The real-life horrors behind The Lighthouse
RIK WORTH recalls the real-life tragedy behind the new psychological horror film The Lighthouse
American director Robert Eggers has already cemented his position in the fortean film firmament with his 2015 goatbased folk horror, The Witch .His second film, The Lighthouse ,has safely made its way across the Atlantic and arrives on British shores later this month [see review, p64].
Eggers’s second feature, ahead of his adaption of Nosferatu and his Rasputin biopic, stars Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe as “wickies” (lighthouse keepers to you and me). The psychological horror story has received critical acclaim, having won the International Federation of Film Critics Award at Cannes this year. But this tale of Lovecraftian madness, isolation, storms, murder and woodwork has a real-life British predecessor – the Smalls Lighthouse Tragedy.
Located some 20 miles (32km) off the most westerly point of the Welsh coast, Smalls Lighthouse stands to this day, although the structure has changed since it was first built in 1776. Its name comes from the collection of battered rocks in the Irish Sea – The Smalls – that it was built on. Its original design was a simple but sturdy structure of a lamp room and living quarters standing above the sea on nine oak legs.
So remote and difficult to reach is Smalls Lighthouse that when designer Henry Whiteside, an instrument maker from Liverpool with no previous experience in lighthouse construction, was sent out with a team to reinforce his design, they were quickly cut off from civilisation. Fearing he was trapped, he sent out a message in a bottle reading: “Immediate
assistance to fetch us off the Smalls before the next Spring or we fear we shall all perish, our water near all gone, our fire quite gone and our house in a most melancholy manner.”
The instrument maker’s message made it to shore and a rescue was promptly mounted; but two later occupants, cooper Thomas Howell and labourer Thomas Griffith were not to be so lucky.
Griffith and Howell moved into the lighthouse in 1801, 90 years before their cinematic counterparts. The two men had been residents of Solva, where the lighthouse had been partly built before being taken out to sea. According to author Christopher P Nicholson, the pair were known to have an acrimonious and noisy relationship: “What these two loved more than anything
else was to argue... they could empty bars of public houses with the force of their arguments, especially when it looked like they would come to blows over something.” 2
The two hotheads were never actually seen in a physical fight, so a month trapped together in a lighthouse together didn’t seem too risky a proposition – and it would give the good folk of Solva some peace and quiet.
Within a couple of weeks of their arrival, a storm crashed into The Smalls and the distress signal could be seen from the shore. Though onlookers were worried, the difficult waters made relief impossible; besides, the lamp of the lighthouse was still regularly lit, giving some reassurance to the families of Griffith and Howell.
In fact, Griffith had become ill. Going about his duties in the lamp room, the usually sure-footed wickie slipped, banging his head against a rail and accidentally killing himself. This left Howell in a bit of a predicament. He was fully aware of the reputation the two men had on the mainland. If he were to commit Griffith’s body to the sea, surely he would be accused of murder?
Ivor Emlyn, in his 1858 account of The Smalls tragedy writes: “The body could not be thrown, to find its grave, into the sea; suspicion with her thousand tongues would point at Howell as the author of foul play – that to hide a lesser fault he had committed the greater one of murder!”
So Howell kept Griffith’s body in the living quarters, raising the distress signal and continuing with his duties for as long as he could. Eventually, though, the corpse began to decompose. Unable to bear the stench, Howell crafted his roommate a coffin using his skills as a barrel maker and, in the fury of the storm, moved body and coffin upstairs to the lamp room, and then out onto the gangway at the top of the structure. Here, he lashed the coffin to the rails in order to protect it from the waves washing through the oak legs of the lighthouse.
As the storm continued, a rescue was contemplated, but the weather and treacherous,
rock-filled waters around the lighthouse made it impossible to for any vessel to make landfall. Several crew members of passing ships reported seeing a figure waving to them from the lighthouse, but as the lamp was lit each night, no one could quite figure out what had happened.
The coffin remained on the outside of the lighthouse for three weeks, but the constant pummelling of the Irish Sea fractured the casket, exposing Griffith’s cadaver to the wind. As Howell tried to continue with his duties, the rotting arms of Griffith scraped across the windows of the living quarters, seemingly taunting Howell and beckoning him to his own demise. This continued for three more weeks: Howell trapped by the storm, with help unable to reach him, while the corpse of his former colleague scratched at the window and threatened his sanity.
A boat from Milford carrying two lighthouse keepers arrived once the storm had finally subsided. By that time, Howell had been in the lighthouse for four months. The majority of that time he had been alone with no one but the decomposing Griffith for company. The event left him broken. Emlyn wrote: “Howell’s attenuated form demonstrated the sufferings, both mental and physical, he had undergone; his friends, in some instances, failed to recognise him on his
return home. Four months in such a place, and under such circumstances, what would it not affect?”
Once Howell told his story, it became apparent that the ‘waving’ figure reported by sailors had been Griffith, his body lashed to the frame of the lighthouse as his arm blew in the wind.
Whiteside, disturbed by the story, saw to it that from then on Smalls Lighthouse would be manned by no less than three men, so no lighthouse keeper would ever have to undergo such trauma again. This rule would become maritime law up until the mass automation of lighthouses.
Smalls Lighthouse was continually rebuilt and is famous not just for this tale, but also for being the first lighthouse with a flushing toilet. The incident has provided storytellers with no end of inspiration, prompting them to asking if there was something more sinister at play in the lonely lighthouse or exploring how the human mind can cope with such terrible strain. Welsh playwright Alan Harris developed a radio play of the incident for the BBC and in 2016 a Welsh independent movie, also called The Lighthouse, was nominated for four Welsh Baftas for its faithful adaptation of the story.
British lighthouses must hold some dread fascination for filmmakers, as another creepy tale of maritime misadventure was released in March 2019.
The Vanishing, starring Gerald Butler is a retelling of the events surrounding the disappearance of three men from Flannan Isles Lighthouse in 1900 (see FT352:40-44, and Mike Dash, “The Vanishing Lighthousemen of Eilean Mor”, Fortean Studies ,vol 4, 1998).
Perhaps filmmakers will continue to look to lighthouses for sanctuary in a sea of franchises, hoping to find new stories to explore. What happens out there, with characters alone among the elements, isolated from the real world, will always be a siren song to storytellers; but, in the case of Smalls Lighthouse, fact is as strange, and more morbid, than fiction.
NOTES
1 Trinity House History, 12 June 2012. https://trinityhousehistory. wordpress.com/2013/06/12/a-rockand-a-hard-place-storms-death-andmadness-at-the-smalls-lighthouse.
2 Christopher Nicholson, Rock Lighthouses of Britain: The End of an Era, Whittle Publishing, 1995.
3 Ivor Emlyn, The Smalls: A Sketch Of The Old Light-House Its Projector, And Builder, John Williams Printer and Publisher, 1858.
2 RIK WORTH is a freelance journalist and writer. His new comic, Hocus Pocus, looking at magic, science and the supernatural, is out this month.