For instance, the uneaten food and upturned chair were details invented by Gibson. McCloskey busts several of the most enduring myths about the disappearance. In 1990, his daughter Anna Ducat – then 98 years old – gave an interview to The Times in which she recalled her father's reluctance to take the post.Īnyone looking for the truth behind the legend should turn to The Lighthouse by Keith McCloskey, an exhaustively researched book published in 2014 that set out to solve the mystery once and for all. The man in charge was James Ducat (played by Butler in The Vanishing), an experienced keeper in his forties who had worked with the Lighthouse Board since he was 22. The lighthouse had only been in operation for a year before its crew disappeared. There are more dubious reports of human sacrifices at Callanish on nearby Lewis, home to an extraordinary, Stonehenge-like collection of standing stones. The Hebrides were once believed to be home to a race of tiny, pixie-ish men Lewis was known as "the Pigmie Isle", and on the earliest Ordnance Survey map is called Luchruban, apparently a variant spelling of "leprechaun". According to a history of Scotland's Western Isles, written in 1695, "these remote islands were places of inherent sanctity", and there was a custom that arriving on the island would "uncover their heads and make a turn sun-ways round, thanking God for their safety". Were the keepers trespassing on sacred ground? The island had been uninhabited for centuries, though it was home to a tiny ruined chapel, believed to be a shrine to St Flannan. The Lighthouse, a 1980 opera by Peter Maxwell Davies, suggested the keepers had been driven to violent madness by their solitude, and that the steamer’s crew were forced to kill the deranged men in self defence – before covering up their actions.īut if the crew of the Hesperus weren’t to blame for their disappearance, then who was? A glowing green alien blob, according to 1977’s Horror of Fang Rock, one of the darkest Doctor Who serials of the Tom Baker era. It’s not the first attempt to dramatise the mystery. The Vanishing, a new film out today starring Gerard Butler, imagines what might have happened to them, weaving a dark tale of murder, betrayal and smugglers’ gold. The three lighthouse keepers had disappeared without a trace. On venturing inside the lighthouse – or so the story goes – the captain found all the clocks stopped and an uneaten meal on the table. As the ship approached, three huge, black birds stared down menacingly from the rocks. On Boxing Day 1900, after weeks of the foulest weather in recorded history, the steamship Hesperus stopped at the only lighthouse in the Flannan Isles, a desolate clutch of uninhabited islands in the Hebrides.īut something was wrong.
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