This year is the big centennial of Split Rock Lighthouse, on Minnesota's North Shore of Lake Superior. A lot happened at Split Rock in 1910...including the first keeper fatalities.
100 years ago this month, Roy C. Gill, 2nd assistant keeper, and Edward F. Sexton, 1st assistant keeper, took off in a small boat for Beaver Bay to get the mail. This was 15 years before the North Shore highway was in place, and the only routes to civilization were by boat or by foot. Although the keeper warned against it, Gill and Sexton put up a small sail on their boat.
The boat was found later, but no bodies.
The story would end there as just another Lake Superior tragedy, if it weren't for an eerie ghost story from 1990. As William Mayo and Kate Barthel relate in their book Mysterious North Shore, the ghosts of Gill and Sexton were seen walking up from the historic boat landing.
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