Fred Jordan's Christmas Gift

Note: This story is from currently unpublished "A Cask of Good Liquor: A Biography of Long Island Sound" by Tony Muldoon.

 They were just two kids out fishing on Long Island Sound when they received their Christmas gift from Fred Jordan. The gift was their lives, and Fred Jordan had paid for it almost fifty years earlier.
                Every lighthouse worth its candlepower has a resident ghost to watch over, or curse, mariners. Long Island Sound is no exception being, as it is, the maritime entrance to New England, where grim and mysterious tales are the staff of life. The Sound’s ghosts range from the hundreds of cantankerous revolutionaries who the Brits left exposed to the rising tide at Execution Rock at the western end, to poor old Ernie, keeper of the New London Ledge Light at the eastern end who took a header off one of the outside galleries onto the rocks below after his wife sailed away with the skipper of the Block Island ferry.
                 But Fred Jordan is without a doubt the most helpful, benevolent ghost on Long Island Sound, or anywhere else for that matter. There were the two boys in the capsized skiff, of course, as well as several other yarns of sailors who were helped through the storm-tossed or fog-shrouded entrances into Fairfield or Black Rock Harbor. 
                Fred was the keeper of the Penfield Reef Light just off Fairfield, Connecticut.  It has been perched on the eastern end of one of the nastiest pieces of real estate on the Sound since 1874. Penfield Reef used to be dry land and there are reports from pre- colonial days of cattle grazing on the gentle, green field surrounded by salt water. 
                Time and nature have long since eroded all the soil from Penfield Reef, leaving a deadly crescent of rock lashing out from the Fairfield beach like a scimitar. The reef lies just below the surface at high tide and every new sailor is warned before taking their new boat out of Black Rock or Fairfield to NEVER, EVER try to go between Penfield Reef Light and Fairfield Beach. 
                And, of course, there are always a few who ignore the advice and find themselves hung up on the reef or with the bottom torn out of the boat and the Sound rushing in. 
                One particularly grim Penfield Reef tale involves a family of seven who climbed over the rocks to the end of the reef. Then the tide came in and they were never seen again. 
                Life was lonely out there at the Penfield Reef Light and could be downright hard when the classic winter nor’easters whipped the sea up into a lethal fury. No wonder, then, that Fred wanted to spend the Christmas 1916 ashore,  with his wife and two children at home in Fairfield. 
                Shortly after noon on December 22, 1916, Fred set off from the lighthouse in one of its small skiffs. A storm was howling and it is easy to say Fred was a damned fool. But, Christmas was coming. He was less than halfway to Fairfield Beach when the boat was overwhelmed by the booming surf and Fred was dumped overboard. 
                Rudi Iten, the assistant light keeper, saw his boss struggling desperately in the surf. Rudi tried to launch one of the station’s other boats, but the winds and the waves defeated his attempts and Fred was carried away by the sea. 
                Fred’s body was found on Fairfield Beach a few days later. Rudi Iten was absolved of any responsibility in Fred’s death and was, in fact, named to replace him as chief keeper of the Penfield Reef Light. 
                Reports that Fred Jordan’s spirit still lingered around the old masonry lighthouse began within a couple of weeks of his death and continued at least into the late 1960s. Iten reported several spectral appearances, during which the light seemed to flash erratically. Iten also found the station’s official logbook opened to the page for December 22, 1916.
                A friend once told me of a similar occurrence when he was a young Coast Guardsman stationed at Penfield in the late 1960s. Clearly, to most of us anyway, it was the sea breeze blowing in through an open window that ruffled the logbook’s pages. But was it all that clear to the people who lived at the light station? 
                Fred Jordan remained a largely undefined apparition until 1942, when he delivered the first of his gifts. The two boys whose misfortune kicked off this yarn, managed to make it to the reef after their boat capsized but were too weak to pull themselves up on the slippery rocks.
                Then, a strange looking, pale faced man appeared above them and offered his hand to pull them from the water.  Later, after they had been taken to the lighthouse to warm up and dry out, they were unable to pick out their rescuer from any of the station’s Coast Guardsmen. They did, however, pick Fred Jordan out of a photo gallery of past lighthouse keepers on the wall.
                To this day, if you hang around Fairfield or Black Rock harbors, you’ll hear stories of storm battered, dangerously exhausted sailors being guided to a safe berth by an unknown pilot who always vanishes as soon as the dock lines are secured.
                There is no one stationed at the Penfield Reef Light today. It was automated by the Coast Guard sometime around 1969 and is visited only occasionally by Coast Guardsmen maintaining the light or preservationists trying to save the historic old masonry building.
                Yet on Snoopy’s proverbial dark and stormy night, when only lunacy or an extreme sense of duty could lure anyone out on Long Island Sound, a shadowy figure has been reported patrolling the gallery on the roof of the lighthouse, watching for people in peril on the Sound and, if called upon, delivering  the present that Fred Jordan purchased at such great cost ninety-seven years ago.