According to local lore, soldiers from Fort York visited J.P. Radelmüller on the evening of January 2, 1815, in search of his bootlegged beer. But they had too much to drink and a dispute broke out, culminating in the keeper's murder. The inebriated soldiers, so it is claimed, tried to conceal their crime by chopping apart the corpse and hiding the remains. In 1893, then-keeper George Durnan searched for the corpse and found part of a jawbone and coffin fragments near the lighthouse, though it was impossible to definitively prove they were linked to Radelmüller. The veracity of the legend of the murder has long been questioned. As prominent Toronto historian Mike Filey wrote, when it came to the truth of the story of the keeper's demise, "Your guess is as good as mine."