Light in the Darkness

or a subway car rumbling underfoot. You might also smell peanuts roasting on the stand on the corner, and you'll definitely see massive buildings reaching towards the sky overhead. Oh and cars, lots of cars, spewing exhaust into the air and honking at all hours while the eats clog up. New York City today can feel almost clustrophobic with everything going on around us. But it wasn't always like this.

Once upon a time, it looked a lot different. Eighteen hundreds of New York was just becoming the hustling, bustling metropolis it is today. The streets were packed with horse drawn carriages and pedestrians. Stores lined the avenues, selling all kinds of goods before long chain coffee shops and fast food places took over. But even though the city was growing and evolving, it still faced the same problem as

every city in America. The weather. Summers were blisteringly hot, and winters in New York were especially hard to face. Feet of snow would bring everything to a halt, but New Yorkers didn't let flurries and blizzards slow them down. If anything, they got faster. In January of eighteen thirty, the bitter cold had led to inches of snow coating

the ground, trees, and storefronts. Over the following days, that blanket of white would get crushed and compacted until it was hard and flatten to walk on, but most of the time people would use another means of transportation to get around. That month, Scottish politician James Stewart came to visit and saw firsthand how the locals dealt with the snow. The New York Carnival began and the beautiful, light looking

slaves made their appearance. He wrote, he watched as people strapped horses to their slaves and took to the streets, zooming through Manhattan, and I quote at the rate of ten or twelve miles an hour. You see, until the end of the nineteenth century, men, women and children took advantage of the otherwise harsh conditions, making the best of them. These carnivals lasted for hours, but most people ventured out between three and five PM. During those times, thousands of

Manhattan residents would steer their slaves through the city. Central Park was one of the most popular locations, and people used whatever they had available to dash through the snow. There were even public slaves like buses that would pull groups of people all at a time. But eventually New York realized that the carnivals needed a little friendly competition. In the late eighteen hundreds, the city's streets were transformed

into racetracks for sleigh races. Small models called cutters would fly through the upper avenues with the wind whipping the faces of the people handling them. But despite the dangerous speeds achieved by racers, the press called these contests something deceptively calm, trotting races, which doesn't sound fast or furious. In December of eighteen sixty nine, dozens of racers set

out to prove themselves after a major snowstorm. An article in the New York Herald described them as and I quote, Roman chariots spitting flakes of snow in their wake as they careened across Harlem. Local businesses also got in on the action. McGowan's Pass Tavern on one hundred and fourth Street held a yearly race for anyone who wanted to participate. Winners were given a bottle of champagne every year until

the tavern was torn down in nineteen fifteen. Unfortunately, as New York continued to expand and formalized throughout the nineteenth century, both the carnivals and the sleigh races faded out of fashion. These events had helped city dwellers past the dreary winter months with ease. After all, it was hard to stay sad when every fresh snow meant another chance to beat

your neighbor to the finish line. The advent of the automobile, though, brought all of that to an end, because it was hard to navigate a sleigh through Boston around all of those cars. Today, tourists and couples can take a horse drawn carriage ride on demand, enjoying a scenic trot through Central Park, but little do they know that over one hundred years before, that peaceful outing might have looked and sounded very different with a lot more snow and a

lot less traffic. Lighthouses are contradictory places for lost ships. They signal the safety a home shore at the same time they warn of dangers hidden beneath the seas. Their symbols of civilization on a deserted sea. And yet, for the lighthouse keepers on the remote Flannin Isles off of Scotland, their job kept them far away from the rest of society. That kind of isolation was hard to get used to.

As you might imagine, the keepers quickly found that when something strange happened, there was no one they could tell, and when something went terribly horribly wrong, there was no one to hear them scream. On December twenty sixth of nineteen hundred, the crew of the small ship Hesperus approached the lighthouse on Alan Moore, the largest of the Flannin Isles. The ship had been delayed several days by a storm, but it had finally arrived to relieve the three lighthouse

keepers stationed on the island. The crew was surprised when no one came out to greet them. The captain of the Hesperus blew his ship's whistle and even fired off a firecracker to alert the keepers, but James Duckett, Thomas Marshall, and Donald MacArthur were nowhere to be seen. Inside the lighthouse, it felt as if the three Missa keepers had only just stepped out. Their beds weren't made, and there was half eaten food left out in the kitchen. The door

was unlocked and a chair was found overturned. The oil in the lamps was full, but the clock had stopped, and while two of their heavy oilskin raincoats were missing, the third was hanging right there by the door. The clues the relief team found inside didn't offer much more enlightenment. A box of supplies near the western boat landing had been smashed and its contents were strewn about the shore. Iron railings had been wrenched out of their concrete bases.

Even a one ton boulder had moved to a new resting place. But most unusual were the last three entries the keepers had left in the log book. On December twelfth, fourteen days before the hespers had arrived, Keeper Thomas Marshall had recorded a storm. According to him, there were and I quote severe winds, the likes of which I have never seen before in twenty years. He also noted that keeper William MacArthur had been crying. This entry concerned the

crew of the Hespers for two reasons. For one thing, William MacArthur had a reputation as a tough man who loved to fight. Crying was out of the ordinary for him. For another, according to reports from the nearby coast, the logbook was wrong. There was no storm on December twelfth of nineteen hundred. Thomas Marshall's entry the next day on December thirteenth noted that the storm was still raging and

the three keepers had taken to praying for it to end. Finally, on December fifteenth, he wrote the last entry in the logbook storm ended. See calm God is over All. All of this left the Northern Lights Board, which managed the lighthouse there with a mystery. They had the pieces of the puzzle, but no clear solution. As news of the keeper's disappearance came to light, speculation ran rampant. Some people familiar with William MacArthur's quick temper wondered whether he suffered

a violent outburst and murdered his two companions. Not wanting to face the consequences of what he had done, he somehow dumped the bodies in the sea and escaped or jumped into the waves himself. Believed that the sea wasn't to blame. They hadn't been taken by the natural world,

but by something supernatural. Flann and Isle was named after Saint Flannin, a sixth century Irish bishop who built a church on the island, and according to legend, even Saint Flannin himself wouldn't stay there past nightfall due to the evil spirits that ran amok after sundown. Superstitious people thought that it must have been those dark forces that kidnapped the three lighthouse keepers. Without evidence, these speculations were hard

to prove. It didn't help that investigators from the Northern Lighthouse Board were missing their biggest clue, the lighthouse keepers themselves. The three men's bodies had never been found. With the facts they had on hand, the board came to the following conclusion. During a storm on the island, strong winds or waves must have caused extreme damage to the western landy Duckett and Marshall had grabbed their oilskins and left to go secure their supplies when a freak wave dragged

them into the sea. MacArthur grew worried and followed them, going against lighthouse board rules to keep one keeper in the lighthouse at all times. He must have been so panicked he left his coat behind. When he reached the landing, he too fell into the sea and was lost. We may never discover what really happened in December of nineteen hundred on that small isolated island. Searching for the answers is a bit like holding up a lantern in a cave.

Sometimes the brighter you shine the light, the deeper the shadows grow. I hope you've enjoyed today's guided tour of the Cabinet of Curiosities. Subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, or learn more about the show by visiting Curiosities podcast dot com. The show was created by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with how Stuff Works. I make another award winning show called Lore, which is a podcast, book series, and television show, and you can learn all about it

over at the Worldoflore dot com. And until next time, stay curious.