Haunted Houses Have Nothing on Lighthouses
atlasobscura.com
atlasobscura.com
When I lived up in Caithness myself and couple of others would go out ringing (banding) storm-petrels at night next to Noss Lighthouse, near Wick. We'd setup mist nets on the cliff-top and tapes played of birds calling at a colony. That would attract petrels passing at sea and they'd get caught in the nets. One night, in between checking the nets, we were sitting there when a loud and frightening snarl come out of the pitch black darkness, close-by. After nearly shitting our pants we grabbed torches and poles we used to erect the nets and searched the area. Nothing was found. It was a few months later we found out that one of the lighthouse keepers nearby kept a Great Dane, which he used to let out at night. We only found out this because the dog had attacked someone, in a pub of all places.
Another supernatural experience at the same place. I was walking down the road to the lighthouse alone, again out catching storm-petrels. It's was deathly quiet and suddenly I could hear footsteps behind me. I stopped, they stopped. I'd start walking again and the footsteps would follow. This raised the hairs on my neck but a search with a torch revealed nothing. It's the closest thing I've come to a ghostly experience and at the time a little unsettling. It was only later I realised I was probably hearing my own footsteps echoing off the dry-stone wall that ran along side the road.
[0]https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/70180/115-year-old-myste...
This really feels like a needlessly invented detail. There are accepted signals for distress, and you'd assume a lighthouse would be equipped for nautical signalling. Flying the union jack upside down is not one of them - it makes a very poor signal as it's easy to do accidentally and difficult to spot from a distance (or even up close, for all but the mostly keenly-eyed).
Just say a distress flag. It's a ball and square for those that know, and it's perfectly descriptive of its function for those that don't. Inventing further detail is jarring for anyone who can mentally picture what the union jack would look like inverted.
Flying a national flag inverted was indeed the more common way of signalling distress for centuries and was by far the most likely way a lighthouse would have done it around 1800.
The Union Jack was only displayed in the top left of maritime flag at the time so it’s somewhat easy to see when the flag is inverted.
It is an odd quibble as another commenter put it - I guess being well-researched is exactly what makes pieces like this interesting, so I was struck by how easily an errant detail distracted me from that - especially one that could so easily have been omitted.