Allow me, if you will, to first set the scene.
The location is The Smalls, a group of rocks not far from Marloes Peninsula in Pembrokeshire. The lighthouse is, uh, this.
By 1801, the lighthouse, which was built to a rather odd design in 1776, already had a bit of a reputation as a place you didn’t necessarily want to find yourself as a lighthouse keeper. The design was generally sound, although strange, but some of the materials used made the structure somewhat unsteady, and it tended to rock in severe gales.
The man who paid for its construction, a Liverpudlian instrument-maker named Henry Whiteside, had gone to visit it and oversee some necessary repairs (see the previous paragraph about the lighthouse rocking in severe gales...) in 1777. He was accompanied by his blacksmith, and they ended up stranded there for a month when a huge storm swept in, battering the lighthouse with gale-force winds and rendering the tides unpassable. He wrote a message, sealed it in a bottle, and placed it in a casket - nice bit of foreshadowing here - imploring the receiver not to forget that he was there and begging for help, as all their supplies were almost exhausted. He survived the incident, you’ll be glad to hear.
At the time, a working lighthouse was usually tended by two men to ensure that the light did not go out. This way, one man would always be watching over the light. It was imperative that the light always be lit, because without the beacon to warn sailors of the approaching rocks, ships would very likely crash against them and cause huge losses of life.
In 1801, the two men tasked with this job were Thomas Howell, a younger man who was a cooper (made barrels, basically) before he became a lighthouse keeper, and Thomas Griffith, who was a good deal older and had been a labourer beforehand. Stories about the two of them say that Howell had a history of what we would now recognise as mental illness, and that Griffith had what we might call a ‘strong personality’, and that the two of them did not get on. They often argued and spent half their time at each other’s throats, so the prospect of spending a long period of time together in a lighthouse, 20 miles from anywhere else, with no-one else for company or respite, was going to be interesting, to say the least. Unfortunately, it turned out to be much more than just interesting.
Some weeks passed. They did their jobs, and the light didn’t go out. More time passed. And then, something happened to Griffith. Accounts differ as to whether he was injured or became unwell, but whatever befell him, it was obvious that his life was now in danger. Unable to leave the lighthouse to get help, they set up a distress signal in the hope that passing ships would come to their aid, but none did. To make matters worse, it became apparent that a terrible storm was brewing. Griffith died after a few weeks, and Howell’s nightmare began.
You see, the problem Howell now faced was what to do with Griffith’s dead body. The prospect of keeping the body inside the lighthouse didn’t particularly appeal, for fairly obvious reasons; as long as the storm raged on, he would be unable to leave the lighthouse, and anyway, someone had to stay to man the light. The body would quickly decompose, and spending any length of time in a confined space - the lighthouse interior was only around five metres in diameter - with a rotting corpse wasn’t Howell’s idea of a good time. However, throwing the body into the sea wasn’t an option, either. Due to the two men’s storied history of animosity, Howell was aware that discarding Griffith’s body would incriminate him for the man’s death, and make it look like he had something to hide. Howell weighed up his two options: spend a few weeks with a decaying corpse, or end up being hanged for murder. He chose the first one.
At first, he managed to go about his business almost as usual, while Griffith’s body rotted in the lighthouse alongside him, but after only a short time, the stench became unbearable. He began to realise that he wouldn’t be able to keep the body in the lighthouse much longer, and yet he knew that he couldn’t get rid of it, either.
Then, the solution came to him. Howell, remember, was a barrel-maker by trade. So, he dismantled a bulkhead in the sleeping compartment, fashioned it into a rudimentary coffin, and placed Griffith’s decomposing body inside it. He then affixed the coffin to the railings on the outside shelf with ropes, just outside the window of the sleeping compartment, so that the coffin wouldn’t get washed out to sea by the storms.
And then the storms worsened.
The lighthouse was battered by wind and rain so heavy that no ships could even get close. Rescue was out of the question. Howell worked, night and day, to keep the beacon lit, trying to send distress signals, but to no avail. Still tied to the railings, the coffin bore the brunt of the storm.
And then the winds started to blow the coffin apart.
Boards of wood were stripped away, leaving Griffith’s decaying body exposed to the rain and wind. The body itself was caught in ropes twisted around the railings. Outside Howell’s window, lit by the beam of the lighthouse, Howell could see the arm of the dead man, outstretched from rigor mortis and raised up in a beckoning fashion. At night, the wind lashed the remnants of the coffin and battered it against the lighthouse. As the storms raged on, the coffin completely blew apart and left only the body, hanging upside down from a tangle of ropes outside the window. When the wind blew at a certain angle, the rotting body swung and Griffith’s beckoning hand knocked against the window.
Called by Howell’s distress signal, a few ships did manage to get close enough to the lighthouse during these weeks to see a lone man standing at the top of the lighthouse. The crews of these ships attempted to shout to the man, but he appeared not to hear them over the storm. He waved to them, but never made any attempt to respond to their calls. None of these ships could get close enough to land.
After three weeks, a boat was finally able to rescue Howell, and recover Griffith’s body. He had spent a total of four months in the lighthouse. The light had never gone out. However, he was so severely traumatised from the experience that when he got back to shore, his friends didn’t recognise him. He was described as grey and ashen, and he could barely speak. There’s very little information available about what happened to Howell after his rescue, but by some accounts, he had gone almost entirely mad.
After the events at Smalls Lighthouse, maritime policy changed, and all lighthouses were manned by three men rather than two.
- The Lighthouse (2019) is partly based on this incident. Both protagonists in the film are named Thomas (Thomas Howard and Thomas Wake), which is a nod to Thomas Howell and Thomas Griffith. The idea of two men being stranded in a lighthouse during a violent storm, developing cabin fever, and ending up at loggerheads is also taken from these events. The film is also inspired, among other things, by an unfinished story by Edgar Allan Poe called The Light-House, the myth of Prometheus, and a whole bunch of Jungian theory. Fun.
- There is a Welsh film, also called The Lighthouse (2016), which is a straight retelling of the events at Smalls Lighthouse. It’s actually pretty good, although nowadays a good 30% of the reviews are just ‘this doesn’t have Willem Dafoe in it, what gives?’ I bet the people who made that film thought that theirs would be the defining reimagining of the tragedy. Which is a bit awkward, really.
- I have absolutely no reason to suspect that Edgar Allan Poe had even heard of this event when he wrote The Tell-Tale Heart, but there are definite similarities, so if you want to get a feeling for the events at Smalls Lighthouse, reading that story would probably get you in the zone.
- Some people believe that the figure standing on the lighthouse seen by the failed rescue crews wasn’t Howell, but Griffith’s body, with his arm outstretched. I’m not sure I buy that, though.
- The likely cause for Griffith’s death is theorised to have been a head injury incurred after he slipped outside during the storm, rather than a spontaneous illness.
- Yes, some people obviously think that Howell killed Griffith, but I really don’t. I don’t see why you’d put yourself through the trauma of keeping the decaying body lashed outside your window to prove your innocence if you were guilty.
- Some accounts say that Howell spent four months alone with the body, but I think that’s a misinterpretation - it seems that he spent four months in total there from the day of his arrival, three weeks of which he spent alone after Griffith died.
- 30 years later, in 1831, the lighthouse was hit by a huge wave which tore the floor of the lighthouse keepers’ room up and hurled it against the ceiling. One keeper was killed.
