“They’ve all lost their minds, then. There’s no way the lighthouse could have done that—no way, no how.”

“Yeah, I went on a walk and saw it for myself. It’s pretty beat up.”

“That’s only the half of it. The place is a complete ruin. There’s a wire fence around the building, no staircase on the inside, and even if someone found a way to get into the lantern room, there’s no lamp.”

“There isn’t?”

“Nope. The lamp was dismantled and removed after the building was condemned back in the late 1970s.”

Amy stared at the horizon, thoroughly confused. If the lighthouse wasn’t capable of producing a beam, then what was it that everyone thought they had seen? Even her cab driver’s explanation, which had sounded somewhat plausible at the time, no longer made any sense: How could the town have been fooled by some hoax if the apparatus no longer existed with which to achieve it?

“I must be missing something, then,” she said.

“There’ll be a perfectly reasonable explanation.”

“But all the people I overheard seemed so convinced. Some of them even sounded genuinely frightened.”

“Rational thought flies out the window when it comes to the folks in this town and that lighthouse. Put it this way, I’m not surprised to hear that’s the conclusion everyone’s jumped to.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. What’s behind the fascination? I’ve only been in Seabrook one night, and yet I don’t think I’ve gone five minutes without seeing a picture of the lighthouse or hearing a reference to it. Is it just me or is the town a little obsessed?”

Ryan took off his hat and nodded to the ground. “If you want to hear the story, then we’d better sit.”17

So, it all begins with a lighthouse keeper,” Ryan began, “a man by the name of Theodore Booth. Theodore had been manning the Seabrook lighthouse for over forty years, but during the last year of his watch, in 1907, right in the middle of a big winter storm, his lamp failed. No one knows exactly why, but at the time people suspected he’d lost the flame by trimming the wick too closely, and because of his mistake, a passing vessel—a fishing boat named the Lady Madeline—smashed into the rocks and sank. Eight people died. It took two weeks for all the bodies to wash ashore.”

“Oh no,” Amy whispered. “That’s terrible.”