3 Disturbing True Lighthouse Horror Stories (Based on Real Events)

3 TRUE Lighthouse Horror Stories Based on Real Events | Blighty Nightmares

Experience three disturbing true lighthouse horror stories featuring paranormal activity, mysterious disappearances, and real ranger reports from the world's loneliest coasts.

📍 Story 1: Dead Air - A lighthouse keeper's final broadcast received days after his death
📍 Story 2: The Third Logbook - Strange entities appear on nights when no one is writing
📍 Story 3: Watcher in the Lantern Room - A figure seen pacing above, even after the tower was abandoned

Told in immersive first-person narration with psychological dread, maritime atmosphere, and paranormal realism.

🎧 Blighty Nightmares brings you terrifying true stories, disturbing encounters, and bone-chilling horror narrations every night. If you love Mr. Nightmare, MrBallen, and Lazy Masquerade, subscribe for daily horror stories that will haunt you.

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KEYWORDS: lighthouse horror stories, true scary lighthouse tales, haunted lighthouse stories, disturbing maritime horror, lighthouse keeper horror stories, paranormal sea stories, true horror podcast, British horror narrator, Mr Nightmare style podcast

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Chapters

• 0:00 Dead Air
• 7:57 The Third Logbook
• 14:48 Watcher in the Lantern Room

Transcript

I work nights at a remote light station the Coast Guard automated 10 years ago. Automated. It doesn't mean nobody goes. It means one person does everything. Battery checks, bulk signal tests, lens cleaning, weather logs, and tries not to go crazy between scrolls. That winter, it was me. On my second week, the BHF woke up at 1:12 a.m. Channel 16, the distress channel. Mayday, Mayday, this is Troller Breeny Rose position. Static ate the rest. I wrote it in the log out of habit. Then I stopped. Breeny Rose sank in O2. My dad talked about it when I was a kid. Four men lost in a thick fog half a mile off the point. It's why our light was given a backup generator in the first place. I answered anyway. Vessel calling Mayday. Say position. My voice sounded stupidly calm. Silence. Then the same thing again like someone pressing replay. Mayday. Mayday. This is Troller Breeny Rose. Same cadus. Same catch in the second May. I could have matched it syllable for syllable. I checked the AIS display. No target. I pressed the transmit key and kept it down long enough to see the red TX light glow just to prove to myself it wasn't stuck. Coast Guard sector station white cap possible hoax transmission on 16. I logged that too. At 117 a.m. The radio spat in a voice I didn't recognize. Anybody hear us? The weather went bad over the next 20 minutes. A wall of rain erased the horizon. I did rounds to keep myself moving. Battery shack, diesel, lantern room, and came back soaked. When I sat, there was a small pool under the mic. Even though I left it hanging on its hook. I wiped it off. The metal was warm. At 1:32 a.m., a knock rattled the watch room door just once. I looked at the camera feeds. Empty catwalk. Empty stairs. empty dock. The light clicked as the rotation gear settled. I told myself I imagined the sound until it happened again, closer, as if the knuckles had tapped the bulkhead near my head. I keyed the mic. Bry Rose, watch your nature of distress. My finger hovered above the log book pen. Another knock. This one came from the console itself, like the radio's casing flexing in the cold. That's foul engine taking on. The voice broke apart. I texted the sector to watch Strander. Intermittent Mayday old vessel name. No AIS. Typing felt ridiculous next to the ancient brass clock and the shutter of the tower and the wind. At 1:41 a.m., the voice came back too clear now, cutting through the hiss like someone had turned a fader off. Wake up. You're late. I froze. Nobody knew I signed the watch white cap in the log. It's just what the old keepers used to write. Identify, I said. The TX light stuttered. Identify. Turn the light. The voice said, and the beam slowed, just a hitch like a heartbeat, then resumed. That's not possible on an automated carriage. Not without a command. and I hadn't sent. I lifted the maintenance panel out of habit, the override switch, the one with a safety seal over it was flipped to manual. The seal lay in two pieces on the deck. I hadn't touched it. I flipped it back to auto. The beam stayed steady. My phone buzzed. Sector online. I answered, still watching the radio, the rain, the reflection of my own face in the window black as the sea. Station White Cap sector. We're recording your transmissions. Can you repeat the name of the vessel? Riny Rose, I said. Copy. We've archived of that Mayday from 2002. It's matching to within 1 second. In the pause that followed, the watch room felt too small. I could hear the fog signal low horn bleed through the walls. 5 seconds on, 45 off, like a breathing animal. Then a different voice came through the speaker. Not a stranger. Mine. Mayday. Mayday. This is station white cap. Position. The same break on. May. I dropped the mic. I hadn't transmitted. The TX light wasn't on. My own voice kept calling. Desperate. The words I just spoken. But not quite. My accent pulled longer. The fear pushed forward. Sector. Did you copy? I asked. The sector line went quiet then cut. The radio kept going. My voice overlapping itself stuck in a lag like a bad satellite. This is station white cap position. Need assistance. Anybody hear us? It looped on and on. And when I finally yanked the power, the speaker kept whispering. No power, no light. But the audio didn't stop. I went up to the lantern room with a handheld on my belt just to get away from the sound. The stairs vibrated under the wind. The festal lens rotated, turning rain into a carousel of streaking glass. One second. When the beam passed over the water, I saw a cluster of mass lights out there where nothing should be, then black again. On the inner glass, halfway around, there was a small smear I hadn't noticed before. All parallel streets, fingertips dragged through condensation from the outside. One more drip trailed down laggate. I slept on the floor under the console that morning. Phone dead. The radio finally a mute box. When sector's boat tied up at first light, their radios reported an open carrier constant transmit coming from our frequency as if someone had taped the mic button down. My mic was on the hook. The maintenance team took the console apart that day. They found salt crystals blooming inside the casing like white flowers. Humidity, they said. Condensation. They replaced the radio, the wiring, the breaker. Two nights later, the loop started again at 1:12 a.m. My voice stacked over itself, calling a position that was ours and a name that shouldn't answer. It ran for 6 hours after I pulled every fuse. I transferred off station at the end of the month. Before I left, the new guy asked if I had any tips for staying sane. I told him to keep the log updated, keep the light clean, and never ever answer a Mayday that knows your name. Last week, Setter emailed me an audio clip for testing. The file name was Whitecap Legacy.wave. I put my headphones on. Through the hears, someone breathed once and spoke in my voice. Older, horser, patient. Mayday, mayday. I took the headphones off, but the clip kept playing without them. I did a winter rotation at the Stone Lighthouse, 8 miles of the Devon Coast. Twoman crew, six on, six off. swap at noon. Me and Harry, an older guy, quiet, lived on biscuits and tea. I was there to get hours towards a permanent posting. He was there because he didn't trust machines. Second night, I woke to kettle noise from the gallery. It was 2:06 a.m. I patted down in socks, half expected Harry to be filling a flask for his watch. The gallery light was on. The kettle whistled on the table. Free plates, toast crumbs. Jam smeared in free art. Free mugs sweating steam. Harry, I said. He appeared behind me from the watch room, rubbing his eyes. You left that on. We stared at the table. He checked the log. He'd been on duty since midnight. I'd gone off at 11:55 p.m. id asked. No. He tossed all three plates in the sink. No jokes. Not this far out. Day three. Tools we left by the wrench had migrated to the lantern room. A second pair of wet footprints dried in the entryway that didn't match either of ours. Harry accused me of sleepwalking. I accused him back. We laughed because the wind was screaming hard enough to make the tower flex. And laughing felt better than admitting each of us had awoken to someone moving on the stairs. On day five at 11:32, the fog cleared to an horizon. I logged it. Harry went up to clean the lens. When I came up to pass in the length three class, he was standing with his hand on the brass gallery rail, just looking at the glass. "Tell me you see it," he said. On the inner pain, almost invisible unless the light hit just right, were three greasy arcs the size of shoulders where someone had leaned. Below them, the suggestion of a palm. We cleaned them off without a word. That evening, I found the second log book behind the gallery tins. Same format as ours, same handwriting as ours. But every entry felt slightly wrong. Times rounded, weather too neat, little phrases like lantern observed instead of lantern inspected. and some entries had both our names signed even though we hadn't been on the same watch. Joke, I said. Someone left this to spook the new kid. Harry flipped to the middle, then to the back. The last page had tomorrow's date. It was blank except for a line at the top in block letters. Do not leave the light alone. We both stared at it longer than we needed to. Later, when I tried to nap, I dreamed of the tower emptying itself with sound as if the sea had inhaled and held its breath. On day six, the barometer fell hard. By midnight, we were in a white room of rain. The beam cut a tight tunnel through water. The horn bellowed every 45 seconds. Harry took the first watch, and I tried to sleep on the sofa. The kettle sang at 12:21 a.m. I stayed put. At 10:08, the radio whispered, not words I could make out, just the sound of someone at the edge of speech. I went upstairs and found Harry with the mic in his hand, eyes on the glass. You hear that? He asked. Before I could answer, something tapped the window. Not hail knuckles. Once, twice, palm flat against a glass as the lens carried the smudge round on its rotation. Sue sprray, he said, voice too bright. We both watched the smudge come back a second rotation. It hadn't streaked. At 2:00 a.m., the generator hiccuped and the light stuttered. The tower sighed. Everything lost the second. In that instant, I heard footsteps coming down from the lantern room. Not ours, not a trick. A third person was moving with that economy you only hear when someone knows their route in the dark. We stood on either side of the stairwell and didn't say a word. The footsteps paused three steps above as if whoever it was had stopped to listen. The horn moaned. My teeth vibrated. Then the footsteps resumed down past us into the watch room. We followed. The gallery's kettle was already boiling. Three mugs on the table. Three plates. The second log book open. Pen laid neatly across the center. Harry reached for the pen and drew his hand back like he touched a stove. Started, he said, shaking his fingers. We both watched the pen move a centimeter by itself. Not dramatic, just a tug as if someone had taken a letter and then thought better. In the quiet between horn blast, we heard a scratch scratch scratch from the paper like a nib seeking words. I slammed the book shut. Enough. I shoved it behind the tins where we found it. Arion plugged the kettle. We just sat in the watch room until dawn. Radios off. Log untouched except for times and fuel checks. We didn't speak about it. At noon, the supply boat didn't come. weather. I went to fetch the second log book to prove to myself I'd been overt tired. It wasn't behind the tins. It wasn't anywhere. I found crumbs on the table, free circles where mugs had sweated. Harry swore. No jokes, he said again, but this time it sounded like a plea. I finished my rotation a week later and stepped onto the supplied boat with that grateful lurch your legs do when land becomes an idea again. Back at the depot, they asked me to hand over the official log. I did. The clerk glanced through and tapped the last page. Who forgot to sign off the watch? He said, pointing at our names. And this third signature. Who's our ward? I don't know, I said. He held up a second book I'd never seen. Same binding, same station. The third log book stamped on the spine. It was full. Every page written in a tight block hand that wasn't mine. Dated cleanly through tomorrow. On the last line until tomorrow's date, three names signed off. Harry, Kent, me, our ward. Below them in neat capitals. Don't leave the light alone again. I asked where he got in that book. He looked confused and said, "You turned it in with the rest. I'm a tech contractor to service automated lights along the coast. Battery banks, control boards, corrosion checks. The older guys talk like keepers. I talk like a mechanic. A light is a light. It's either on or it isn't. Except at North Pike. North Pike reported a fault-free night straight. A 1 minute blackout at 3:14 a.m. every morning. self-restoring at 3:15 a.m. No weather alarms, no generator drop, no battery sag, just one dark minute, like a blink. I went out on a calm night with a pelican case full of spares. The tower rose out of the rock like a white bone. Nobody's stationed there anymore, just a dock, a door, a spiral of iron up to the lantern. There's a small watch room with a cot and a desk. The control unit sat there humming green LEDs happy. I ate a stale sandwich, set an alarm for 3:10 a.m., and watched the control panel tick its seconds. At 3:1359, the main lamp went dead. The control unit didn't care. No error. The relays didn't click. The green LEDs just kept smiling. Outside, darkness swallowed the sea. I could hear it more than see it. quiet like a held breath. At 3:15 a.m., the light snapped on. Beam, fog, horizon. The panel never blinked. I wrote it off and went topside. The lantern rune smelled like hot glass and salt. The fraser lens is like a cathedral window wrapped in a barrel, prisms stacked in rings. You learned to move around it without touching, finger oils etch. On the inside of the outer glass was a handprint. Four fingers and a thumb smudged from the inside. It faced outwards like someone had pressed their palm to look down at the rocks. I took a photo. The ridges weren't random. You can make out loops. A print. I wiped it carefully with lint-free cloth, then looked for the entry point. The hatch was closed. No footprints in the dust. I told myself it was some previous tech with bad discipline. I left the hatch cracked anyway. If somebody was screwing with the place, I wanted a draft to push them out. At midnight, I brewed bad coffee and watched the sea make no promises. At 3:10 a.m., the control panel logged nothing. At 3:14 a.m., the light went out again. Wind rose like someone had opened the door. I climbed to the lantern room with my head lampamp off to keep the glass from blinding me. The beam was down. Only starlight and the phosphorus smear of the breakers lit anything. Something moved inside the dark lens. My own shadow, I told myself, until it didn't line up. When I lifted my hand, the thing inside didn't. When I stopped, it kept moving for a second, catching up like a laggy screen. There was a man in there. Not behind the glass, inside the circle of the lens where there is no floor, no room, just a narrow catwalk in the turntable. He was where light shouldn't be. Not a figure exactly, more like a darker shape. Shoulders, head, something like a smile where the reflections braided together. Hello, I said because I was alone and I hadn't heard anyone say it in hours. I watched the control panel's reflection in the glass read 3:15 a.m. in reverse. The light came on. The man was gone. The glass was clean. I went back to the watch room and pulled the SD card from the little maintenance camera. It's a dumb thing that records one frame every second when it when it detects a fault. I scrolled to 3:14 a.m. For one minute, the video showed the lantern room empty. Then halfway through the blackout, the camera did something it can't do. It panned towards the sea. No motor, no gimbal. The image just slid until it caught a patch of water, smooth as oil. A ripple bulged from nothing, as if something enormous had surfaced without breaking. The last frame from 3:15 a.m. showed the camera sliding back to its starting position. A handprint on the glass came into view, fresh. the same loots in the print as the one I wiped. I told myself I was tired. I put the camera away. I wrote the word intermittent in the fault line because writing there's a man in the lens, it felt like a career decision. On the third night, I sat my phone to record audio. If something wanted to be heard, I'd catch it. I sat on the floor under the control panel and listened to the hum of electricity and an old iron moving in its sleep. At 3:13 a.m., the air in the room felt like a held breath again. At 3:14, the light died. The audio picked up a faint hiss, like static, except the panel wasn't emitting anything. The hatch upstairs creeped without wind. I climbed. The lantern room was dark, but the sea glowed a little with the starlight. I pressed my palm where the prince had been. Cold glass, nothing else. Then something knocked from the other side of the lens. Three slow taps, the kind meant for a window between rooms. I didn't run. I couldn't. I waited and said, "What do you want?" A voice, not loud, not dramatic, spoke as if it was right behind my ear, except the echo came from the glass. Don't leave us in the dark. At 3:15, the light returned in the room flush with brightness. On the outer glass and my eye level, a fresh print bloomed in grease, sliding with the rotation. It wasn't mine. My hands were clean. The loops didn't match. When the Coast Guard boat came at dawn with a replacement panel, I met them on the stairs. We pulled the control unit and installed a new one. The old board went in the Pelican case. I signed the work order. Routine fixes in a place that didn't want routine. They radioed me that evening to say North Pike was shining steady again. No more one minute blinks. Good job, tech. I checked my phone when I got home and listened to the night's audio. It was almost empty. Wind, my boots, the creek of the hatch until 3:16 a.m. One extra minute I hadn't noticed. The recording captured the light coming back, my breath, and then just once, a sound like someone dragging their palms slowly down the curved glass. A long wet squeal, lower than fingers, higher than a tool. The next week, they sent me back to swap out a fog horn contractor. I climbed the stairs, walked into the watch room, and found my Pelican case sitting open on the desk. The control panel I removed wasn't inside. Upstairs on the inner glass, dried and dusty now. Was a handprint bigger than mine, fingers spled wide on the outside of the lens where only the weather should be. It revolved in and out of the sun slowly as if someone had pressed it there and waited through the dark minute for me to see it. I logged the fault as none and wrote nothing else.