Maine Minutiae: Haunted Maine - Seguin Island Lighthouse

Being a lighthouse keeper in the late 18th on into the early 20th Century had to be a lonely ass job. It's not like the lighthouse keepers of the day were able to catch I Love Lucy reruns on a flat panel TV or plug in a computer to keep themselves and their family entertained, especially when the winter came. Winters up here can be brutal. Even a "normal" winter ain't exactly a walk through the park. Which leads us to our story.

Seguin Lighthouse is situated 186 feet high on the rocky cliffs two miles off the Maine coast at the mouth of the Kennebec River. As the crow flies that's about 50 miles from where I sit. Getting supplies to the island back in the 19th Century was a tedious task. Summers in the area were great, but when Old Man Winter came, not so much.

On one occasion, a guy took a job as the Seguin Island Lighthouse keeper and with him he took his young wife. Needless to say, she became bored in a very short period of time. So, the husband, wanting to keep his wife sane and happy had a piano shipped to the island. This does not end well. Here  is where you can read the whole story.

Lighthouses are usually thought of a beacons of hope and guidance, but in some cases, such as the one in the story above, lighthouses become places of loneliness and despair.

Texas Tidbits: Haunted Texas - The Alamo

Sacred Ground

Yesterday when I wrote about the alleged spirits at The Menger Hotel in San Antonio, which is adjacent to the Alamo, I was curious as to why there was no mention of ghosts at the most Sacred Ground in Texas, the Alamo itself. I employed the use of my legendary Google-Fu and came up with some very interesting stories about just such a thing - ghosts at the Alamo.

Rather than give you a synopsis of each ghost story related to the Alamo, I'll give you the link to them and let you read them at your leisure. There are several of them and they are fairly short, so reading a couple at a time shouldn't present too much of a problem. After the links, I will have a final word on my thoughts about what the stories have to say.

• Ghost stories of the Alamo

Confession: I am a Catholic, so I guess "confession" is a good choice of words. :) I believe in the paranormal. I think that we mere humans must bore God to pieces sometimes, so, in my mind, there has to be something else out there - some kind of "bridge" between life as we know it and the afterlife, Angels and demons and all that. I obviously have no proof of this "bridge" between the living and the dead, it's just something I believe. Having said that, it comes as no surprise to me that there would be ghosts, apparitions, spirits, pick a name, at the Alamo. I mean the Battle of the Alamo is a historic event of mammoth proportions - a symbols of man's yearning to be free and what he is willing to do to live free, even if it means certain death. Surely when Colonel William Barrett Travis saw 4000 Mexican soldiers awaiting the order to attack the Alamo, he had to think, "We may all die here today, but our sacrifice will inspire men everywhere to stand up for their freedom, no matter the odds." I think that God allows us to see these spirits at places like the Alamo to remind us, amongst other things, that freedom ain't free and sometimes we must make incredible sacrifices to keep it, like the sacrifice that Jesus made so man could eventually be at the right hand of The Almighty. Dieing for freedom is not a choice of life or death, so much as it is a choice to live, not only today, but forever. God bless the defenders of the Alamo and God bless Texas.