The page is not fancy. It is a sketch of the Fresnel catching a buoy-lamp beside a radio note with a skip call-sign, two kinds of light and one kind of voice agreeing to share a crate.

Glass: a stepped lens that bends even other people’s lamps into a “beam.” Air: a duct that bent a crabber’s voice into your harbor. Water-fog: tiny mirrors. Peck, in the morning, means the title kindly:

How a lighthouse makes ghosts.

Kids from town will come and put their hands near the cold lamp (no fire) and look at the buoy sketch (no crew) and hear a clap-and-count (no second horn). Nobody gets mocked for having been scared. Everybody gets the mechanism.

Tess pins a copy above the keeper’s table. “Wonder stays,” she says, for the second time in your life and not the last.

You sleep without listening for keepers. The moans can happen. You know their names.

THE END

What you learned: a Fresnel lens can fling distant lights; refraction and fog can stack or shift them into “ghost ships”; radio ducting can deliver a real voice to the wrong place. Three tricks, three physics. Folklore collected them. Science sorts them without throwing the stories away.