The Flannan Isles Disappearance

The Flannan Islands have been rumored for centuries to be haunted or have some supernatural darkness. In 1900, three men vanished from the lighthouse on Eilean Mor, leaving behind an unfinished meal and a mystery that's never been conclusively solved.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast
as my name is Holly fro and I'm Tracy Vee Wilson,
and today we're going to talk about another maritime mystery.
I know a lot of our listeners have written when

(00:22):
we've talked about ship breckx and they really enjoy them.
But this one does not involve a ship, but it
involves them, but in a it's a century sort of way.
Uh it doesn't center around a ship at all, but
in fact a lighthouse. Uh So, just for a little
bit of background, the Flannin Islands, also called the Flannin Isles,
are named after a sixth century Irish bishop who is

(00:43):
storied to have brought good fortune to everything and everyone
he touched in The Flanna Isisles, which are off the
coast of Scotland, have been rumored for centuries to be
haunted by either sa spirits or other supernatural powers. But
the event that we're talking about today is is uh
an incident that happened in nineteen hundred. Construction of the

(01:04):
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

(01:27):
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 Eileen Moore, which is the largest of the seven
islands that make up the Flannins, and these are also

(01:47):
called the Seven Hunters Eileen Moorise. It's about eighteen miles
from Gallant Head on the west coast of Lewis 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.

(02:08):
It was set 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

(02:32):
built to be incredibly stirring, 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 there's they're very small and there's not really
much you could do with that lands desolate in a beautiful,

(02:54):
very remote The wildlife in that area there is some
of it's really unique, the 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

(03:15):
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

(03:35):
they would pay him eight pounds 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 nine the lighthouse was manned
by three people. There was James du Cut the principle.
He was forty three and he had two decades of
lighthouse experience. He was also married and had four children.

(03:59):
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 dred an American vessel the

(04:22):
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

(04:46):
Board at that time. That 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

(05:10):
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

(05:33):
relief personnel switched on December twenty, but because of adverse weather,
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

(05:53):
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

(06:13):
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,

(06:34):
the remains of an unfinished meal, and a clock which
had 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 yes, that's really not a hint at anything

(06:54):
supernatural going on. It had wound down, 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,

(07:14):
so there was no mechanical problem that would cause it
to go out. Uh and Joseph Moore wrote a letter
and his own description of the incident two days after this,
which was on December twenty, 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.

(07:34):
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

(07:55):
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

(08:16):
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

(08:38):
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 wearehead arrived

(08:59):
at Eileen Moore to robe 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

(09:20):
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
as 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

(09:43):
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 fifteen had all been done
from weird heads of report. The lamp was crimmed, the
oil fountains and canteens were filled up and a lens
and machine re cleaned, which proved that the work of
the fifteenth had been completed. So the afternoon of the

(10:05):
fifteenth 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 theirs. And it also you know, suggested that MacArthur
went out in his shirt sleeves, which further suggested a

(10:27):
possible emergency situation because remember it's December, yes, well, and
then sort of imagining 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

(10:49):
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 called 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

(11:10):
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.

(11:31):
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

(11:51):
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
weirheads 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

(12:12):
yet 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 tied
with bits of canvas still attached to them, So it
looked much more like a breakage than anyone had cut

(12:34):
or unfurled them. Were heads 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

(12:57):
Joseph Moore was severely shaken by the that had happened
at 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

(13:19):
someone on shift who was familiar with that particular lighthouse
and its workings. He also investigated the seeming negligence of
the gamekeeper Mackenzie. So, as we talked about earlier in
the podcast, the light had been out for a while
and he hadn't said anything about it. After first talking
to Mackenzie's sons and then with Mackenzie himself and discovering

(13:40):
that the light had not been seen between December seven
and twenty nine, he reported quote Mackenzie stated, and I
have since verified this, that 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 or to
its reappearance, been getting the assistance of the natives to

(14:03):
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 chocking all of this

(14:24):
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, Mackenzie,
It turned it 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 We're Heads report.
And as Tracy mentioned earlier, based on the weather proof

(14:46):
gear being gone, it seems like two men went out
to do something, something took place in a third been left,
which is basically kind of what We're Head suggests. But
despite that report, uh, there are some sticking points that
other 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

(15:09):
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

(15:33):
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 seems pretty logical and believable that if there were
a dire emergency somebody could run out without their code on. Uh.
And while the tipped chair and the abandoned meal found

(15:55):
in the kitchen suggested an emergency, the gate and the
door to the light house 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

(16:16):
lighthouse log and the first time the leg was noted
to be missing, which was December fift that had been
a clear day. There were storms the day after, but
not on the fifteen, 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

(16:39):
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 remembers
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

(17:01):
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 ce monster
theory that some sort of ce monster had come out
of the North Atlantic and dragged them off but they Okay,

(17:21):
this one's not actually funny, but 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

(17:41):
seem remotely 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

(18:04):
swept away one or both of them, and that the
roommate whoever was remaining, went out to help and got
swept away. Also. At the end of his report, which
was dated January nine, one, Superintendent Muir had said, I
was with the keepers for more than a month during
the summer of nine when everyone worked hard to secure

(18:24):
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.

(18:46):
Sort of an interesting point that adds color to this
whole story is that we're head 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.

(19:09):
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 Flannon Isle, which was written
in nineteen twelve by Wilfred Wilson Gibson, and it uh

(19:30):
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 UH that says that Joseph Moore allegedly saw these
three odd birds on the island when he first landed
on December twenty six, and that story is what provides
the inspiration for that poem. The opera The Lighthouse, composed

(19:53):
by Sir Peter Maxwell Davis was also inspired by The
Vanishing at Flannon Isles. It debuted at the Edinburgh Festival
in nineteen eighty. 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

(20:15):
to be much more about interpersonal communication in the drama
of that UH. And the flatted 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,

(20:35):
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

(20:57):
officials from the Northern Lighthouse Board and mystery verse, of course,
still bandy about theories as to what really happened on
December fifteenth d although I think most historians accept some
variation and wearheads report that it was really just sort
of an unfortunate accident that happened while trying to secure
something at the crane and the landing stage. I think

(21:20):
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 and 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

(21:40):
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 forests,
like all of those want them. They're pretty appealing to me,
the appeal of them, But I would go a little
crazy after a bit. Yeah, I think, do you also

(22:03):
have some listener mail. I knew indeed this is about
our episode on Pluto, and it's from our listener, Helene.
She says, hello, ladies. As a professional astronomer, I was
very happy to listen to your latest podcast on Pluto.
Did a great job of explaining its discovery and the
controversy regarding its classification as a planet or dwarf planet.
I did not get to attend the International Astronomical Union

(22:24):
conference where Pluto was demoted, but I celebrated the event
with many astronomers from my department, as we pretty much
all agreed Pluto was an oddball that did not really
deserve to be called the planet. There are, after all,
several objects within its vicinity with a larger mass. I
have one minor error to point out, uh, The Moon's
P four and P five have recently been named as
cerberos and sticks, respectively. That is an dense where we

(22:47):
recorded an episode, and in the gap between when we
record it and when it publishes, things happen. I think
that literally happened two days, yes, two days after we
recorded it was really right in that I think I
think it actually happened basically wise, we were in the studio,
but it wasn't announced a couple of weeks later. So
uh so yeah, we did not have the names. We

(23:10):
didn't know they were there yet. Uh. And then she
mentioned another good uh podcast idea, what you know what
I'm not going to read because I want to do
it surprise people with more astronomy. I've had some listener
mail like that to things that are I'm like, that
needs to become a whole episode, not just the thing
that we read. I love it. I love it. She's
great stuff. So thank you, Helene. It's always great here

(23:31):
from people in the fields that we talk about, particularly astronomy,
since it is near and dear to my heart. If
you would like to write to us, you can do
so at History Podcast at Discovery dot com. You can
also visit us on Twitter at Misston History at Facebook
dot com slash history class stuff, and on Tumbler at
Misston History dot tumbler dot com. And we're also on conterest,

(23:51):
so if you would like to learn more about all
we talked about today, you can do that as well.
And at our website. Uh. If you go there and
you type in the word lighthouse in the search bar,
you will get an article called How Lighthouses Work, which
explains a little bit more about how they function and
how they are no longer the solitary dream job Treacy wants.
You're in for love lighthouses, not just the idea of

(24:11):
working at Win, just in general. Yeah, they're just a
cool They have a long history. They started way back
in Egypt, so they're fascinating. Uh. If you'd like to
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can do that at our website too, And that is
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(24:43):
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