The Case
A Locked Lighthouse. Three Men Gone.
On 26 December 1900, a relief vessel reached a lighthouse on a bare Atlantic island called . No flag flew. No keeper waited. Inside, the lamp was trimmed and the beds were unmade — but James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald McArthur were gone.
Their bodies were never found. The death register, filed in February 1901, recorded just two words for cause: . A century of retellings then buried the facts under invented log entries and an uneaten meal that were never in the record at all.
The full account — every document, every debunked myth, every theory weighed against the three surviving primary sources — is in The Keepers Who Vanished, Book Four of The Unlucky Thirteen.
Inside The Dossier
What you get, free, on joining
The empty station
Relief keeper Joseph Moore went in alone. The lamp was trimmed, the beds unmade, no one there.
The West Landing
Storm damage 33 metres above the sea — a box smashed, iron railings torn from rock.
The Admiralty chart
Chart No. 3331, published 1903 — the rock, its cliffs, and both landings, mapped.
The relief voyage
Twenty miles of open Atlantic from Lewis to the rock. View the case board ↓
Exhibit 04 — Case Board
The case, by location
Tap a pin. Not to scale — a working case board of Eilean Mòr, not a survey chart.
Eilean Mòr, Flannan Isles — case map of the island, the lighthouse and both landings marked.
Also part of the case — not pictured above:
Select a pin to open its file.