The Flickering Lantern on Drowned Sailor’s Dock: 1894, Gull Point

In 1894, on the night of October 4th, the light from a single lantern shimmered out on Drowned Sailor’s Dock in Gull Point, though every witness swore no boat had landed and the dock itself was half submerged after the storm. That night, fisherman John Merrow was the first to spot the glow from his window-too steady for fire, too real for moonlight-pulsing silver at the very spot where his brother went down with the Annie May five years before. Every October 4th after that, the lantern returned, always the same size and in the exact same place, whether the dock was underwater or not, even as new boards replaced rotten wood and the shoreline shifted from floods. Bystanders reported the flame burning cold-no warmth, no sound, yet cold mist gathered where the lantern burned the longest. One year, a skeptic tried to approach, but his boots never touched the planks; the closer he got, the dock seemed to stretch farther, shimmer, and vanish, swallowing the lantern in a black ripple. It wasn’t until a century later, after a drought exposed the dock’s original wooden piles, that they discovered what was lashed beneath: a single oilskin bundle containing an old logbook, and inside, Merrow’s brother’s name signed on October 4th, 1889.