Mystery of Wyndmon's Retreat

In November 2007, Sydney Caldwell (43) and Beau Marshall (48) arrived on the small island of Wyndmon’s Retreat within the coast of Maine after being assigned the job of the island’s new lighthouse keepers. About two months later, on January 19th, both Caldwell and Marshall had been reported to have mysteriously vanished without a trace.

Two days prior at 5pm, a local angler made his rounds and was preparing to sail back to Northeast Harbor. As his ship passed Wyndmon Retreat, he noticed that the once shining lighthouse had been shut off, and assumed the keepers somehow had forgotten to switch on the lighthouse. Thankfully, the sun hadn’t fully set, and the weather was clear. After he safely boarded the docks, the angler went to the nearest telephone booth and reported his sighting to the lighthouse’s upper management.

The next morning at 7am, the management got a four-person crew, Donovan Goddard (52), Jim Erickson (27), Liam Brockholm (36), and Mason Webster (41), and sent them to Wyndmon’s Retreat to check on the two keepers. When the crew made it to the dock, there was a pile of crates containing canned food and equipment that remained unopened, the island was noted to have an odd cloud of mist around the area, and the lighthouse was still off. Thinking the keepers were asleep, the crew attempted to reach them by blowing the vessel’s whistle and waited a few minutes, only to not receive an answer.

Brockholm volunteered to man the vessel as the remaining three crewmates took a small boat out to the island. After docking the boat, Erickson was sent to switch on the lighthouse, while Webster and Goddard went to check the keeper’s quarters on the southwest of the island. As the two searched the quarters and called out the keepers’ names, they noticed the front door to the building was left open. Entering the compound, the two men came across a strange sight. Not only were the keepers missing, almost everything inside was untouched. The beds in the bedroom were unmade, clothes were neatly tucked in the shelves, candles stood fizzled out in their own wax, and there were even full plates of stale food left on the small dining table.

After the crew returned to the mainland and reported their findings, the local police began a search party for the two keepers, scanning the entire island. It became the talk of the town for weeks. However, barely anything came from the search, let alone the whereabouts of the men. The one thing they were able to find that was out of place that hadn’t been found beforehand…was a rough engraving on the stone wall underneath the first landing of the spiral staircase.

Etched on the wall was one word: “PENOBSCOT.” This, engraved onto the inner wall of the lighthouse, was the name of a Native American tribe that used to live in the woodland of Maine. Even odder than that is that this isn’t the first time a circumstance like this has occurred. Almost 500 years ago, at the coast of modern-day North Carolina, the English colony of Roanoke had similarly disappeared, the entire settlement completely abandoned, leaving only the name of the Native tribe that inhabited that area, in this instance, the Croatoans. The distance between both areas, however, was over 900 miles. This begs the following questions: how many places between these two points have been left abandoned, who or what has been leaving these engravements...and how many of them are there? What else has been lost to the tides?