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A new tale from the master storyteller of Haunted Lakes.
By Frederick Stonehouse, Illustrated by Carl Gawboy
This story was given to me by a sailor of long experience. To my knowledge, neither he nor his wife have any psychic powers. Both refuse to name the island and are steadfast that its real location remain a secret. I did draw out of them, however, that it is in Lake Superior. More than that they would not reveal, only calling it “Rock Island.” I think they really want others to have the same thrills they did in discovering such a real Great Lakes mystery.
It was great sailing on the lake, a good breeze from the northeast and we were making a fast nine knots. I even had the big jenny up! It was only my wife and me on this trip. We looked forward to this late-season trip for a long time, a week on the Big Lake with no phones or kids. Grandma took care of the last part and the office would just have to suffer without us.
We never stayed at Rock Island, but when we studied the charts over the winter planning this trip, it looked like a wonderfully out-of-the way place to tuck in for a day or so. It had a good deep water channel leading into a little cove right behind the island. Once inside, it looked to be proof against all winds.
As we approached it in late afternoon, the old lighthouse stood out plainly against the rock of the island. Our pilot book said it was no longer in use and I remember reading somewhere that it was abandoned back before World War II when the shipping lanes changed. Today it didn’t even have one of those silly little plastic lens on the tower.
We dropped the sails, fired up the kicker and started for the island. When we got closer, my wife slipped up to the pulpit and, using hand signals, helped me work through the channel and into the little cove behind the island. She released the hook and we found it had pretty good bottom, probably sand from the feel of it. I decided a single moor would do with the calm forecast and as sheltered as we were from the winds. Sitting in the cockpit, we could just see the upper part of the lighthouse over the trees.
The island looked so damn intriguing that we grabbed a couple of beers from the reefer and went ashore in the rubber dingy. The crib dock was still partially intact, probably because of its sheltered location, so we were able to get ashore dry. The nearby boathouse had not fared as well. Snow had collapsed the roof and it was mostly just a pile of rubble. I found a small path up through the woods toward the lighthouse and, after 20 minutes or so, we came out on the edge of a little clearing. The lighthouse stood on the northern edge of it, right where the rocks shelved down toward the water. From this angle the lighthouse was especially impressive. The brick building was a story and a half with a tower 70 feet or so in height attached to the west side. Once the whole structure was covered in whitewash, but today the red brick was completely exposed. All the windows were boarded up. A small brick oil house was off to the east. We walked over to the lighthouse and I tried the door but it refused to open. Half a dozen nails protruded from the frame showing the reason.
The sun was starting to set, so we returned to the boat. I had heard there was an old graveyard on the east end of the island. Tomorrow I would go look for it. Supposedly, it held the bodies of half a dozen sailors lost in a turn-of-the-century shipwreck. The island, lighthouse and graveyard would make a nice story. I do a little writing and hate to pass up a good tale.
We had a late dinner and afterwards enjoyed a magnificent display of the northern lights. Sitting in the cockpit with a glass of wine and my arm around my wife, life just couldn’t get much better. There weren’t even any bugs! I glanced from the stars to the northern lights to the beacon rotating slowly, its beam cutting through the night.
What the hell! That isn’t right. The lighthouse is abandoned. What is going on? I asked my wife if she saw what I did. She said yes, the light was on! Could it be a strange reflection of the sun, based maybe on the height of the tower and the angle of the sun past the apparent horizon? However wild that theory, it would not explain the crisp rotation. From what we could see the light was in full operation.
For at least two hours we alternated between watching the northern lights and the old lighthouse. Around midnight, it blinked off. Tired of coming up with useless theories, we rolled into our bunks. We couldn’t solve the mystery that night anyway.
The next day we went back to the island and on up to the lighthouse. The building was sealed solid, every window and both front and back doors too! No one had gotten into it. The lamp room windows were also covered with black plywood sheets. Even if light were inside, it wasn’t getting outside.
Feeling that there was nothing more to see at the lighthouse, we went looking for the graveyard. After a couple of hours crashing around in the underbrush, we found a small clearing bordered with the remnant of a wooden picket fence. There were no headstones, only half a dozen shallow depressions in the ground. Either the wooden coffins had collapsed or the bodies had been disinterred and returned to families. It was another mystery.
We spent the afternoon fishing and got a couple of nice lake trout. After an exhilarating swim in the cool water of the cove, I fired up the rail grill and my wife uncorked a bottle of Chablis. Nothing tasted better than grilled trout and a fine dry Chablis. The northern lights didn’t show that night, but the lighthouse beam did. Shortly after dark, it again cut through the starry sky.
I resolved to try to solve the mystery. We took the dingy to the island and, flashlights in hand, made our way up the trail. At night everything looks different, even a little spooky. When we reached the clearing we saw something neither of us will ever forget.
Light streamed out of every window in the lighthouse! A steady beam came out of the lamp room too! It was like the clock was turned back a century. We could see figures inside the house. There was one man with a full beard that walked past the kitchen window several times. There was also a woman and at least two children. We were perhaps 50 yards away, so we had a pretty fair view. The aroma of wood smoke also hung heavy in the night air. The kitchen stove must have been fired up. At one point the woman came out the back door and yelled something. Pretty soon a big black dog came bounding out of the darkness and past her into the house. Illuminated by the light coming out the open door, we could see that the woman’s hair was in a tight bun and she wore a long dress reaching down to her ankles. All of the figures looked absolutely solid, nothing vaporous or misty.
Despite what we were watching, there was no sense of fear. More than anything, it was a sense of curiosity. We watched for maybe an hour when I got too bold. I told my wife to stay in the trees and I crept up to the lighthouse to get a closer look. As I slowly worked my way through the clearing and up to the building, the furnishings inside came into better view. There was a big wood stove in the kitchen, pictures on the walls and lace on the windows. I almost reached the kitchen window when a small boy looked out and saw me. He pointed right at me, then said something. The bearded man appeared next to him, then everything went black. Bang, every light went off. By now I was close enough that my flashlight beam could reach the house and it showed that all the windows were boarded up tight, just as they had been during the day! When I turned around, my wife was right behind me. She said she didn’t want me to have all the fun. I think she didn’t want to wait in the bushes alone. We went back to the boat and, considering all we had seen, slept like babies.
The next morning we went back to the lighthouse, determined to give it a better examination. Everything was boarded up, heavy wood over the windows and doors nailed shut. I keep a large tool kit on the boat, complete with a small pry bar, which I now used to pull the nails out of the door. It creaked loudly as I slowly pushed it open. Inside was chaos, a combination of deterioration from the ravages of time and the work of an earlier generation of vandals, apparently done before the building was sealed up.
Our flashlights provided the only light, other than what came in through the open door and slits in the window boards. Inside, it was cold, almost freezing, in sharp contrast with the warmth outside. Peeling yellowed wallpaper hung down in great strips. In some places the plaster had fallen from the walls and ceiling, leaving lath visible like the bones of a prehistoric monster. Paper and other garbage littered the floor. Shattered glass from wine and whiskey bottles crunched underfoot.
In the dining room, chairs were overturned and the remnants of a table lay collapsed in the middle of the floor. Upstairs, two of the rooms still had beds and chests of drawers. The remains of a smashed child’s china doll was in the corner of the smaller room. All the floors were coated in a thick layer of undisturbed gray dust.
It was evident that no one had been in here for a long time. Nothing we had found could in any stretch of the imagination explain what we had seen the previous night.
Our last stop was the kitchen. As we stood in the room talking, I leaned back, placing a hand on top of the wood stove. It was hot! Not hot enough to burn me, but hot enough to be uncomfortable. Touching it gingerly, my wife felt the same heat. When I opened the scuttle door, the coals were stone cold, as expected, after half a century since last being used. We fled the building!
I quickly nailed the door shut as best I could with my pry bar and we retreated to the boat. We hauled anchor and carefully threaded our way out the narrow channel and into the open lake to continue our trip. Looking back, we could see the old lighthouse looking down on us. I swear I saw someone standing on the galley deck, but my wife said she saw nothing.
Neither of us can explain in the slightest what we saw and we both decided not to say where exactly it happened. We just call it Rock Island. Regardless of what happened, it’s still a beautiful spot. Our days there were wonderful ones and we feel another family is still enjoying their time there. There is no reason for anyone to ever disturb them.
A few years later we were at one of those cruising rendezvous and got to talking with the couple in the boat moored alongside. After drinks, the man asked if we had ever cruised around Rock Island. I admitted we had. Then he asked if we had ever moored in the little cove behind the island. I confirmed we had done that too. Finally, looking a little sheepish, he asked if we had seen anything “strange” while we were there? I looked at my wife and said, “No, not a thing at all.”
Frederick Stonehouse is a noted Great Lakes historian and shipwreck author whose best-selling book Haunted Lakes, published through Lake Superior Port Cities Inc., is in its third printing.