SUPERNATURAL - The Lighthouse - page 116

ritual internment. The small chapel on the island was said to guard the remains of the
dead. The building of a large and modern lighthouse which reached into the sky dis-
turbedthesanctityoftheislandandthelightkeeperspaidtheprice.JosephMooreagain
comes into this account when it was said that he had boarded the Hesperus to travel out
to the island but that he was delayed as the weather changed violently within that day
and he had to wait for one further day. Oddly, this account mentions the irregularity of
the cloth (blinds) not being drawn during daylight, something which Muirhead made
no mention of in his report and something which he surely would have made a note of
as an obvious irregularity. The account also goes into some detail about the 'dramatic
entries' in the log book ( see Chapter 4). The conclusion drawn from this account is that
the men were aware of their impending doom and prayed towards the end before their
complete disappearance for offending the 'Sky Folk'. 15
The theme of abduction (including alien abduction) of the three lightkeepers is also
present in other accounts. 16 There are also many accounts of the small race of men who
occupied the islands.
Intheearly1900s,writerW.C.MacKenziewroteanarticleonthe'PigmieIsle'atthe
Butt of Lewis and the Pygmies' chapel there. He mentioned that the first traveller who
had visited the 'Pigmie Isle' in a pastoral capacity and wrote of his visit was clergy-
manDonaldMonro(knownasDeanoftheIsles).MonrovisitedtheIslandsin1563and
wrote a manuscript of his visit entitled A Description of the Western Isles of Scotland,
which was not published until 1582 and was only made available to the wider public in
1774. He wrote in his manuscript that he went to the north point of Lewis and visited:
alittleIslecalledthe'PigmiesIsle'withalittlekirkinitoftheirownhandiwork.With-
inthiskirktheancientsofthatcountryoftheLewissaythatthesaidpigmieshavebeen
buried there. Many men of different countries have delved deeply the floor of the little
kirk, and I myself among the rest, and have found in it, deep under the earth, certain
bones and round heads of wonderful little size, alleged to be the bones of the said pig-
mies; which may be likely, according to sundry histories that we read of the pigmies;
but I leave this far to the ancients of Lewis. 17
This description of Monro's is used by the sixteenth-century scholar George Buchanan
in his History of Scotland . Further reference was made to the Pigmies' kirk and the
bones in an official account of Lewis which was written in 1580. It stated the pigmies'
bones were measured and found to be not quite 2in long.
Another description of the Pigmies Isle was given by Captain John Dymes, who vis-
ited the Isle in 1630. He too dug up some of the pigmies' bones, but he expressed some
scepticism, stating: 'Mybeliefisscarce bigenoughtothinkthemtobehumanbones.' 18