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Left page: Looking like Santa reading some children’s Christmas letters while seated before a warm, cozy stove, this illustration, taken from a teaching journal around 1903, shows head keeper Milton R. Reamy in the watch room at Minot’s Ledge Light. There were many ghost stories told concerning the two keepers who died when the first tower collapsed in 1851. One of these was told by Gustav Kobbe in his 1894 Outlook magazine article:
“In the old tower, when a watch was at an end, the keeper in the watch-room summoned the keeper below by rapping on the stovepipe which ran up from the lower room, and the other keeper would rap in reply to notify the watch that he had heard the signal and would be up immediately. In the present tower the watch is called and the answer given by electric bells.
“One night, as the midnight watch was drawing to a close, the keeper in the watch-room who had been brooding over the destruction of the old tower, quite unconsciously leaned forward and rapped with his pipe. A few minutes later he was startled to hear an answering rap from below. Every moment he expected the other keeper to appear and relieve him.
“After waiting in vain, he pressed the button of the electric bell, and after the usual interval the bell in the watch-room rang and the reply from below, the steps of the relieving watch were heard on the iron stairs. He had not heard the rapping, and therefore had made no reply, his first intimation of the change of watch having been the ringing of the bell!” (Illustration courtesy of James Claflin)
Back to the edition of: Nov/Dec 2022
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