Spectral Keepers of the Lights

Wood Island Tales of Lightkeepers

The Friends of Wood Island Lighthouse, featured on Page 4 of the main Haunted Lighthouses site, held their annual meeting last week in Saco, Maine, and two of their guests were the children of former lighthouse keepers at the station. Tammy Burnham, daughter of Laurier and Lily Burnham, will never forget the night of Nov. 29, 1960, even though she was only two years old at the time. That’s the night she almost drowned while members of the Coast Guard tried to take her to the mainland for medical treatment from her home at the light keeper’s house on Wood Island.

On that fateful night 47 years ago, Tammy Burnham had a high fever and was complaining about her belly hurting. Lily Burnham, scared by her daughter’s symptoms, called a doctor on the mainland, who told the family Tammy needed to get medical treatment right away as the symptoms Lily described sounded like appendicitis. Unfortunately, a storm had come up with high seas and dense fog. It was also cold, with the water temperature estimated at about 45 degrees. Nonetheless, the Fletcher’s Neck Coast Guard cutter headed to Wood Island to get Tammy.

The girl’s grandparents had been called to meet the boat at Biddeford Pool and take Tammy to the hospital. Her parents couldn’t leave the lighthouse unattended, especially in bad weather.
When the Coast Guard cutter got as close as it dared to the dangerous shoals surrounding Wood Island, Syvinski and another seaman, Bill Raymond, took the dinghy and rowed it to shore, where there was a ramp leading up to the boathouse on the island.

Syvinski and Raymond set out for the Coast Guard cutter anchored offshore with Tammy. It was then that a large swell capsized the boat, sending all three into the water. Raymond took off swimming for the Coast Guard cutter, while Syvinski, hanging desperately onto Tammy, tried to keep a hold on the overturned skiff. Syvinski recalls going under the water three separate times.

He and Tammy had made it to Negro Island, which was the closest neighboring island to Wood Island. But Syvinski didn’t have enough strength to pull them up out of the water. They would surely have died of hypothermia if Tammy’s father hadn’t disobeyed a direct order and taken the pea pod Wood Island was equipped with to go out looking for them. Lily Burnham remembers they got a call from the Coast Guard cutter, which had successfully rescued Raymond. The boat chief told Lily about the accident and said, “ I guess we’ll go searching for the bodies in the morning.”

That’s when Tammy’s father swung into action. He took the pea pod out and the first island he checked was Negro Island. Unfortunately, that island, too, had dangerous shoals.
He waited for his opportunity and rode into shore on the “perfect wave,” Lily Burnham said. Laurier soon came across Syvinski standing in the water, trying his best to hold Tammy out of the waves.
Laurier got the two of them into his boat and to the mainland. Afraid to bend her because she was so cold and wet, they laid her out in the back seat with her head on her grandmother’s lap. Tammy said her grandparents, who met the boat, stopped at the newly-opened Notre Dame Hospital, where Tammy remembers spending about three days. The irony of the whole adventure is that Tammy didn’t even have appendicitis.

In addition to the Burnhams, Steve Frank, whose family lived on Wood Island and kept the lighthouse from 1952-1956, was also present.

Frank was only 10 days old when his father was posted to Wood Island and spent the first five years of his life on there. He mostly remembers getting into trouble, so much so that his parents finally fashioned a leather harness and staked him out in the yard like a dog so they would know where he was at all times.

For more information about Wood Island Lighthouse, visit their site at www.woodislandlighthouse.org.

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