It was 1889 and there were mysterious lights just off the coast of Lawn, NL.

The phenomenon had been occurring all through October and, by the end of the month, the Captain knew something had to be done.

He drafted a letter, parts of which appeared in the to the Evening Mercury on November 7, 1889.

“I wish to call your attention to a light seen on the Middle Island at Lawn,” he wrote. “It has been seen several limes since the first week in October; but last week it was seen every night.”

Nobody in Lawn knew what the light was. It looked like a lighthouse, except there was no such structure in the vicinity. On top of that, its interval was far too long.

“I was on the look out over Jersey Cove myself, with many others,” the Captain wrote. It appeared as “a revolving light, ten to fifteen minutes between the intervals. The flash is very bight, and can be seen for twenty miles. The flashes do not appear equally bright at all times. It is a very white light, but at times it appears between a white and a red light, and sometimes goes very suddenly.”

Setting aside any creepy feeling that might have accompanied the light, there were probably reasons for legitimate concern — if it were mistaken as a navigational light, it could lead to disaster.

“I consider it very dangerous to mariners,” the Captain wrote, “and that is the reason I call your attention to it.”

“There are all sorts of stories here about it;” he concluded, “but these are the facts.”

It appears the source of the light was never discovered.

Nearly 80 years later The Evening Telegram, recalled the incident as a piece of ‘Offbeat History.’ They suggested that the mysterious light, in later years “would be described probably as a UFO.”

Lawn’s Not Alone

in 1948, a somewhat similar tale appeared in the Daily News concerning a light seen off Bonavista.

“A mysterious light is seen at intervals in the Bay,” the paper reported. “This light has been putting in in its appearance for a number of years. No one knows what it is.”

The light was described as a reddish colour and it seemed to vary in intensity — flaring up, then dying down again. Sometimes it appeared as though the light were far out in the bay, still other times it seemed close to shore.

People who had seen the light from their boats claimed that the light “almost appears to come aboard the boat and then suddenly disappears.”

The Rev. Canon Bailey, noted local clergyman, was of the opinion the light might be caused by “some substance on the water thrown off by a certain kind of fish.”

“No doubt,” the paper reports, “this light is due to some strange freak of nature.”

Whatever the real cause of the light, it spawned a series of stories including the idea that the light might be a ghost ship, lost in a storm years earlier. The ghost ship, it was said, appeared whenever bad weather was on the way, perhaps trying to save other mariners from their terrible fate.

Weather Lights

The weather light phenomenon — the idea that mysterious lights appear in the water to foretell storms — is fairly widespread in Newfoundland. I’ve written elsewhere of weather light stories, I heard as a child of the Eastport peninsula.

Are there ‘weather lights’ in your part of the world? If so, I’d love to hear about it.