started.
lighthouses beautiful beacons shining in the night signalling to ships for safe passage into port warning of treacherous rock and structure looming in the dark waters below
Their history is an important one. Lighthouses have long been part of maritime navigation, and though automation has all but made the profession extinct, the tales of keepers from centuries past give us a glimpse into the often lonely yet meaningful existence on saltwater-soaked ledges. But as beautiful as they are, lighthouses have a dark side too.
The legend and lore surrounding the light stations of New England date back hundreds of years. Hauntings, ghost sightings, paranormal experiences. When you stand in the presence of a lighthouse, whether you believe in the supernatural or not, it's hard not to feel like you're in the presence of something or someone.
I always say that whether you believe these stories or not, the spirits of the keepers of the past are with us. They are there one way or another. Whether you believe they're actually literally there or figuratively there, their spirits are interacting with us every day. So it is very much a presence you feel at these places for sure.
I'm Kylie Lowe, and together with lighthouse historian Jeremy D'Entremont, we're exploring the legend and lore surrounding Maine's lighthouses on Dark Down East. Jeremy D'Entremont is a lighthouse historian for both the U.S. Lighthouse Society and the American Lighthouse Foundation. His passion for lighthouses began with an appreciation for the ocean at a young age. I grew up
You know, being kind of fascinated by the ocean. I grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts. If you're from that area, North Shore of Boston, everybody knows Lynn, Lynn, City of Sin. You never come out the way you went in. I've heard that saying, yeah. So I grew up in Lynn and I just was fascinated by the ocean. I used to look out on an island off the Lynn coast called Egg Rock. It wasn't until years later that I found out there was a lighthouse there, but there had been a lighthouse there, but there was just something that fascinated me about it.
But it was really in the 1980s. And by that time, I was grown up by that time. And I really got into photographing lighthouses, started visiting them, fell in love with their beauty. But then I realized how interesting the history was. And I started researching that and started writing about them and so forth. And the rest is my personal history, I guess. But, you know, it's always the people that bring these places to life for me.
And it's those people, the keepers and their families, at the root of many of the darker legends and lore that surround New England's lighthouses. I think there's something that kind of ignites our, sparks our imagination. You know, we look out, we see that light flashing in the dark, something about an offshore lighthouse as
especially at night. At least I get this feeling. I imagine what was it like to live out there, you know? And I think it was a scary existence no matter how you look at it, whether you believe in ghost stories or not. These keepers lived at these places all year round through winter storms, all kinds of terrible conditions. And often it was hard to get on and off these lighthouses. They might be stuck there for weeks or even months at a time. It was often a lonely existence.
So I just think there's something about especially the isolated lighthouses that lend themselves to these stories. And among those stories is the tale of Seguin Lighthouse in Phippsburg, Maine, quite possibly the most famous of all the New England haunted lighthouse tales.
Seguin Lighthouse was established in the 1790s, but the lighthouse that stands there, nearly 200 feet above the water atop the highest point of the island today, was built in 1857. It serves an important role at the mouth of the Kennebec River. It's a beautiful place, and it's got the only...
First order Fresnel lens still in use in any lighthouse in Northern New England. Fresnel lenses being the beautiful glass lenses made of multiple prisms that were in every lighthouse and are still in about approximately 10% of the lighthouses today. First order meaning the largest and most powerful that they used.
So Seguin was considered a very, very important light to help coastal shipping going up and down the coast, but also guiding vessels into the Kennebec River, a very important region. Of course, shipbuilding and bath and other commerce around there. Utility aside, Seguin's remote nature also lends itself to a dark tale.
Probably the most important part of the story is the beginning where I say, they say. This is one of those they say stories. So they say that in the mid-1800s, there was a keeper at Sanguine Island who lived there with his wife. There was a nice, fairly comfortable keeper's house next to the lighthouse. So they lived in the house.
But especially in the winter, the days would pass, every day would be the same, and his wife became very, very bored living at the place. That is not all that hard to believe, although I will say that in many cases, wives did a tremendous amount of work. Most wives actually learned how to do the job of keeper to kind of fill in or help their husband.
But anyway, in this case, they say that the keeper's wife became very bored and she asked her husband for a piano to help pass the quiet, slow hours. And he said, okay, I'll get you a piano. He hired a crew to bring a piano out on a schooner. These guys brought the piano out. They carried it up the high path up to the keeper's house on the top of the island, put the piano in the house for the woman.
But along with the piano, they only gave her one piece of sheet music. Okay. And, you know, some versions of the story will give the name of the song. I'm not so sure we can, we know enough to do that. But in any case, she got the sheet music for some popular song of the day. She learned how to play it, but it's the only music she had. So she would play that one song over and over and over and over and over, et cetera, et cetera, over and over and over again.
until it drove her husband insane. He couldn't take it anymore. He got an axe that was on hand for chopping firewood, proceeded to chop the piano into kindling, and then proceeded to murder his wife with the axe and to kill himself. So the story goes. There's no evidence that the story actually took place, the murder-suicide. Not to say it absolutely couldn't have taken place, but...
I think there would be some sort of record of it if it happened. There's no record of a keeper and or wife dying on the island. Nobody has produced anything to prove that that might have happened. I couldn't resist doing some research myself, and I could find no record of a murder-suicide on Seguin Island in the 1800s. And yet, visitors report strange experiences while on the island.
And they say that ever since then, if you're on Seguin Island on a quiet day and you listen really carefully, you're probably going to hear this beautiful soft piano music floating in the breeze, that same song playing over and over and over again. So they say...
Jeremy spoke to a woman who worked for the General Services Administration when they were together visiting several lighthouses with the Coast Guard in the mid-2000s. Seguin Lighthouse was not on their agenda that day, but it did come up in conversation. She said to me that she had been on Seguin Island like a week before for the first time.
And she said that she had never heard the ghost story, knew nothing about it at all, had never heard about the piano, hearing piano music or anything like that. So she's wandering around on the island by herself and she said she heard pretty piano music floating in the air.
And she actually described it as sounding like a memory, which I think is really interesting. She went to the caretaker, somebody who was living in the keeper's house at that time, and she said, that music was really pretty. Who was playing the piano? And the caretaker said, there's no piano here, and nobody was playing any music of any kind, so you must have heard the ghost. And she insisted to me she knew what she had heard. She had absolutely heard this pretty piano music kind of drifting in the air there on the island.
Have you thought about how the school buses your kids ride can affect their physical and mental health? Highland Electric Fleets partners with communities to replace the loud, smelly diesel buses we're used to with electric buses that provide a cleaner, quieter ride for students. Just five electric school buses will reduce the pediatric asthma risk for more than 1,000 students. With Highland, the benefits of electric fleets are more accessible and affordable for everyone. Learn more at highlandfleets.com.
There are lighthouses that are undeniably beautiful, like Seguin or of course the famed Portland Headlight. These beacons are the images that come to mind when you think of a lighthouse. White towers reaching into the sky, a well-kept keeper's home nearby, and a landscape fit for a postcard. And then there are others, far offshore and weather-worn.
No paint could really withstand the brutal elements, so the stone towers are grayed and rugged-looking. They're positioned on jagged piles of rock, no greenery or vegetation or cover in sight. In contrast to the beauty of Portland Head and some of the other mainland light stations, they are almost spooky and scary. Jeremy says there's actually a saying for this dichotomy.
There was a saying in the French lighthouse service, a long, long time phrase that they used a lot, and that's "Enfer est paradis," "Hell and Heaven," referring to the two extremes of lighthouses, both in terms of building them and living at them. You know, you had the "Enfer" lighthouses, which would be a hell lighthouse on a rock offshore on a really small island.
And then you had the paradise or heaven lighthouses on the mainland. And it was a very extreme, you know, two extreme ways of life on each side of that extreme landscape.
The mainland lighthouses, you know, keepers lived with their families for the most part. They had nice, comfortable keepers' houses to live in. It was easier to get supplies from a nearby town or city, that kind of thing. And they were more sheltered from storms. But then you had these lighthouses off on remote rocks and just stuck out there in the ocean, which sometimes, you know, a lot of these lighthouses, they refer to them as wave-swept or sea-swept lighthouses often.
And sometimes in storms, you'll see the waves just hit the rocks around a lighthouse like that and just explode up in the air 80 or 90 or 100 feet or more. I have photographed this myself. And, you know, to think about living in those places is pretty incredible. Boone Island Light is one that might be called unfair, hell-like.
Writer Celia Thaxter called Boone Island in 1870, quote, "the forlornest place that can be imagined," end quote. It's not pretty by any means, but it's fascinating. And the history of people living on that little pile of rocks eight miles off of southern Maine, it's just absolutely fascinating. Fascinating and tragic, as you'll hear. First of all, Boone Island Lighthouse is the tallest lighthouse in New England. It's 133 feet tall.
But it's on a barren little pile of rocks, again, about eight miles offshore from Kittery in York, southern Maine. And it was considered one of the worst places in the country for lighthouse keepers and families. And it's hard to believe that. But for many years through the 1800s, families lived out there with the keepers. Little kids grew up on this little pile of rocks eight miles offshore. It really is amazing.
And there was one keeper out there for 28 years, William C. Williams, which Willie Williams, as he was known, it's kind of mind-boggling. But the light was established in 1811. But before that, there was Day Beacon, as they would call it, just a tower with no light on it to help mark the island during the day. So ships traveling the coast there would know to avoid that, you know, going aground on the rocks around that island.
They rebuilt the day beacon in 1805, and when it was being rebuilt, three workers who were leaving the island in their boat, the boat capsized and three workers drowned. So it does have some tragedy associated even, you know, before the lighthouse was built. I asked Jeremy about one of the stories that is most often shared about Boone Island, that it was occupied by, quote, the Boone Island cannibals, end quote.
But from what he told me, this sensational moniker isn't the full picture. The story of Boone Island is one of incredible survival that took place long before the lighthouse was ever built.
It was December 11th, 1710. A British ship called the Nottingham Galley went aground on the ledges of Boone Island. And it had come from England and picked up some goods in Ireland. I believe the cargo was mainly rope and cheese. And they were coming to Boston, but they...
for whatever reason, were approaching the coast, you know, pretty far north of Boston. So in the wee hours of the morning, they were caught up in a storm, apparently like a sleet storm, and the ship went aground on the ledges at Boone Island. The 14 men on board all survived the wreck, but the ship was a complete loss, although they salvaged a little bit of wood, and two of the men died.
managed to kind of fashion a makeshift raft and they tried to get ashore in it, but they died trying to do that. They were found dead on shore. Two others in the crew died on the island, including the ship's carpenter. And this is where the big word cannibalism comes into play here.
they made use of his body. By that time, the guys were starving. There wasn't a whole lot of choice if they were going to stay alive. So they did resort to extraordinary means. They didn't kill him. He died naturally, you know, of starvation, basically, and exposure. They had no cover. Ten survivors made it through brutal winter weather for more than three weeks before they were picked up by people from Portsmouth. So it's an incredible story of survival.
There are two books about Boone Island and what took place there. One, a novel, takes some creative liberties with the story. The other, titled Boone Island, a true story of mutiny, shipwreck, and cannibalism, written by Stephen Erickson, a historian, and Andrew Veitz, the former editor of Down East Magazine, it's a true account of the events that took place on the pile of rock known as Boone Island.
Erickson writes in the preface of the book, quote, I always think of the Boone Island castaways around the winter holidays, after the temperature outside my house in Portsmouth, New Hampshire has grown frigid. The colder it is, the more they are on my mind. Sometimes I step outside to be coatless in the winter breeze like they were. I try to imagine what it must have been like, but of course I can't.
thankfully i will never know what it is to lie stranded hopeless freezing and starving on barren rock out in the ocean perhaps i walk a few paces as the ice crunches underfoot before retreating back inside to a warmth they could only imagine in their desperate fantasies
He continues, "During the course of my research, I felt some of the victims of the ill-fated ship's company looking over my shoulder, urging me to get the story right at last." With the history it has, of course, Boone Island lends itself to stories of hauntings and the paranormal.
I interviewed a Coast Guard keeper named Bob Roberts in the early, I'm going to say I interviewed him like 20 years ago, but he had been there in the early 1970s. And he told me that when he first showed up on the island, one of the other Coast Guardsmen said to him,
I asked him if he believed in ghosts and he laughed. He thought that was pretty funny. And the other one said, well, you're not going to be laughing for long after you live here for a while. He told me that every time he would go out at night to attend the fog signal, go to the fog signal building, he felt very strongly like somebody was watching him. And he mentioned that to one of the other guys and they said, well, that's where all the cannibalism took place. So I don't know about that, but that's what he was told.
One of the most interesting things Bob Roberts told me is that one afternoon, he and one other Coast Guardsman named Bob Edwards, Bob Edwards and Bob Roberts, they're the only two guys on the island. They went fishing one afternoon in the station's boat.
Peapod Dory, as they would call it. And they realized that they probably had gone too far from the island, farther than they should have. And they had to rush back to light the light at sunset. It's like the most important part of their job. You know, I get to have that light on at sunset. So they're rushing back. And as they're rushing back to the island, somehow that light came on by itself.
They landed. They looked around. There was no sign of anybody on the island. They never found out who might have got up in the tower and lit the light that night. But Bob Roberts really believed the place was haunted. So, Jeremy, you spend a lot of time visiting lighthouses, researching lighthouses, talking about lighthouses. You've heard secondhand stories about ghost sightings and supposed hauntings.
Where do you stand on the subject? Have you ever experienced anything paranormal at a lighthouse yourself? The strongest experience I've had in a lighthouse along these lines was at Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse, which is my local lighthouse. I live here in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Portsmouth Harbor Lighthouse is in Newcastle, a little town that's right next to Portsmouth.
and I've been involved with it for more than 20 years. One day about 15 years ago, I was giving a tour for a young couple one afternoon, I think it was about two o'clock in the afternoon. And you know, you go up this, there's a spiral stairway, you go up 44 stairs to what we call the watch room, like a landing at the top of the stairs. And then there's a seven rung ladder going up into the lantern room where the light is. So I'm leaning against the ladder and I'm talking to this young couple. And as I'm talking, I heard, "Hello."
Pretty much like that. And I stopped...
And I said to the couple, did you hear something? The guy said, yeah, I heard a man say hello. His wife did not hear a thing. So to me, it sounded like somebody was just a few feet to my right. The top of the stairs were just to my right, but there was a wall blocking the top of the stairs for me. So I went over and I looked down the stairs. There was nobody there. We looked outside. There was definitely nobody anywhere near the lighthouse. Nobody in sight. It's on a Coast Guard station, but
There was nobody in that part of the station anywhere close. For me, hearing that voice say hello was the strongest single experience I've had. Jeremy calls himself an open-minded skeptic. And I think I stand in that same camp.
When I stand at the base of Portland Headlight, for example, and place my hand on its white stone as I tilt my head upwards to take it all in, I think of everything the tower has endured. The long, long years on that rocky ledge, withstanding gales and nor'easters and hurricanes, crashing surf and snow squalls.
It has outlived many of the humans who kept the light flashing day in and day out and will continue to survive long past the years you and I get to live. So for me, it's undeniable that when you're in the presence of a lighthouse, you're surrounded by a different kind of energy. Could it be the souls lost to tragic accidents in the surrounding waters? Or maybe the spirits of the keepers of the past?
We can't say for sure, of course, but to Jeremy, the latter certainly makes sense. To me, it's not that big a stretch to think that a keeper of the past might still be hanging out at his lighthouse even years after he died.
You know, these keepers were so emotionally attached to their light stations. Some of these keepers were at these places for 20, 30 or 40 or more years. And they had to have that light going sunset to sunrise no matter what. Didn't matter if, you know, there was a blizzard or hurricane going on or if they were sick or somebody in the family was very sick. There was no excuse. That light had to be on sunset to sunrise. And if it was foggy, the fog signal had to be going.
but they were so tied into that light and fog signal and just the place in general to me it's almost i was thinking about this today i was thinking it's almost like they just kind of become a part of the place
Kind of makes me think of the movie The Shining. You know, he's always been the caretaker. I've always been the keeper. You know, they're just so attached to the place that to me it's not that big a stretch to think that they might still be attached in some form, whether it's their energy or spirit or whatever you want to call it, that they're still there in some form.
The legend and lore persists. Jeremy continues to hear the accounts of strange occurrences and ghostly figures and faint piano music drifting on the ocean breeze. He remains open to listening and learning. Even with all this, what I consider fairly strong evidence, I tend to...
still be kind of on the fence in terms of, you know, I don't believe that every weird thing people see or hear is a haunting or a ghost or whatever. But I do believe there's things that we don't completely understand in this world. My wife always says it's a big universe and we don't understand it all. And that's kind of how I feel about it too.
Jeremy, thank you for joining me on Dark Down East once again to talk about the legend and lore surrounding some of Maine's lighthouses. I've always been fascinated by lighthouses, and it's such a cool opportunity to speak with someone who knows so many interesting stories about them.
You know, the thing about lighthouses is there's so many aspects to them. There's the history, there's the human history of the keepers living at them. A lot of times the building of them is quite interesting. There's the story of their role in navigation, there's shipwrecks near them. There's all these stories and there's the ghost stories, but all of it is really a window into the broader history of the area and that kind of thing. So lighthouses are a fascinating subject and I just hope...
People might hear this. They might decide to visit more lighthouses. They might decide to read more about them. Maybe listen to my podcast. It's called Lighthearted. People have lighthouses in their hearts. Tune into Jeremy Dantramond's podcast, Lighthearted, wherever you get your podcasts.
Thank you for listening to Dark Down East. Sources for this episode are listed at darkdowneast.com, where I'll also link Jeremy's podcast, books, and our previous episode of Dark Down East together covering the Christmas Eve 1886 shipwreck at Portland Headlight. I'm Kylie Lowe, and this is Dark Down East.
