Showing posts with label island. Show all posts
Showing posts with label island. Show all posts

Friday, November 18, 2016

The Haunted Lighthouse

Most folks have seen and been entertained at one time or another by a player-piano - a self-playing piano containing a mechanical mechanism that operates the piano through pre-programmed music recorded on perforated paper. Watching the piano keys moving without the assistance of human fingers however, is pretty spooky; like there is an unseen ghost sitting there on the bench playing tunes. So just imagine how spooky it is to hear piano music in a place where there is not only no pianist, but no piano either. Visitors to the Seguin Island lighthouse often have just such an experience.

About a mile off the coast of Maine near the mouth of the Kennebec River is a finger of land named Seguin Island. The recorded history of this small island is a long one, at least by American standards. In 1607, two small ships, "The Gift of God" and the "Mary and John," came to America from England and dropped anchor near the island. The settlers on board hoped to establish the first English colony in North America. They built a small town along the banks of the Kennebec River and planted a few crops. Unfortunately for them, they had arrived too late in the growing season for this area and many of the settlers perished due to the cold winter and starvation. As soon as the weather allowed, they got on their ships and high-tailed it back to England.

Even the local natives usually steered clear of the boiling waters pounding on the rocks along the island's edge. The name "Seguin" is an English corruption of an Indian word which loosely translated means "place where the sea vomits." After those first settlers departed, the island was left to the natives and largely undisturbed until the late 1700's. In 1795, with numerous ships having met their untimely end on the island's rocks, George Washington gave the order to build the first "watch tower" on the island. A year later, the lighthouse was put into operation.

Congress had appropriated $6,300 (a right tidy sum in 1795) for sturdy construction of the lighthouse using the most modern methods known at the time. The owner of the construction firm which was awarded the contract though built the tower of wood and cheap materials and absconded with the rest of the funds. Wooden towers do not long survive the wet environment and winter storms of the island and by 1819, the lighthouse had been virtually demolished and had to be rebuilt. It was rebuilt according to plans with stone and only cost $2,500.

The original lighthouse keeper was Count John Polersky who was born to a noble family in Europe and had immigrated to America where he served as a major in the Continental Army. Living alone on the uninhabited island proved to be a severe hardship. From the very first, his keeper's shack and the wooden tower were battered by the waves and weather. He built several barns to hold a few head of livestock, but storms destroyed them soon after they were built. Other storms destroyed or sank three different boats he had built to transport him back and forth to the mainland. The wet, salty air killed his garden and ruined his health. One day, after not hearing from Polersky for several weeks, a shopkeeper rowed out to check on him and found him dead on the floor of his little house.

A number of other lighthouse keepers were hired, but none stayed for long. The isolation and terrible conditions always drove them away. About 1850, a young man accepted the keeper's position. He was engaged to a young city girl and soon after accepting the position, the two were married and the young bride moved with her new husband to the isolated lighthouse home where their only neighbors were the seals and seabirds.

It didn't take long for the lively, socially outgoing bride to become bored without the interesting conversation and stimulating entertainment she had enjoyed in the city. Her husband was a quiet man who believed in hard work, but he loved his wife dearly. In an effort to lift her spirits, he purchased a piano in the city and with great effort, floated it across the inlet on a raft, hoisted it up the steep slopes of the island and installed it in the parlor of their home.

The wife very much appreciated the effort and lengths he had gone to for her and she began to practice. Unfortunately, she proved to be very musically challenged. With nothing else to do though, she practiced every day, hour after hour. She eventually managed to learn one small tune and in an effort to perfect her playing of it, she played that same tune over and over again. Her husband hinted that she should try to learn another tune, but she was either unable or unwilling to try anything but the tune she already knew. Day and night, she played the same little tune until her husband demanded she stop playing it, but apparently she had become seriously obsessed, so much so that her husband was worried about her sanity. He should have been worried about his own.

Wherever he went in the lighthouse he could hear the notes of that one maddening song repeated again and again. He could hear them in the kitchen as he made himself something to eat. He could hear them while he worked with the equipment. He could hear them as he worked with the supplies. He could hear them when he went to the top of the lighthouse. Eventually, he could hear them even when his wife had left the piano and went to bed. It wasn't long before he couldn't sleep because of that damnable tune playing over and over in his head.

One day the poor keeper could stand it no longer. As his wife was playing that infernal tune yet again, he went to the tool shed, retrieved an ax and marched to the parlor where his wife sat on her stool. He lifted the heavy ax high above his head and with a mighty swing, brought it down onto the piano. The piano splintered, but he couldn't stop himself. Swing after swing rendered the piano into kindling, twisted strings and shattered ivory keys. His poor wife, too astonished or too afraid to move, was still sitting on her stool when the keeper turned the ax on her.

Amidst the piano debris, the pieces of his dear wife and the massive amount of blood, the keeper fell to the parlor floor. Coming to his senses and unable to live with himself and what he had done, he lifted the ax high in the air once more and let it fall, splitting his skull wide open.

There is no written proof of such a horrible deed happening at the lighthouse. Some say it is only a legend, but others say records were destroyed and the matter covered up or else hiring other keepers would prove to be impossible. But tourists visiting the lighthouse in the summer months very often report hearing piano music. Numerous keepers who came along later, their wives and children included, also report hearing piano music, always the same tune. They report it can be heard in the house, within the walls of the tower, and even standing outside. Many also say they have heard a soft, male voice when there is no one around. Several keepers abruptly left the island, refusing to return because of the whispering voice they heard when they were all alone. Could it be poor, lonely Count Polersky still yearning for companionship?

A few times, keepers have reported seeing ghostly figures, a man and a woman, walking hand-in-hand along the top of the cliffs at twilight, long after all visitors have left the island. It's probably just fanciful stories, but it seems more agreeable to believe it is the unfortunate husband and wife, unwilling or unable to leave the place where their lives came to such a gruesome and premature end, reunited and reconciled in the afterlife.

 

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Did He Live Before?

Vosges region of France
Marc Liblin, a shy, young boy of 6 years, was busy growing up in the town of his birth, a small village in the foothills of the Vosges in eastern France, when he began having odd dreams. He told his parents that in his dreams, a professor would come and teach him physics and an unknown language. He began speaking in this odd language which nobody in his village had ever heard. Over the course of several months, he began conversing in the words of the unknown language more than the French he had been taught since birth and told people it was his "native" language.

Kids can be cruel, especially to someone not exactly like them, so they made fun of little Marc, physically picking on him, calling him a dunce and weird. He began staying at home more, rarely going out to play. His friends were the books his parents brought home from the library. His schoolwork was not exceptional, but certainly within the normal so he passed each grade with his teachers totally confused as to why he insisted on speaking this foreign language far more than French. People from nearby towns began hearing about this odd boy. Most considered it a passing phase of a youngster who possessed an over-active imagination, but the phase didn't go away.

Marc completed his schooling, but couldn't acquire a job of substance as he continued speaking mostly in a language only he understood. As an adult, he earned money by doing odd jobs here and there and from the occasional handout, living a meager life on the fringes of normal society with few friends and no prospects. 

When Marc was 33, two language professors from the University of Rennes heard about this odd fellow who insisted on speaking a language of gibberish. Intrigued, they located Marc and interviewed him. Rather than the mentally unstable drunk they expected to find, Marc impressed them with his demeanor and his educated manor of speaking. They were totally unaware of the language he spoke so easy and naturally, but it was clear to them it was not gibberish at all. It had a rhythm to it with intonations and inflections which sounded like other languages they were familiar with. For the next 2 years, they fed the strange words and sounds Marc spoke into the database of a giant university computer which ran special programs used to decipher and translate speech into one of the world's known languages. After the 2 years was up, it became apparent their work had been in vain; the computer and every language expert they asked was stumped.

In a last ditch effort, the professors decided to ask the sailors who frequented the harbor bars in Rennes to see if any of them had ever heard this language during their world travels to exotic and out-of-the-way places. After several weeks with no luck, just before giving up, they had Marc speak in his language in another bar to a bunch of Tunisian sailors. The barkeeper, a retired Navy man, interrupted Marc, saying he had heard this tongue before on a very remote Polynesian island. And not only did he recognize the language, he knew a lady who speaks it. The lady, Meretuini Make, was divorced from an army officer and lived in a small cottage in the suburbs.

Rapa Iti
The professors quickly arranged a meeting. All three arrived at her door several days later and when Meretuini opened it, Marc addressed her in his language. Marc's life changed right then and there when she answered him right away in the old Rapa language of her homeland. Only 400 native islanders on Rapa Iti, one of the most remote and almost unknown islands in the world, spoke the language which Marc and Meretuini were excitedly and laughingly talking to each other in.

Not unexpectedly, Marc and Meretuini quickly struck up a friendship. They visited each other often and the friendship turned into love. Marc, a person who had rarely been away from his little village in the French countryside and had never been outside of Europe, married Meretuini and they moved to her little native island. There they settled into a quiet, loving and satisfied life, raising 4 children in a small community in the mountains. Marc became a teacher and taught physics to the native children. He was considered an excellent teacher and his students loved him. He also learned all he could about Rapa Iti; the oral history, the language, and the people. He wrote thousands and thousands of pages of documentation, preserving important stories and history and decoding the Rapa language. 

Marc, Meretuini and 1 of their 4 children
Unfortunately, not all of the natives felt toward him the same way his friends, neighbors and students felt. The mayor, a man known to distrust and not want outsiders on the island, discovered Marc did not have a college degree. He tried to have him fired as a teacher, but the community rose up in defense of Marc and so it was decided he would be reclassified as an Auxiliary Teacher rather than a full teacher. This meant Marc had to repay part of the salary he had been paid over the years. The repayment caused him and his family a lot of financial hardship and he had to take extra jobs to make ends meet. It bothered him that this prevented him from working on his Rapa Iti documentation.

With his documentation work still unfinished, Marc passed away due to cancer at the age of 50 on May 26, 1998. He never tried to financially capitalize on his story, indeed, he seemed to want nothing more than to be left alone to be with his family and to document all he could of "his" island. When he passed, he left behind his wife, Meretuini, the only person who had ever understood him away from the island, their four children, a large, unfinished body of documentation work, and an unsolved, very strange tale.