ST. ELSE ISLAND
St. Else Island is a small, isolated island off the coast of Maine, far enough from the mainland to feel removed from ordinary life, but close enough to remain a lingering curiosity. It does not appear on most modern maps, and for many, it exists only as a name half-heard or a place easily overlooked.
The island is perpetually shrouded in fog. Pale mist drifts in from the surrounding Atlantic and seldom fully clears, softening the coastline, blurring the horizon, and lending the landscape a muted, half-dreamlike quality. Even on bright days, St. Else is dimmed, as though seen through a gossamer veil.
Nearly all of the island's residents (around one hundred people) live in the small harbor town, also known as St. Else. The town is a quiet settlement of weathered buildings, narrow roads, and salt-worn storefronts clustered along the Southern shore. Beyond town, the island gives way to rocky cliffs, dense woods, and lonely stretches of coastal terrain.
There is only one way to reach St. Else Island: a ferry from the mainland that runs once a week. Travel is infrequent, deliberate, and often dependent on the weather. Visitors quickly come to understand that St. Else is not a place you pass through casually; it is a place set apart, self-contained, and strangely difficult to leave behind.
HISTORY
Taken from the the writings of local historian, Elias Thorne:
"Most islands have beginnings you can point to cleanly. A charter. A founding date. A neat line in some ledger in Boston or Salem.
St. Else does not.
The earliest reliable records place fishermen here in the late 1700s; seasonal men, mostly, coming in the warmer months for cod and mackerel, setting up crude shacks along the southern harbor before returning to the mainland when the weather turned. There are older references, too: scattered mentions in ship logs and coastal surveys, but nothing consistent. St. Else has always had a way of slipping out of documentation. You'll find it absent from maps where it ought to be, or mislabeled as open water. Even the dates don't always agree. One coastal survey from 1812 references a storm in 1836; twenty-four years before it was meant to occur.
Permanent settlement came slowly. A handful of families stayed through winter. A church was raised. A small town formed around the harbor. By the early 1800s, St. Else was what it remains today: quiet, tight-knit, and remote enough that the rest of New England could forget it existed. It was in those early years, too, that the island's first lighthouse was raised. The waters around St. Else are treacherous in the fog, and the shoals off the western rocks have claimed their share of careless ships. The original tower was a modest thing; stone and lime, built by local hands with mainland assistance after a petition was finally answered.
That changed in 1842, when the Whitlocks arrived.
They were a Boston family of considerable means; old money, shipping interests, industrial ambition. The first to settle was Edmund Whitlock, who purchased much of the island's central hill country and commissioned the construction of Whitlock Manor, the large estate that still watches over St. Else from the ridge above town.
Within a decade, Edmund's sons (Charles and Henry Whitlock, respectively) oversaw the founding of Whitlock Industries, a factory built inland near the eastern woods. Officially, it produced maritime equipment: ropes, pulleys, specialized hardware for shipyards along the coast. Later, during the First and Second World Wars, it expanded into contracted manufacturing; parts, fittings, materials most locals never saw up close.
For a time, the factory was the island's heartbeat. It employed nearly everyone who lived here. It brought steady ferry traffic, supplies, visitors. St. Else was never prosperous in the way of mainland towns, but it was stable.
The Whitlocks remained... mostly.
The family line splintered over generations. Some returned to Boston society. Some married out. Some died young. But a branch stayed rooted to the island. By the 1930s, the manor belonged to Joseph Whitlock, Edmund's grandson, a reserved man who rarely appeared in town except for church on holidays. After his death, the estate passed to his only son, Malcolm Whitlock, who was the last of the family to oversee the factory directly.
Whitlock Industries shut its doors in 1965, or so the paperwork insists. Some islanders will tell you it closed earlier. Others remember men reporting to work there well into the seventies. Memory is a difficult thing on St. Else.
The official reason was simple enough: declining contracts, rising costs, the mainland overtaking island infrastructure. The world was modernizing. St. Else was not. No replacement ever came.
By the 1970s, the machinery had been sold off or abandoned in place. The workforce scattered. Young people began to leave in greater numbers, seeking college, work, lives that did not depend on tides and weather reports. Those who stayed did so out of stubbornness, inheritance, or the simple fact that the island was all they had ever known. Malcolm Whitlock and his family would remain in Whitlock Manor as well, seen less often with each passing year, their presence on the island becoming more rumor than certainty.
St. Else did not collapse. It simply... receded.
The ferry ran less often. The mainland's attention drifted elsewhere. The island became quieter, not with sudden tragedy, but with slow subtraction: one family moving away, one shop closing, one house left empty through another winter. Progress reached St. Else in fragments. A telephone line was installed, then went silent. Streetlights appears on one road and not the next. The island modernized unevenly, as if time itself arrived by ferry and sometimes failed to disembark.
Those who arrived in the decades after were seldom conventional visitors.
A few came for the scenery, for the novelty of fog and solitude. Artists with sketchbooks. Writers with romantic ideas of isolation. Couples who wanted to feel, briefly, as though the modern world had loosened its grip. Others came differently. Some were drawn by grief. Some by exhaustion. Some by the desire to start over in a place small enough that no one would ask too many questions. St. Else has, over time, become a quiet haven for the lost.
And, regrettably, it has also become known as a place where people go when they have made the decision to end their lives.
No one says that openly. We don't speak of it in the way the mainland papers do, with their blunt headlines and their hunger for spectacle. Here, such things are folded into the island's silence. Names are spoken softly. Doors are left unattended. The ferry horn is listened to a little longer than usual.
The island is, in many ways, self-contained. News comes late, if at all. Help comes slowly, if ever. Time moves differently when your world is bounded by water. Days have habit of blurring here. Dates become suggestions. The islanders accept these little inconsistencies the way one accepts fog: present, unavoidable, not worth remarking upon.
The old factory still stands, of course. Visible from certain roads, half-swallowed by scrub and pine. The manor still overlooks the town, though fewer Whitlocks are seen now, and fewer still are spoken of with any certainty. The lighthouse has been rebuilt more than once since, though the exact dates are, like so many things here, strangely inconsistent. Some records insist the current tower was completed in 1829. Others place its dedication decades later, describing keepers who should not yet have been born. Life continues in the spaces between what was and what remains.
St. Else endures. That's the simplest truth that I can offer.
It is a place that persists. Fogbound, forgotten, quietly pulling certain souls towards it, as it always has.
We do not advertise that, of course."
