Hey, Happy Saturday everybody. Today we are revisiting a history mystery, and that's the case of the flann and Niles disappearance, in which several lighthousekeepers all simply vanished. We will probably never know exactly what happened to these men, but this episode gets into some of the possible causes that have been proposed over the years. Enjoying Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. My name is Holly fro and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and today we're going to talk about another maritime mystery which I know a lot of our listeners have written when we've talked about ship bricks and they really enjoy them. But this one does not involve a ship. It involves them, but in a sort of way. Uh it doesn't center around a ship at all, but in fact a lighthouse. Yes, uh so, just for a little bit of background. The Flannin Islands, also called the Flannin Aisles, are named after a sixth century Irish bishop who is storied to have brought good fortune to everything and everyone he touched in the Flannin Aisles, which are off the coast of Scotland have been rumored for centuries to be haunted by either c spirits or other supernatural powers. But the event that we're talking about today is uh an incident that happened in nineteen hundred. Construction of the Flannin Lighthouse ran from eighteen ninety six to eighteen ninety nine and it costs seven thousand pounds to build. David Stevenson was a relative of Robert Louis Stevenson and he was the person who designed it, and the contractor on the job was named George Lawson. The lighthouse officially started its duties in December of eighteen ninety nine, and the lighthouse was owned by the Northern Lighthouse Board in Edinburgh, which is a company that at the time owned and operated more than six dozen lighthouses and employed six hundred men. That company does still exist today, but that was those were its stats at the time. The lighthouse was built on Eilean Moore, which is the largest of the seven islands that make up the Flannins, and these are also called the Seven Hunters Eileen Morrise. It's about eighteen miles from Gallon Head on the west coast of Louis in the Outer Hebrides. This area, prior to their being a lighthouse, there had been extremely dangerous for merchant ships. Uh. And so that's really why there was calls for a lighthouse to be built. And for stats on the lighthouse itself, it was seventy ft tall. It still is. In fact, it stands at the top of a hundred and fifty ft cliff and it's a pretty sheer drop off to kind of raging waters between the islands. And when it was built, it produced one hundred thousand candle power and it flashed twice every thirty seconds. Uh. And those flashes were visible theoretically for a radius of twenty miles. It was built to be incredibly sturdy, and it really had to be because it was sitting there on a rocky cliff in the North Atlantic. An aside from the lighthouse keepers, there were no other inhabitants on the Flannens. If you look at pictures of them, there is pretty much empty desolate rock. They're they're very small and there's not really much you could do with that lands desolate in a beautiful, very remote The wildlife in that area there is some of it's really unique it's a very pretty area, but yeah, not so hospitable for people to make their lives there. No, there was always a list of men willing to work the lighthouse, and it used a rotating schedule of two weeks shifts. The duties of the men who were employed there by the Northern Lighthouse Board included polishing the lenses every day, keeping the mechanics working and clean, maintaining the buildings, and generally keeping the place tidy. And because of the lack of radio contact at the time, the Northern Lighthouse Board had actually made a deal with a gamekeeper on the island of Lewis named Roderick Mackenzie, in which they would pay him eight per year to keep an eye on the lighthouse, and he was instructed to report to the board's headquarters if the light ever went out. So in mid December of nineteen hundred, the lighthouse was manned by three people. There was James Ducat the principal. He was forty three and he had two decades of lighthouse experience. He was also married and had four children. His second assistant was Thomas Marshall and he was twenty eight and not married. Then Donald MacArthur was an occasional keeper and he was serving an alternate. He was serving for William Ross, who was the first assistant and was out on sick leave. So Donald was forty and married. And on December fifteenth, nine hundred, an American vessel, the s S. Arch Tour, which was on route from Philadelphia to Leith, passed by Eileen Moore just before midnight, and the captain of that vessel, Captain Holman uh noted that there was no light emanating from the lighthouse, and when the arch Tour made port three days later, he reported that missing light to the port authorities, but for some reason, that information was never relayed to the Northern Lighthouse Board at that time. It just kind of died on the vine. And also in the for some reason category gamekeeper Mackenzie also hadn't reported the outage to the board. Will actually come back to why that may have been the case in a bit, but uh so that had been again on December fifteenth, and then they reported it three days later, but it wasn't until December that some someone arrives to check out the situation, and on that day Captain James Harvey, who was aboard the Northern Lighthouse board boat, the s s Hesperus approached Eileen Moore, and on board with him was a man who had been intended to replace one of the three men stationed at the Flannin Lighthouse, so he was going to be a shift change and they were going to rotate one man out. The Hesperus had actually been originally scheduled to make the relief personnel switched on December twenty, but because of advert whether they weren't able to stick to their schedule and they were delayed by several days. At this point, the lighthouse had been dark for eleven days and people were really worried about what was going on. No one welcomed Harvey's boat at the landing stage, so the captain at first he blew the ship's whistle uh and siren, and then he fired at a stress signal repeatedly so that he could alert the keepers of his arrival. But no response ever came. No one came down from the lighthouse relief keeper Joseph Moore road Ashore. He went up the cliff steps to the lighthouse, and it's worth noting that because no one was at the landing stage to help them, he had to kind of back into the landing and jump ashore. So this was a tricky maneuver and possibly dangerous. More made his way to the lighthouse and he proceeded initially to the kitchen, and there he found a few things that were a little off. He found an overturned chair, the remains of an unfinished meal, and a clock which stopped. And that clock comes up a lot. This being one of those history mysteries, some people want to give it some sort of supernatural element, like the clock stopped, but remember clocks had to be wound at this time, so that's that's really not a hint at anything supernatural going on. It had wound down. Yes, the beds were all made, the fire grate was cold, and Moore went on to investigate the rest of the lighthouse, but he couldn't find the keepers. There was a pet canary in a cage which appeared not to have been fed for a while. The lighthouse mechanism, though, appeared to be fully functional, so there was no mechanical problem that would cause it to go out. And Joseph Moore wrote a letter and his own description of the incident two days after this, which was on December, and in it he says, on entering the kitchen, I looked at the fireplace and saw that the fire was not lighted for some days. I then entered the rooms in succession, found the beds empty, just as they left them in the early morning. I did not take time to search further, for I only too well knew something serious had occurred. I darted out and made for the landing. When I reached there, I informed Mr McCormick as an aside. Mr McCormick was the second mate of the Hesperus. I informed Mr McCormick that the place was deserted. He with some of the men came up a second time so as to make sure, But unfortunately the first impression was only too true. So after more reported back to the Hesperus that he couldn't find any sign of life at the lighthouse. More men from the boat joined him and started a thorough search of the small island, and there was no trace of the three missing men. So Joseph Moore, along with three volunteers, which included Um and Alan McDonald who was a boy master, and two seamen, Mr Lamont and Mr Campbell, remained on the island to keep the lighthouse in operation. While the investigation continued. Because while this mystery slash tragedy had occurred, they still had to warn ships away from the rocks. Captain Harvey sent a telegram to the Northern Lighthouse Board telling them about the tragedy and UH letting them know that arrangements had been made for the lighthouse. And then on December twenty nine, so three days after the initial discovery, UH Board Superintendent Robert and Ware had arrived at Eileen Moore to probe the matter, and he made arrangements for a new crew for the interim management of the lighthouse station, and then he set to the business of investigation. He went through the lighthouse again looking for for clues, but he couldn't find anything suspicious aside from the overturned chair and the abandoned meal, and the last slate entry, which was written on the morning of December fift had not yet been transferred to the log. So we've talked about this before, where often there's the book log, but what will often happen is on a chalk boarder of slate, they'll write down log entries before they transfer them down. It's kind of like an interim step. So that last slate entry not in the log um included no extraordinary information. It was you know, standard barometer, thermometer readings and then notes about the wind conditions, but nothing jumped out as odd. The work that would have been done the morning of the fifteenth had all been done from weird heads of report. The lamp was crimmed, the oil fountains and canteens were filled up, and the lens and machinery cleaned, which proved that the work of the fift had been completed. So the afternoon of the fifte was pinpointed as the probable time of the disappearance. And uh it was also noticed that only one set of wet weather gear was remaining in the building, and that was MacArthur's, which meant that Ducotton Marshall had been wearing their's. And it also you know, suggested that MacArthur went out in his shirt sleeves, which further suggested a possible emergency situation because remember it's December, yes, well and then sort of imagine the Atlantic, yes, the it's like. The logical conclusion is two men were outside in their wet weather gear. MacArthur was inside getting ready to eat, knocked over the chair in his haste to exit. That's sort of seems like a logical progression of events, but we don't really know. According to lighthouse regulations, all three keepers were not supposed to be outside at the same time. Somebody always had to stay put inside the lighthouse, so something had caused them to break with their procedure. There was coiled rope discovered strewn about the rocks below the crane platform, but the crane was secured, so that rope was not in use when the men disappeared, and the railings there were bent out of shape. There was also a block of stone that was estimated to wait at least a ton that had been dislodged from the cliff wall and had fallen onto the landing stage. Normally, all of this rope would have been stored in a box near the crane, but the box itself was missing. In the superintendence report, he stated quote the ropes were strewn in the crevices of the rocks near the crane platform and entangled among the crane legs, but they were all coiled up, no single coil being found unfastened, so it didn't really look like the ropes had been uncoiled in some sort of rescue effort. Yeah. I think a lot of times when you read accounts of this incident when they say that the ropes were strewn about it in my head the first time I read about it, I was like, Oh, they must have unfurled the ropes to try to reach someone. But then when you read wareheads report, it clearly says like, no, no, they were still all tied tight. They had just fallen out of their box. They were sort of scattered haphazard more scattered. Yeah. Uh. And there had also been a life boy that had been fastened to the railings and it was gone, But it appeared to have been swept away rather than used for an emergency evacuation, because the fastening ropes that would have held it were still in place and time aid with bits of canvas still attached to them, So it looked much more like a breakage than anyone had cut or unfurled them. We're Head's assessment. Uh. Theorized that three men probably tried to secure the wooden box during some rough weather and then were swept away by a large wave while they were trying to work. He wired his findings to his superiors and then called the widows of Duckett and MacArthur in his report, where Head notes that Joseph Moore was severely shaken by the events that had happened to Eileen Moore and stated quote, if this nervousness does not leave more, he will be he will require to be transferred. But I am reluctant to recommend this, as I would desire to have one man at least who knows the work of the station. So at that point, because the other three men were gone, uh, he wanted someone on shift who was familiar with that particular lighthouse and its workings. He also investigated the seeming negligence of the gamekeeper mckenns. So, as we talked about earlier in the podcast, the light had been out for a while, he hadn't said anything about it. After first talking to Mackenzie's sons and then with Mackenzie himself and discovering that the light had not been seen between December seven and twenty nine, he reported quote Mackenzie stated, and I have since verified this. The lights sometimes cannot be seen for four or five consecutive nights. But he was beginning to be anxious at not seeing it for such a long period, and had for two nights prior to its reappearance been getting the assistance of the natives to see if it could be discerned. Had the lookout been kept by an ordinary lightkeeper, I believe it would have struck the man ashore at an earlier period that something was amiss, And while this would not have prevented the lamentable occurrence taking place, it would have enabled steps to have been taken to have the light re lit at an earlier date. So he's basically shocking all of this up to the fact that Mackenzie was not an experienced lighthousekeeper. It was it was a problem of inexperience rather than just falling down on the job, right. Uh. Yeah, And Mackenzie, it turned out, had kept records and had noted these you know, times when the lights would go dim but they always came back. So so that was Weareheads report. And as Tracy mentioned earlier, based on the weather proof gear being gone, it seems like two men went out to do something, something took place in a third men left, which is basically kind of what We're Head suggests. But despite that report, uh, there are some sticking points that bother people that really love a good mystery and to theorize about other things. And some of those sticking points include number one, none of the bodies ever washed back on shore, and as the second one, the men were generally fairly experienced semen and lighthousekeepers, it would be odd for them to be taken unawares by a wave. However, freak waves do happen in the North Atlantic, as they do in other bodies of water, so it's conceivable that they could have just been surprised by a water wall whipping up. It's also really not addressed why one of them would have been out in the december wet weather without his wet weather gear on. Yeah, although you know, there are lots of theories that pretty quickly explained that away. It's it seems pretty logical and believable that if there were a dire emergency somebody could run out without their coat on. Uh. And while the tipped chair and the abandoned meal found in the kitchen suggested an emergency, the gate and the door to the lighthouse were actually closed when Joseph Moore first arrived there, which seems contradictory initially, but uh, many have kind of written that off as it being entirely possible that the wind just blew them shut. It is a very windy area. Another problem was that the weather on the day of the last entry in the lighthouse log and the first time the light was noted to be missing, which December fift that had been a clear day. There were storms the day after, but not on the fifteenth, So again, if it were a weather thing, it would have to have been a freak wave. So because there are just enough question marks still on this story. Uh, many other theories and stories grew out of the mystery to had to explain what had happened to the keepers, And we'll do a short list of them, and some of them are very funny, but again, remember the three men didn't lose their lives. But some of these really are outlandish. I find all of them to be very silly. Yeah. Uh. One is that a foreign power had landed and captured the men, because lighthouse keepers or who you want to take prisoner totally spaceships. Spaceships, they really there were people theorizing the aliens had landed. Also ghosts and alcoholic murder, suicide. My favorite the c monster theory that some sort of ce monster had come out of the North Atlantic and dragged them off. That they okay, this one's not actually funny, but that maybe they were lost trying to help a vessel that was in distress. Yeah, although to the best of my knowledge, there are no records of a distressed vessel happening at the same time. Uh. And the last one on our list, but there are more is that they were carried off by giant birds. That there are only two things on this list that seemed remotely to the murder, suicide or the lost wall. Yeah. Yeah, trying to help another vessel, yeah, yeah, most people agree. I think that one or two of the men likely went out to the landing stage to secure something, probably this box with the ropes in it, and UH was swept away one or both of them, and that the room whoever was remaining went out to help and got swept away. Also. At the end of his report, which was dated January nine, Superintendent Muir had said, I was with the keepers for more than a month during the summer of when everyone worked hard to secure the early lighting of the station before winter, and working along with them, I appreciated the manner in which they performed their work. I visited Flannon Islands when the relief was made so lately is seventh December, and have the melancholy recollection that I was the last person to shake hands with them and bid them ado. Yeah, that's uh. Sort of an interesting point that adds color to this whole story is that we're had knew all of these men personally. He wasn't just like a big wig from the company that came to look things over and write his report. He was investigating the deaths of men that he knew and appeared to have really liked. If you read his report, he really says very good things about them, even beyond that that brief bit that Tracy just read. So it's a little bit extra melancholy to think of him, you know, having to investigate the death of people who were basically his friends, uh and born of this tragic incident. There have been a couple of interesting pieces of art. One is a poem entitled Flanning Isle, which was written in nineteen twelve by Wilfred Wilson Gibson, and it uh tells the tale of a mystical force that turned the men into sea birds. There is another story that goes along with the landing of the Hesperus and Joseph Moore's exploration. That says that Joseph more allegedly saw these three odd birds on the island when he first landed on December six, and that story is what provides the inspiration for that poem. The opera The Lighthouse, composed by Sir Peter Maxwell Davis, was also inspired by the vanishing at Flannon Isles. It debuted at the Edinburgh Festival. In this version becomes more about the tension among the three men trapped together at the lighthouse. Yeah, it almost goes along with the alcoholic murder suicide theory. I have not actually seen that opera, but it seems to be much more about interpersonal communication in the drama of that Uh, and the flat and lighthouse still stands. It remained manned peacefully and without incidents, so for all of the stories of the islands being haunted didn't seem to have any effect on the functioning of the lighthouse. UH. It continued to be manned by a crew until September twenty, nineteen seventy one, and at that point the lighthouse at Eileen Moore became what's called a major automatic light, so it's fully automated, it's unmanned. Uh. It receives maintenance visits and annual inspections, but it doesn't have a crew that stays there. In two thousand, the three lost lighthouse keepers were commemorated in a ceremony attended by residents, relatives, and officials from the Northern Lighthouse Board. And mystery levers, of course, still bandy about theories as to what really happened on December fifteenth of nineteen hundred, although I think most historians, except some variation and weareheads, report that it was really just sort of a an unfortunate accident that happened while trying to secure something at the crane and the landing stage. I think I would have liked to have been a lighthousekeeper. You think, allegedly this one of the reasons they always have people wanting the job is that compared to other jobs at the time, it was a pretty sweet deal when you had to be away from your family, but you you know, basically got free room and board. During that time. It wasn't particularly horrible or arduous work. If you had any experience with the sea, it probably seemed pretty easy. By comparison, so it was a really good job to have all those solitary jobs that don't really exist anymore, like lighthousekeeper or the people who manned fire watch towers in florests. Like all of those want them. They're pretty appealing to see the appeal of them, but I would go a little crazy after a bit. Yeah, I think. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an email address or a Facebook you are l or something similar over the course of today's episode, since it is from the archive that might be out of date now, you can email us at history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how Stuff Works dot com.

Hey, Happy Saturday everybody. Today we are revisiting a history mystery, and that's the case of the flann and Niles disappearance, in which several lighthousekeepers all simply vanished. We will probably never know exactly what happened to these men, but this episode gets into some of the possible causes that have been proposed over the years. Enjoying Welcome to stuff you missed in history class from house stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. My name is Holly fro and I'm Tracy Vie Wilson, and today we're going to talk about another maritime mystery which I know a lot of our listeners have written when we've talked about ship bricks and they really enjoy them. But this one does not involve a ship. It involves them, but in a sort of way. Uh it doesn't center around a ship at all, but in fact a lighthouse. Yes, uh so, just for a little bit of background. The Flannin Islands, also called the Flannin Aisles, are named after a sixth century Irish bishop who is storied to have brought good fortune to everything and everyone he touched in the Flannin Aisles, which are off the coast of Scotland have been rumored for centuries to be haunted by either c spirits or other supernatural powers. But the event that we're talking about today is uh an incident that happened in nineteen hundred. Construction of the Flannin Lighthouse ran from eighteen ninety six to eighteen ninety nine and it costs seven thousand pounds to build. David Stevenson was a relative of Robert Louis Stevenson and he was the person who designed it, and the contractor on the job was named George Lawson. The lighthouse officially started its duties in December of eighteen ninety nine, and the lighthouse was owned by the Northern Lighthouse Board in Edinburgh, which is a company that at the time owned and operated more than six dozen lighthouses and employed six hundred men. That company does still exist today, but that was those were its stats at the time. The lighthouse was built on Eilean Moore, which is the largest of the seven islands that make up the Flannins, and these are also called the Seven Hunters Eileen Morrise. It's about eighteen miles from Gallon Head on the west coast of Louis in the Outer Hebrides. This area, prior to their being a lighthouse, there had been extremely dangerous for merchant ships. Uh. And so that's really why there was calls for a lighthouse to be built. And for stats on the lighthouse itself, it was seventy ft tall. It still is. In fact, it stands at the top of a hundred and fifty ft cliff and it's a pretty sheer drop off to kind of raging waters between the islands. And when it was built, it produced one hundred thousand candle power and it flashed twice every thirty seconds. Uh. And those flashes were visible theoretically for a radius of twenty miles. It was built to be incredibly sturdy, and it really had to be because it was sitting there on a rocky cliff in the North Atlantic. An aside from the lighthouse keepers, there were no other inhabitants on the Flannens. If you look at pictures of them, there is pretty much empty desolate rock. They're they're very small and there's not really much you could do with that lands desolate in a beautiful, very remote The wildlife in that area there is some of it's really unique it's a very pretty area, but yeah, not so hospitable for people to make their lives there. No, there was always a list of men willing to work the lighthouse, and it used a rotating schedule of two weeks shifts. The duties of the men who were employed there by the Northern Lighthouse Board included polishing the lenses every day, keeping the mechanics working and clean, maintaining the buildings, and generally keeping the place tidy. And because of the lack of radio contact at the time, the Northern Lighthouse Board had actually made a deal with a gamekeeper on the island of Lewis named Roderick Mackenzie, in which they would pay him eight per year to keep an eye on the lighthouse, and he was instructed to report to the board's headquarters if the light ever went out. So in mid December of nineteen hundred, the lighthouse was manned by three people. There was James Ducat the principal. He was forty three and he had two decades of lighthouse experience. He was also married and had four children. His second assistant was Thomas Marshall and he was twenty eight and not married. Then Donald MacArthur was an occasional keeper and he was serving an alternate. He was serving for William Ross, who was the first assistant and was out on sick leave. So Donald was forty and married. And on December fifteenth, nine hundred, an American vessel, the s S. Arch Tour, which was on route from Philadelphia to Leith, passed by Eileen Moore just before midnight, and the captain of that vessel, Captain Holman uh noted that there was no light emanating from the lighthouse, and when the arch Tour made port three days later, he reported that missing light to the port authorities, but for some reason, that information was never relayed to the Northern Lighthouse Board at that time. It just kind of died on the vine. And also in the for some reason category gamekeeper Mackenzie also hadn't reported the outage to the board. Will actually come back to why that may have been the case in a bit, but uh so that had been again on December fifteenth, and then they reported it three days later, but it wasn't until December that some someone arrives to check out the situation, and on that day Captain James Harvey, who was aboard the Northern Lighthouse board boat, the s s Hesperus approached Eileen Moore, and on board with him was a man who had been intended to replace one of the three men stationed at the Flannin Lighthouse, so he was going to be a shift change and they were going to rotate one man out. The Hesperus had actually been originally scheduled to make the relief personnel switched on December twenty, but because of advert whether they weren't able to stick to their schedule and they were delayed by several days. At this point, the lighthouse had been dark for eleven days and people were really worried about what was going on. No one welcomed Harvey's boat at the landing stage, so the captain at first he blew the ship's whistle uh and siren, and then he fired at a stress signal repeatedly so that he could alert the keepers of his arrival. But no response ever came. No one came down from the lighthouse relief keeper Joseph Moore road Ashore. He went up the cliff steps to the lighthouse, and it's worth noting that because no one was at the landing stage to help them, he had to kind of back into the landing and jump ashore. So this was a tricky maneuver and possibly dangerous. More made his way to the lighthouse and he proceeded initially to the kitchen, and there he found a few things that were a little off. He found an overturned chair, the remains of an unfinished meal, and a clock which stopped. And that clock comes up a lot. This being one of those history mysteries, some people want to give it some sort of supernatural element, like the clock stopped, but remember clocks had to be wound at this time, so that's that's really not a hint at anything supernatural going on. It had wound down. Yes, the beds were all made, the fire grate was cold, and Moore went on to investigate the rest of the lighthouse, but he couldn't find the keepers. There was a pet canary in a cage which appeared not to have been fed for a while. The lighthouse mechanism, though, appeared to be fully functional, so there was no mechanical problem that would cause it to go out. And Joseph Moore wrote a letter and his own description of the incident two days after this, which was on December, and in it he says, on entering the kitchen, I looked at the fireplace and saw that the fire was not lighted for some days. I then entered the rooms in succession, found the beds empty, just as they left them in the early morning. I did not take time to search further, for I only too well knew something serious had occurred. I darted out and made for the landing. When I reached there, I informed Mr McCormick as an aside. Mr McCormick was the second mate of the Hesperus. I informed Mr McCormick that the place was deserted. He with some of the men came up a second time so as to make sure, But unfortunately the first impression was only too true. So after more reported back to the Hesperus that he couldn't find any sign of life at the lighthouse. More men from the boat joined him and started a thorough search of the small island, and there was no trace of the three missing men. So Joseph Moore, along with three volunteers, which included Um and Alan McDonald who was a boy master, and two seamen, Mr Lamont and Mr Campbell, remained on the island to keep the lighthouse in operation. While the investigation continued. Because while this mystery slash tragedy had occurred, they still had to warn ships away from the rocks. Captain Harvey sent a telegram to the Northern Lighthouse Board telling them about the tragedy and UH letting them know that arrangements had been made for the lighthouse. And then on December twenty nine, so three days after the initial discovery, UH Board Superintendent Robert and Ware had arrived at Eileen Moore to probe the matter, and he made arrangements for a new crew for the interim management of the lighthouse station, and then he set to the business of investigation. He went through the lighthouse again looking for for clues, but he couldn't find anything suspicious aside from the overturned chair and the abandoned meal, and the last slate entry, which was written on the morning of December fift had not yet been transferred to the log. So we've talked about this before, where often there's the book log, but what will often happen is on a chalk boarder of slate, they'll write down log entries before they transfer them down. It's kind of like an interim step. So that last slate entry not in the log um included no extraordinary information. It was you know, standard barometer, thermometer readings and then notes about the wind conditions, but nothing jumped out as odd. The work that would have been done the morning of the fifteenth had all been done from weird heads of report. The lamp was crimmed, the oil fountains and canteens were filled up, and the lens and machinery cleaned, which proved that the work of the fift had been completed. So the afternoon of the fifte was pinpointed as the probable time of the disappearance. And uh it was also noticed that only one set of wet weather gear was remaining in the building, and that was MacArthur's, which meant that Ducotton Marshall had been wearing their's. And it also you know, suggested that MacArthur went out in his shirt sleeves, which further suggested a possible emergency situation because remember it's December, yes, well and then sort of imagine the Atlantic, yes, the it's like. The logical conclusion is two men were outside in their wet weather gear. MacArthur was inside getting ready to eat, knocked over the chair in his haste to exit. That's sort of seems like a logical progression of events, but we don't really know. According to lighthouse regulations, all three keepers were not supposed to be outside at the same time. Somebody always had to stay put inside the lighthouse, so something had caused them to break with their procedure. There was coiled rope discovered strewn about the rocks below the crane platform, but the crane was secured, so that rope was not in use when the men disappeared, and the railings there were bent out of shape. There was also a block of stone that was estimated to wait at least a ton that had been dislodged from the cliff wall and had fallen onto the landing stage. Normally, all of this rope would have been stored in a box near the crane, but the box itself was missing. In the superintendence report, he stated quote the ropes were strewn in the crevices of the rocks near the crane platform and entangled among the crane legs, but they were all coiled up, no single coil being found unfastened, so it didn't really look like the ropes had been uncoiled in some sort of rescue effort. Yeah. I think a lot of times when you read accounts of this incident when they say that the ropes were strewn about it in my head the first time I read about it, I was like, Oh, they must have unfurled the ropes to try to reach someone. But then when you read wareheads report, it clearly says like, no, no, they were still all tied tight. They had just fallen out of their box. They were sort of scattered haphazard more scattered. Yeah. Uh. And there had also been a life boy that had been fastened to the railings and it was gone, But it appeared to have been swept away rather than used for an emergency evacuation, because the fastening ropes that would have held it were still in place and time aid with bits of canvas still attached to them, So it looked much more like a breakage than anyone had cut or unfurled them. We're Head's assessment. Uh. Theorized that three men probably tried to secure the wooden box during some rough weather and then were swept away by a large wave while they were trying to work. He wired his findings to his superiors and then called the widows of Duckett and MacArthur in his report, where Head notes that Joseph Moore was severely shaken by the events that had happened to Eileen Moore and stated quote, if this nervousness does not leave more, he will be he will require to be transferred. But I am reluctant to recommend this, as I would desire to have one man at least who knows the work of the station. So at that point, because the other three men were gone, uh, he wanted someone on shift who was familiar with that particular lighthouse and its workings. He also investigated the seeming negligence of the gamekeeper mckenns. So, as we talked about earlier in the podcast, the light had been out for a while, he hadn't said anything about it. After first talking to Mackenzie's sons and then with Mackenzie himself and discovering that the light had not been seen between December seven and twenty nine, he reported quote Mackenzie stated, and I have since verified this. The lights sometimes cannot be seen for four or five consecutive nights. But he was beginning to be anxious at not seeing it for such a long period, and had for two nights prior to its reappearance been getting the assistance of the natives to see if it could be discerned. Had the lookout been kept by an ordinary lightkeeper, I believe it would have struck the man ashore at an earlier period that something was amiss, And while this would not have prevented the lamentable occurrence taking place, it would have enabled steps to have been taken to have the light re lit at an earlier date. So he's basically shocking all of this up to the fact that Mackenzie was not an experienced lighthousekeeper. It was it was a problem of inexperience rather than just falling down on the job, right. Uh. Yeah, And Mackenzie, it turned out, had kept records and had noted these you know, times when the lights would go dim but they always came back. So so that was Weareheads report. And as Tracy mentioned earlier, based on the weather proof gear being gone, it seems like two men went out to do something, something took place in a third men left, which is basically kind of what We're Head suggests. But despite that report, uh, there are some sticking points that bother people that really love a good mystery and to theorize about other things. And some of those sticking points include number one, none of the bodies ever washed back on shore, and as the second one, the men were generally fairly experienced semen and lighthousekeepers, it would be odd for them to be taken unawares by a wave. However, freak waves do happen in the North Atlantic, as they do in other bodies of water, so it's conceivable that they could have just been surprised by a water wall whipping up. It's also really not addressed why one of them would have been out in the december wet weather without his wet weather gear on. Yeah, although you know, there are lots of theories that pretty quickly explained that away. It's it seems pretty logical and believable that if there were a dire emergency somebody could run out without their coat on. Uh. And while the tipped chair and the abandoned meal found in the kitchen suggested an emergency, the gate and the door to the lighthouse were actually closed when Joseph Moore first arrived there, which seems contradictory initially, but uh, many have kind of written that off as it being entirely possible that the wind just blew them shut. It is a very windy area. Another problem was that the weather on the day of the last entry in the lighthouse log and the first time the light was noted to be missing, which December fift that had been a clear day. There were storms the day after, but not on the fifteenth, So again, if it were a weather thing, it would have to have been a freak wave. So because there are just enough question marks still on this story. Uh, many other theories and stories grew out of the mystery to had to explain what had happened to the keepers, And we'll do a short list of them, and some of them are very funny, but again, remember the three men didn't lose their lives. But some of these really are outlandish. I find all of them to be very silly. Yeah. Uh. One is that a foreign power had landed and captured the men, because lighthouse keepers or who you want to take prisoner totally spaceships. Spaceships, they really there were people theorizing the aliens had landed. Also ghosts and alcoholic murder, suicide. My favorite the c monster theory that some sort of ce monster had come out of the North Atlantic and dragged them off. That they okay, this one's not actually funny, but that maybe they were lost trying to help a vessel that was in distress. Yeah, although to the best of my knowledge, there are no records of a distressed vessel happening at the same time. Uh. And the last one on our list, but there are more is that they were carried off by giant birds. That there are only two things on this list that seemed remotely to the murder, suicide or the lost wall. Yeah. Yeah, trying to help another vessel, yeah, yeah, most people agree. I think that one or two of the men likely went out to the landing stage to secure something, probably this box with the ropes in it, and UH was swept away one or both of them, and that the room whoever was remaining went out to help and got swept away. Also. At the end of his report, which was dated January nine, Superintendent Muir had said, I was with the keepers for more than a month during the summer of when everyone worked hard to secure the early lighting of the station before winter, and working along with them, I appreciated the manner in which they performed their work. I visited Flannon Islands when the relief was made so lately is seventh December, and have the melancholy recollection that I was the last person to shake hands with them and bid them ado. Yeah, that's uh. Sort of an interesting point that adds color to this whole story is that we're had knew all of these men personally. He wasn't just like a big wig from the company that came to look things over and write his report. He was investigating the deaths of men that he knew and appeared to have really liked. If you read his report, he really says very good things about them, even beyond that that brief bit that Tracy just read. So it's a little bit extra melancholy to think of him, you know, having to investigate the death of people who were basically his friends, uh and born of this tragic incident. There have been a couple of interesting pieces of art. One is a poem entitled Flanning Isle, which was written in nineteen twelve by Wilfred Wilson Gibson, and it uh tells the tale of a mystical force that turned the men into sea birds. There is another story that goes along with the landing of the Hesperus and Joseph Moore's exploration. That says that Joseph more allegedly saw these three odd birds on the island when he first landed on December six, and that story is what provides the inspiration for that poem. The opera The Lighthouse, composed by Sir Peter Maxwell Davis, was also inspired by the vanishing at Flannon Isles. It debuted at the Edinburgh Festival. In this version becomes more about the tension among the three men trapped together at the lighthouse. Yeah, it almost goes along with the alcoholic murder suicide theory. I have not actually seen that opera, but it seems to be much more about interpersonal communication in the drama of that Uh, and the flat and lighthouse still stands. It remained manned peacefully and without incidents, so for all of the stories of the islands being haunted didn't seem to have any effect on the functioning of the lighthouse. UH. It continued to be manned by a crew until September twenty, nineteen seventy one, and at that point the lighthouse at Eileen Moore became what's called a major automatic light, so it's fully automated, it's unmanned. Uh. It receives maintenance visits and annual inspections, but it doesn't have a crew that stays there. In two thousand, the three lost lighthouse keepers were commemorated in a ceremony attended by residents, relatives, and officials from the Northern Lighthouse Board. And mystery levers, of course, still bandy about theories as to what really happened on December fifteenth of nineteen hundred, although I think most historians, except some variation and weareheads, report that it was really just sort of a an unfortunate accident that happened while trying to secure something at the crane and the landing stage. I think I would have liked to have been a lighthousekeeper. You think, allegedly this one of the reasons they always have people wanting the job is that compared to other jobs at the time, it was a pretty sweet deal when you had to be away from your family, but you you know, basically got free room and board. During that time. It wasn't particularly horrible or arduous work. If you had any experience with the sea, it probably seemed pretty easy. By comparison, so it was a really good job to have all those solitary jobs that don't really exist anymore, like lighthousekeeper or the people who manned fire watch towers in florests. Like all of those want them. They're pretty appealing to see the appeal of them, but I would go a little crazy after a bit. Yeah, I think. Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday. 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