Regional legend · 3 min read · Set in Cormorant Street ·
The Lantern Wife of Cormorant Street
The people of Cormorant Street say a woman walks the street each night with a lantern, looking for the men who went down to the harbour and did not come up, and that if you leave your door open the lantern will stop for you.
- status: folklore
Cormorant Street runs down from the high town to the harbour wall, a steep cobbled lane of narrow houses with blue shutters and doors painted the colours of old boats. In the winter the wind comes up the lane off the water and rattles every latch. The old people say it is the Lantern Wife's breath.
She was a fishwife called Mary Coyle, who lived at the top of the street in the years when the harbour was a busy place and the boats went out every morning before dawn. Her husband, Tom, went out on the *Brightwater* in a November gale and never came back. His boat was found the next day upturned on the rocks at the harbour mouth, but his body was not. Mary took a lantern and walked down to the harbour every night for the rest of her life, looking along the wall and into the water, calling his name.
The story goes that she never stopped. When she died, in the spring of the year after the wreck, the neighbours found the lantern still burning on the step of her house, and they could not put it out. It was lit every night thereafter, a small steady flame in an old brass holder, carried by no one, moving slowly down the cobbles toward the harbour.
The children on Cormorant Street are taught to keep their doors closed after dark, because the Lantern Wife goes from house to house, looking for her husband. If a door is opened to her, she will set down her lantern on the step and look inside, very carefully, at every face in the house, and if she finds a man there who has ever worked the boats, she will ask him, in a soft voice, to come down to the harbour and help her look.
Most families keep their doors shut. But old Jack Rennie, who was a deckhand on the *Brightwater* as a boy and left the sea when he was twenty, says the Lantern Wife is not cruel. He says she only wants company on her walk, and that he once saw her stop at a door where a fisherman's son was sleeping, and set down her lantern, and watch him for a long time, and then pick it up again and move on with a sigh, having found that he was not the one she was looking for.
The street has a custom. On the first night of each new year, the people of Cormorant Street leave a small lamp burning in the window, at the top of the stairs, where the light can be seen from the harbour. Nobody remembers who began it. The lamps are still lit. And every year, when the Lantern Wife walks down the street, her own light goes past each window, slowly, and the lamps answer it, one by one, all the way down to the water.
This is told by the grandmothers of the street, who say it is only a story, and who keep their own lamps lit all the same.