The Red Lanterns of Gull’s Perch

The first year out of boot camp, I was twenty years old and dumb as a bag of hammers. My buddies and I—all of us fresh from the Great Lakes and desperate for a taste of something besides brine and discipline—decided to blow our entire weekend liberty in the old coastal town of Port Meridian. We’d heard about its famous clam shacks and the grand, Victorian-era hotel perched on the cliffs overlooking the harbor, the Gull’s Perch. It’d been in some old movie, and I was itching to see it.

We hit the beach at dawn, drinking cheap beer and watching the gulls fight over a dead crab. By noon, the sun was high, and we staggered onto the boardwalk, sunburned and laughing. The Gull’s Perch rose ahead, all gables and turrets, its white paint peeling in spots, but still grand. The red lanterns on the veranda swayed in the sea breeze, casting a warm glow that seemed out of place in the daylight. We were just a bunch of sailors with too much time, and we figured the hotel’s bar wouldn’t check IDs too close, so we strode up the steps and pushed through the heavy oak doors.

Inside, the lobby was a time capsule of velvet and dark wood. The air smelled of salt and something faintly sweet, like rotting flowers. An old woman with a face like a crumpled map sat at the front desk, knitting. She didn’t look up when we asked for a table in the dining room. ‘Lunch is served in the Garden Room,’ she said, pointing a bony finger down a corridor. ‘But mind the tide.’

We laughed at that, thinking it a joke. The Garden Room was a glassed-in conservatory at the back of the hotel, filled with ferns and a marble fountain. We ordered the chowder and the fried fish, and for a while, it was pure bliss. The place was nearly empty, just a couple of old men nursing whiskeys at the bar. We talked about the war, about the guys shipped over to the Gulf, and how we were lucky to be stateside. The mood was light, until my buddy Felix noticed the paintings.

They lined the walls, all of them portraits of the same woman, each in a different era, but with the same unsettling smile. The final portrait, closest to our table, showed her in a black dress, holding a red lantern, and her eyes followed us as we moved. ‘Must be a local legend or something,’ Felix said, but his voice had lost its edge. The old bartender overheard and shuffled over, leaning in with a conspiratorial whisper. ‘She was the innkeeper’s daughter, back in the day. Drowned herself off the cliffs. They say she still roams the upper floors, lighting her lantern for the ships. But those who see her—they don’t live to tell.’

We laughed, but the old man’s eyes were dead serious. He pointed a gnarled finger at a black mark on the floor beneath our table. ‘That stain? That’s from the last man who didn’t believe. He laughed just like you. They found his body on the rocks the next morning.’ The jokes died, and we tossed our bills on the table, suddenly eager to leave.

But the front door wouldn’t open. We pushed, we pulled, we rattled the brass handles, but the oak barely budged. The old woman at the desk had vanished. The lights flickered, and the red lanterns on the veranda, visible through the glass, began to sway violently, one by one going dark. The air turned cold, and the salt smell grew thick, like we were underwater. One of the old men at the bar turned and grinned at us, his face too pale, his gums black. ‘She’s coming down to light your way,’ he croaked, and then the lights went out entirely.

We fumbled in the dark, our flashlights cutting weak beams through the black. The corridor we had come through now seemed longer, branching off into unfamiliar hallways. We followed the sound of the sea, thinking to find a back exit, but the floorboards creaked with the rhythm of waves, and the walls began to sweat. In the dim glow of a dying flashlight, we saw her—the woman from the paintings, her black dress now soaked, her hair dripping with seawater, holding a red lantern. She didn’t speak, only raised the lantern, and a slow, wet smile spread across her face.

We ran. We ran down corridors that twisted into each other, past doors that slammed on their own, up staircases that seemed to multiply. Felix stumbled and fell, and when we turned back, he was gone, a trail of wet footprints leading toward a door that had not been there before. We yelled for him, but only the echo of our own voices came back, mingled with a soft, fragile singing from somewhere above. One by one, the other guys disappeared, leaving me alone, clutching a broken flashlight.

I ended up on the roof, staring at the churning black ocean below. The red lantern was beside me, casting a pool of crimson light. I knew what the legend expected: that I would jump, joining her in the deep. But I had seen enough death in my short life, and I was done being a coward. I picked up the lantern and, instead of jumping, I hurled it into the sea. For a moment, the world went silent, and then the hotel gave a great shudder, as if waking from a nightmare. The next thing I knew, I was on the beach, drenched, with the sun rising over the hills, and the Gull’s Perch standing empty and dark on the cliffs.

The others were never found.

The navy shipped me back to the base, but I couldn’t shake the cold. It wasn’t the chill of the sea wind; it was deeper, inside my bones. Every night, I dream of red lanterns, and every morning, I check my hands to make sure they’re not stained black. I learned later that the hotel had gone out of business the week after our incident—no reason, just closed its doors. But sometimes, when I close my eyes, I see the corridor of portraits, and the last one, which now bears my face, with a red lantern in my hand.

And I know she’s still waiting, hoping I’ll come back to light her way.