In Brief
Sheffield Island Lighthouse sits alone in Long Island Sound off Norwalk, Connecticut. In 1991 an archaeologist heading out by boat heard music with no source, cries for help with no one in sight, and a foghorn — on an island that has never had one.
The Full Story
Sheffield Island Lighthouse stands alone in Long Island Sound, a stone dwelling off Norwalk, Connecticut, reachable only by boat. In 1991 an archaeologist took that boat out, and on the way she heard a foghorn.
There is no foghorn on Sheffield Island. The Norwalk Seaport Association, which owns the place and runs the ferry, says so flatly on its own website: "there is no fog horn on Sheffield Island." She heard it anyway. She also heard music drifting off the shore with no source she could find, and distant cries for help with no one in sight.
The light came first in the late 1820s — a thirty-foot stone tower built after Captain Robert Sheffield bought the island and gave it his name. A fourth-order Fresnel lens went in by 1857. The tower the ferry visits now, a ten-room Victorian dwelling with the light rising from its gable, was rebuilt in 1868. It was deactivated in 1902 once a better-placed light went up nearby.
In between, a keeper died in a way no one ever explained. On a sunny July day in 1872, Noah Mosher Sr. — 64, the elder of two keepers by that name — was watching passing vessels through his spyglass and talking to visitors in the dining room when, by one account, he "suddenly fell backward and died."
The music has a name attached to it. Robert Sheffield, the man the island is named for, was said to have a knack for strange musical instruments — and the sourceless music is what people tie back to him.
A paranormal team that came out in 2006 told it differently. They concluded three spirits were stuck on the island, one of them a young girl named Abby. Who Abby was, when she died, how — no source says. She's just there, a name with no story behind it, on an island you can only leave by water.
