Faulty reasoning signals

• Negativity Bias - 16.4%
• Biased Writer Voice - 15.5%
• Availability Heuristic - 13.6%

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Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

On the morning of December 15, 1900, gale-force winds and raging waves hit the island of Eilean Mòr, and its lighthouse keepers were never seen again.

It’s thought that the men had gone outside to secure equipment, but an enormous wave swept them out to sea before they could get back inside.

With no bodies or evidence of how the men disappeared, and superstitions swirling around the island, their last moments remain a mystery.

Shrouded in mist and fog, the craggy island of Eilean Mòr in the Flannan Isles of Scotland’s Inner Hebrides is haunted by legends. Some say fairies dwell in the crevices of rocks. Others speak of the Blue Men of the Minch —creatures with blue skin and gray faces lurking in underwater caves whose wrath sends storms bubbling up from the deep. But one mystery of this remote, windblown locale belongs not to legend but to history: Three men truly did vanish from its lighthouse.

As the iron-hulled clipper ship Hesperus made its way through the treacherous waters of the Hebrides archipelago, Joseph Moore was overcome with dread. Moore was a lighthouse keeper, and while sailing towards Eilean Mòr on December 26, 1900, to relieve one of its keepers of duty, he realized that the lighthouse flag (which lighthouse keepers would normally use to signal incoming ships) was nowhere in sight. It was expected that two of the three keepers—James Ducat, Thomas Marshall, and Donald McArthur—would come out to meet the boat when it docked and give the crew assistance with unloading, especially on an island with cliffs so unforgiving that a crude staircase needed to be carved out of the bedrock as a pathway to shuttle supplies back and forth. Moore’s captain, Jim Harvie, blasted the ship’s horn, but even after he fired a signal rocket, lapping waves were the only response.

Moore became suspicious. Lighthouse keepers never leave supply vessels waiting—least of all men as dependable as Ducat, Marshall, and McArthur. Once ashore, he searched for them, unable to shake a heavy sense of foreboding. The entrance gate was closed, but the kitchen door stood open. Inside, the air hung stale and cold. No fire burned in the fireplace, and only one oilskin coat hung where there should have been three. The beds were empty. The place was deserted . Upstairs, the lightroom continued the strange story: the lamp had been polished, its fountain filled with fuel, and the window blinds were drawn in proper order. Everything was eerily tidy, as though the keepers had completed their duties and simply ceased to exist. Only the bent and broken iron railings outside hinted that something had not gone according to routine.

“The iron railings along the passage connecting railway with footpath to landing [were uprooted from] their foundation and broken in several places, also [the] railing round [the] crane, and handrail for making mooring rope fast for boat, is entirely carried away,” Moore stated in a report dated December 28, 1900. “Now there is nothing to give us an indication that it was there the poor men lost their lives.”

Scouring the deserted lighthouse for evidence, Moore came upon the logbook of the keepers (which had last been updated on December 13) and their slate (updated on the morning of December 15). The men must have disappeared shortly afterward.

It was possible that two of the men, likely Ducat and Marshall, had panicked in the face of an impending storm and were trying to secure equipment when a towering wave took them under. There always needs to be one keeper inside, and that had probably been McArthur, whose oilskin was the only one left unworn. Running to help through the gale-force winds had been howling around Eilean Mòr that day, he may have been swept as well.

But a few holes remain in that idea. For one, while waves must have been crashing dangerously close to the lighthouse, any hypothetical wave that could have fully washed the men out to sea would have had to be a hundred feet high. For another, it seems that securing a box of equipment with mooring ropes would have likely been the last thing on the men’s minds.

However, Ducat had been previously reprimanded about an accident with the crane used for hoisting boxes of supplies up to the lighthouse tower, so he risked being fined or fired if the hoisting equipment wasn’t kept in working order. That might be enough to explain why he and Marshall would have rushed out to beat the storm before any serious damage was done.

Eventually, Robert Muirhead (the superintendent) led an investigation of his own and came to the same conclusion as Moore: The keepers must have been swept away by a powerful wave. While no bodies ever washed up, what is taken by the sea is not always returned .

Not everyone believed that Ducat, Marshall, and McArthur had been swallowed by raging waters, and folklore often superseded logic. Sea serpents, fairies, elves, and the Blue Men were all implicated in the disappearance of the men. There was also Moore’s account of three ravens ominously perched on top of the light tower. Superstition took over when he saw them flap their dark wings, soaring through the overcast sky, and he would later recount how he feared these were the lost men transmogrified into birds. Their names are still said to echo around the island as if their spirits never left.

“Moore was naturally very much upset by the unfortunate occurrence, and appeared very nervous,” Muirhead said in his official report . “If this nervousness does not leave Moore, 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.”

With no telegraph on the island to notify anyone that they were in danger, no other means of communication, and no traces of human remains, the truth about what actually happened to the men was lost with them.

Elizabeth Rayne is a creature who writes. Her work has appeared in Popular Mechanics, Ars Technica, SYFY WIRE, Space.com, Live Science, Den of Geek, Forbidden Futures and Collective Tales. She lurks right outside New York City with her parrot, Lestat. When not writing, she can be found drawing, playing the piano or shapeshifting.

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