Penfield Reef Lighthouse

Keeper Frederick A. Jordan had been stranded on the reef by weeks of storms and was finally relieved. With handmade Christmas presents for his family, he set out in a dory for the mainland in rough seas. About a hundred fifty yards northwest of the light, a wave broke over the boat and capsized it. Assistant Keeper Rudolph Iten tried to launch a rescue boat, but a strong wind and an outgoing tide beat him back; he could only watch as Jordan drifted and went under. "It was a dirty day for weather and a nasty sea was running," Iten told a reporter afterward.

Jordan's body was recovered. Iten was cleared of blame and promoted to keeper — which makes what he wrote next harder to dismiss.

Weeks later, during a storm that sent waves over the top of the lighthouse, Iten woke with the feeling that someone was in his room. In the keeper's log he recorded seeing a gray, phosphorescent figure emerge from Jordan's former room, hover at the head of the tower stairs, and dissolve into darkness. On another occasion he found the logbook on the floor, open to the page recording Jordan's death, and noted the light itself "behaving strangely." Later keepers reported the figure too; Iten collected their affidavits.

The afterlife attributed to Jordan is, fittingly, a keeper's: accounts credit a man in the surf with steering an endangered yacht around the reef, and two boys whose canoe capsized were reportedly guided to the lighthouse by a figure who appeared from the rocks and vanished once they were safe. Lighthouse historian Jeremy D'Entremont makes the file's point for it — a man who had just failed to save his friend was an unlikely person to invent the story. Whether that makes the log true, the record does not say. It only keeps it.