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The Vanishing: what really happened at the Flannan Isles lighthouse? The mystery behind the movie revealed
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.
But something was wrong. The lamp had been unlit all night. As the ship approached, three huge, black birds stared down menacingly from the rocks. On venturing inside the lighthouse – or so the story goes – the captain found all the clocks stopped and an uneaten meal on the table. The three lighthouse keepers had disappeared without a trace.
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.
It’s not the first attempt to dramatise the mystery. 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.
But 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.
After much lighthouse-based horror, the adventure ends with Baker’s Time Lord intoning the final words of a poem studied by generations of schoolchildren:
“Aye, though we hunted high and low,
And hunted everywhere,
Of the three men's fate we found no trace
Of any kind in any place,
But a door ajar, and an untouched meal,
And an overtoppled chair.”
First published in 1912, Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s ballad Flannan Isle turned a sad, half-forgotten news item into a timeless mystery. When The Telegraph first reported the story in December 28, 1900, it ran under the headline “LIGHTHOUSE STAFF DROWNED”.
“No such incident has ever happened in the history of the Lighthouse Board,” wrote our reporter. There was, however, no hint of a supernatural explanation. Instead, “It is surmised that the men were swept away during the storm.” By contrast, Gibson turned the image of the empty lighthouse “ghostly in the cold sunlight” into an emblem of the uncanny to rival the Mary Celeste.
His poem has been set to music in a terrifying rendition by Siouxsie Sioux (of Siouxsie and the Banshees) and inspired a number of original songs, including The Mystery of Flannan Isle Lighthouse, an early Genesis tune. Peter Gabriel’s lyrics create a macabre atmosphere (“the island's rocks have many caves that smell of dying flesh”), but they aren’t all that helpful to fact-hungry amateur historians.
The lighthouse is “forty-seven miles from land in the roughest part of the sea”, sang Gabriel, clearly without checking his Ordnance Survey map first: in reality, it’s just 17 miles west of Lewis.
Eilean Mor, the largest of the Flannan Isles, was seen as dangerous even before the tragedy. The Lighthouse Board commissioner who chose the site, David Stevenson (son of Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson), had warned the board that "there is little protection from the Atlantic swell which is seldom at rest".
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. 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".
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".
The lighthouse had only been in operation for a year before its crew disappeared. 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.
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.
"He said it was too dangerous, that he had a wife and four children depending on him, but Mr Muirhead [the superintendent] persuaded him because he had such faith in him as a good and reliable keeper," she said. On the day he left for the last time, he stopped to give each of his children a kiss: "I always wondered if he had some kind of premonition that he would never see us again."
Working with Ducat was Thomas Marshall, a large man seen as a "gentle giant" by locals, who was still in his twenties (though Peter Mullan, the actor who plays him, is pushing 60) but he had four years of experience under his belt. Neither, one assumes, would be the kind of man to risk his life by mistake.
If there was a weak link, it would have been Donald MacArthur (played by Sex Education’s Connor Swindells), a local tailor who had served in the Royal Engineers and was said to have a nasty temper.
The lighthouse should have had a staff of four, but one, William Ross, was away due to sickness, and another, Joseph Moore, was on shore leave. MacArthur, who had signed up earlier that year as an occasional lightkeeper, was called in to help the shorthanded Ducat and Marshall.
Though the Hesperus only arrived on December 28, the men disappeared around two weeks earlier; another ship passing on the night of December 15 saw the lighthouse unlit, but failed to report it. Muirhead, who was later tasked with investigating their disappearance, had visited the lighthouse at the beginning of December and found nothing out of the ordinary. "I have the melancholy recollection that I was the last person to shake hands with them and bid them adieu," he later wrote.
Anyone 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.
McCloskey busts several of the most enduring myths about the disappearance. For instance, the uneaten food and upturned chair were details invented by Gibson. According to an eyewitness report from Moore – who was returning aboard the Hesperus, and so was the first to arrive on the scene – everything looked orderly, and "the kitchen utensils were all very clean”.
Then there are the often-quoted logbook entries, supposedly written by Marshall:
Dec. 12th. Gale, north by north-west. Sea lashed to fury. Stormbound 9pm. Never seen such a storm. Everything shipshape. Ducat irritable. 12pm. Storm still raging. Wind Steady. Stormbound. Cannot go out. Ship passed sounding foghorn. Could see lights of cabins. Ducat quiet. Macarthur crying.
Dec 13th. Storm continued through night. Wind shifted west by north. Ducat quiet. Macarthur praying. 12 noon. Grey daylight. Me, Ducat and Macarthur prayed.
Dec. 15th 1pm. Storm ended. Sea calm. God is over all.
They’re dramatic, evocative and almost certainly bogus. As McCloskey points out, "It is extremely unlikely that he would have written in the official logbook that his superior was 'irritable.’” Besides, Moore’s report said the logbook stopped at December 13. The earliest instance of the spurious entries that McCloskey could find was in a 1965 book by Vincent Gaddis, the sensationalist American writer who coined the phrase "Bermuda Triangle".
Not all the exciting details are later inventions, though: the distraught Moore apparently spread the story about seeing those ominous black birds himself.
McCloskey raises the possibility that the men were blown from the hundred-foot Western cliffs in a sudden gust; on December 15, according to contemporary weather reports, the gale reached force eight on the Beaufort scale. But Muirhead dismissed this idea in his original 1901 report: "As the wind was westerly, I am of opinion, notwithstanding its great force, that [...] it would, from its direction, have blown them up the island."
Instead, McCloskey concludes that the most likely outcome is that one of the men fell from the steep steps carved into the Western cliffs, while trying to secure some equipment in a storm. (Ducat had previously been fined five shillings for failing to look after his equipment in bad weather, and would have wanted to avoid another such fine.) McCloskey speculates that the other two would have tried to rescue him, but all three would have been washed away by a giant wave.
We may never know for certain, but it's worth noting that the disappearance wasn't the last strange event at Eilean Mor. McCloskey records a remarkable story about Donald John Macleod, a part-time harbourmaster who occasionally worked at the same lighthouse, and was there on the day the Second World War broke out.
On one occasion Macleod was working there with two other men, when one fell victim to severe flu and another had a mental breakdown. "He tried to keep everything running on his own until the arrival of the relief on the Pole Star [a relief ship] which was four days away," McCloskey writes. "The mentally unstable lightkeeper had threatened violence... which resulted in them having to overpower the out-of-control lightkeeper and tie him up." Could something similar have happened to the unlucky keepers in 1900?
The Vanishing is out now in cinemas