Now I’m just a house of gulls. I’m streaked and spotted with gull droppings that glue fish bones, scales, and feathers to my decks, sills, and roof. The gulls torment me with their squawking and circling. If only I could be a scarecrow.
After Edgar and Violet, there was a succession of keepers who were driven away by Violet’s monotonous melody. One keeper didn't mind the ethereal music so much as the repetition of the same piece. If there had been a varied ghostly repertoire, he might have stayed on. Two nights before his departure, he cried out to the phantom pianist in his sleep, requesting Chopin's Nocturne. The ghost of Violet didn't oblige.
I was deserted once again.
Then came Carlotta and Sven Jensen, a Scandinavian couple, during the era of the new Fresnel lens. Sven drowned just days after taking the job when his dinghy capsized in whitecaps. The celebratory glogg he and Carlotta had been drinking had gone to his head. “Don’t go out when the wind is blowing 50 knots,” I wanted to say. Carlotta returned to Stockholm a widow. She blamed me for taking her husband. But it was the sea. The wretched sea.
Mac arrived in 1923 after Sven Jensen’s death. I thought he might be a keeper. I sensed that it was love at first sight. He would spend his days scrubbing my decks, polishing my windows and brass, and replacing broken parts. Mac would balance precariously on ladders, adding a fresh coat of brick red paint to my exterior walls and ivory to my window frames. He kept the lens and windows so clean that the light would not be weakened. Polishing the lens could take eight hours a day, but this wasn’t a problem for Mac, who never slept. I sparkled under his keep. My light beamed at its full intensity at night, and my fog horn pierced thick, floating fog, providing direction to wayward ships and crafts.
Ten years to the day he first arrived, Mac learned that his wife had run off with a one-eyed captain of an island ferry, a pirate, people said. Mac stood perched on my upper deck contemplating his final jump. “No, don’t do it! We’ll find another lighthouse missus,” I wanted to say, but lighthouses can’t talk. I couldn’t stop him. He fell to his death from my upper deck, to which he had just applied a new veneer. I hoped the sea would cradle and return him to me, but the sea was his tomb. The damned sea.
Mac's ghost sometimes scrubs my decks, turns my fog horn off and on, and fixes broken lights. And several captains have been mysteriously guided to shore when their vessels were lost at sea.
Mac is a benevolent ghost.
I am now a wandering eye with no mooring, a Cyclops of the sea. The howling wind seeps through the cracks in my walls, doors, and window frames. When the wind blows more than 100 knots, a high-pitched squeal echoes through my structure. During storms, my creaks are so intense it feels as if I'm going to crack in half, but I never do. When the driving rain assaults my tower, water forms pools and rivulets on my worn and buckling hardwood floors. There’s no one to place buckets under the leaks to catch the water. I’m rotting from the inside out.
No one knows what to do with me anymore. If I had my say, I’d be a freshly-painted candy cane lighthouse throwing light across the water, lit up by a watchful keeper and his wife. But now lighthouses are automated and monitored electronically by the U.S. Coast Guard. Some say that the trend to automate and abandon lighthouses is because personnel won’t serve in haunted lights. Now it’s just me and the bevy of see-through ghosts.
The local chamber of commerce is considering placing me on a tour of haunted lighthouses. There’s even talk of a gift shop with nautical knick-knacks. Goosebump-seeking tourists with floppy hats, lighthouse ghost-buster T-shirts, dangling digital cameras, and bright white tennies will climb my tower, expecting ghosts to open doors, creak floors, perform beheaded hovering, and moan in eerie tones. But tourists don’t understand ghosts the way I do. Ghosts don’t perform on cue. They only show you signs when you least expect it — to make believers of nonbelievers.
Lucky me. After 100 years of lighting the sea for sailors, I’ve become a haunted house. That is why I hate the sea. It made ghosts of men who cared for me.
