Ghost On The Beach
Author: C.B. Colby


The Bahamas, vacation islands off the east coast of Florida,
have been visited by pirates, phantom ships and ghosts as well
as by tourists. Great Isaac, a small cay of the groups, about a
hundred miles northeast of Miami, was the setting for an eerie
visitation.

In 1810, long before there was any lighthouse on Great Isaac
Cay, a great storm left tragedy and many wreckage behind it.
Several ships sank, and many bodies were washed ashore. One of
the bodies was a drowned woman who somehow still clutched a
living baby in her arms. Rescuers on the cay quickly removed
the baby and in time nursed it back to health.

Years later, when workmen were erecting a lighthouse on Great
Isaac, one of them met a hooded woman walking along the beach
one night. Her arms were outstretched and she was crying, "My
baby, my baby!" over and over again. The workmen started to
rush to her aid, but then he saw that the rising moon shone right
through her figure onto the sand. He stopped in his tracts and
rushed back to the camp. Laughter and jeers greeted his story,
so from then on he kept it to himself. But not very long, for
he was not alone in meeting the phantom of the beach.

Soon afterwards the foreman of the work crew met the same women.
Then another workmen saw her as well. The laughter stopped. When
the work crew left, they warned the lighthouse keeper about her.
This was in August of 1859.

From that day on, usually after a hurricane or bad storm, and
when the moon was rasing, the phantom lady was seen and heard
walking on the beach.

Then in 1913 she had appeared in a most unusual way. She attempted
to climb the stairs of the lighthouse itself.

The keeper was on his way down when he heard her and saw her coming
up the spire stairs towards him. For a moment he was panic
stricken. Then he raced back up the ladder, slammed the trap door
behind him and anchored it down with a heavy crate of machine parts.
There he stayed until a full hour after dawn before he dared move
the crate away and climb downstairs, half expecting to meet her at
every turn. He requested a transfer the following day, but it was
almost a year before the new keeper arrived, He was a sterner stuff
and decided to rid the island of the phantom lady for good.

He gather several Bahamians together around the light and held a
solemn funeral service on the beach where the mother and child had
originally been found, to put her tortured soul at rest. From that
day on there has been no report of there turn of the grieving mother
searching for her lost child.