- 7/3/2025
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CreativityTranscript
00:00the light at devil's reach. They say the sea keeps its secrets, but that's a lie. The sea
00:05doesn't keep secrets. It whispers them at night, through the walls, up the stairs, into your ears
00:12while you lie frozen in your bunk, heart pounding like a drum. I didn't believe that once. I do now.
00:18My name is Liam Hayes. I've served in the Coast Guard for over 12 years. I'm not the storytelling
00:23type. I don't drink, don't gamble, and I've never believed in ghosts or monsters. I fix lights,
00:30engines, and radars. Nothing more. But what happened at devil's reach changed me in a way I
00:35still can't explain. Back in the fall of 2017, I got assigned to a maintenance rotation on a
00:42decommissioned lighthouse off the coast of Nova Scotia. The place was known as devil's reach,
00:47a jagged outcrop of rocks and gold-covered cliffs about 12 miles from the mainland.
00:51There was no harbor, no dock, no power grid, not even plumbing. Just a rusted lighthouse and a one-room
00:59shed full of fuel cans and forgotten tools. Normally, it's a solo job. But after reports
01:05of equipment failures and power anomalies the year before, Command sent two of us. I went out
01:10with another technician named Marcus Ellison. We weren't close, but we'd worked together a few
01:16times before. Marcus was a quiet guy, sharp, methodical, with a dry sense of humor. Like me,
01:23he didn't buy into the supernatural stuff. The first few days were uneventful. Rain, wind,
01:29routine checks. The beacon housing needed a cleaning. The emergency diesel had to be rotated,
01:35and the batteries tested. Nights were dull. We ate kent soup, played cards, and read by lantern light.
01:41There was a stillness to the place that made it feel like we were suspended out of time.
01:45No signal. No outside world. Just the sea and us. But on the fourth night, something changed.
01:53I woke around 2am, with a tight feeling in my chest. The kind you get just before lightning hits.
01:58The air felt heavier, charged. I couldn't hear the rotating sweep of a lighthouse beacon.
02:04The sound that had become a kind of lullaby in the background. I sat up, uneasy, and glanced out
02:10the porthole. No light. Nothing but blackness outside. I shook Marcus awake. We threw on our
02:16boots, and climbed the narrow metal stairs up to the beacon room. It was pitch dark, but we could
02:21hear the gear, assembly whirring. The motor was trying to turn the light, but it wasn't moving.
02:26Something was jammed in the housing. We pried the metal casing open, and found the blockage.
02:31A shredded piece of dark, oily fabric. It was soaked, slimy, and smelled like dead seaweed mixed with
02:38decay. It looked like it had been underwater for years. We couldn't figure out how it got there.
02:43The room was locked. The windows sealed. No birds. No wind access. Just us. We tossed the thing outside
02:51into the ocean breeze, double-checked the motor, and headed back to bed. The next night, same thing.
02:57I jolted awake at 2.13am. The light was out again. We raced back up, and there was another piece of
03:04cloth, but not the same kind. This one looked like a woman's scarf. Red, frayed at the ends,
03:10soaked in seawater, tiny barnacles clinging to the edges. It had no business being inside that tower.
03:17That's when I stopped believing this was a fluke. Something was interfering with the beacon,
03:21and we weren't alone. We started locking everything tight, bolting the stairs with crates.
03:27After final checks each night, we padlocked the beacon room and shoved furniture against the
03:32barracks door. We weren't scared yet, but we were alert. On the seventh night, I caught Marcus
03:38whispering. He was lying in his bunk, mumbling into the darkness. I couldn't make out the words,
03:44but he sounded like he was answering someone. I sat up and asked what he was saying. He blinked.
03:49What? You were talking to someone. He looked confused. No. I was asleep. Later that same night,
03:56I caught him standing at the window, staring down at the rocks below. When I asked what he was doing,
04:01he said, there was someone down there. Last night, I saw them, just before the light went out. I didn't
04:08sleep that night. By day nine, Marcus was unraveling. He stopped shaving, stopped eating. He'd stare out
04:15the porthole for hours, murmuring to himself. He started scratching at the walls, saying he heard
04:21footsteps in the tower. I tried to stay rational. I kept notes, took photos, but it was hard to deny what
04:28was happening. That night, we both heard it. Footsteps. Deliberate. Slow. Descending from the
04:35beacon above. Thud. Thud. Thud. We stood at the base of the stairs, staring up into blackness.
04:42You go. I asked him. He shook his head. You? No. Neither of us had moved. The light was locked,
04:49but someone, or something, had walked down from that room. We blocked the stairwell with an iron pipe
04:54and dragged a dresser in front of our door. Slept with knives under our pillows. On the eleventh
04:59night, it escalated. The beacon stopped again, and this time, the room wasn't locked when we got there.
05:06It was wide open. The wind howled through, freezing cold. The gears were intact, but the bulb had been
05:12unscrewed and placed upright in the center of the floor. That bulb was industrial-grade, reinforced.
05:18You couldn't just twist it off casually. It took effort. Intent. Marcus stared at the bulb and
05:24muttered. They don't want the light on. That's when I felt it. Something brushed my back. Cold.
05:30Wet. I turned. Heart hammering. But there was no one there. Marcus had gone pale. His eyes locked on
05:37the far wall. There was a hand. He whispered. It came out of the brick. We ran. We barricaded
05:43ourselves again. I didn't sleep at all. Marcus sat in the corner, rocking, muttering in some
05:49language I didn't recognize. At first light, I called for extraction. I told them we had critical
05:54system failure. They said they'd dispatch a boat by afternoon. That should have been the end of it.
05:59But just before they arrived, one of the crew asked us about the 2.12am distress call. The one we made
06:05with the emergency set phone. We didn't make any call. I told him. He looked confused. You did.
06:11We got a transmission. Static. Then someone said, he's here. He's with us now. Then silence.
06:18Marcus never said a word on the ride back. He quit the Coast Guard a month later. Moved to
06:23Colorado. I haven't seen him since. As for me, I still work lighthouses. Still do repairs. But if
06:30they ever try to send me back to Devil's Reach, I'll go AWOL before I set foot on that cursed rock again.
06:35Some lights aren't meant to be fixed. Some shadows aren't meant to be disturbed. The light that
06:40shouldn't go out. My name is Gregory. And I've heard a lot of strange things in my life. But what
06:46I'm about to share with you is something I still think about late at night. Especially when it's
06:51quiet. Too quiet. This story didn't happen to me. But to my friend Marcus. Someone I've known for over
06:5720 years. Marcus isn't the kind of man to spook easily. He's been a diver, a coastal technician,
07:02and a government contractor. Spending most of his adult life fixing the things that others were too
07:08afraid to touch. Oil rigs, sunken vessels, sea walls battered by hurricanes. But what happened
07:14to him in the fall of 2014 off the coast of Oregon nearly broke him. Marcus had been hired by a county
07:20restoration board to inspect an old decommissioned lighthouse called Crane's Hollow Point. It sat
07:26alone on a jagged slab of rock, roughly 40 miles from shore. No docks, no roads. Just stone, moss,
07:35rust, and silence. His job was to spend four days there, catalog the structural integrity of the tower,
07:42and radio in a report before being picked up. It was nothing he hadn't done a dozen times before.
07:47He left on a Monday morning, radio in hand, a backpack with food and supplies,
07:52and his usual gear. The county boat dropped him off at high tide, and the second he stepped onto
07:58that slick black rock, he told me he felt it, like the island was watching him. But Marcus wasn't the
08:04type to turn back. The first night was uneventful, or so he thought. The lighthouse tower stretched
08:10maybe 60 feet up, capped with the old glass beacon that hadn't worked in decades. Inside, the air was
08:16heavy, salty, and metallic. Layers of dust clung to everything, and each step on the spiral staircase
08:24echoed up and down the hollow stone interior like a warning. The second day, the fog came, thick white
08:30endless. It pressed up against every window like it wanted in, and that's when Marcus noticed
08:35something strange. A maintenance closet that had been rusted shut the day before was now open,
08:40just a crack. Inside it sat a small wooden box covered in moss. Damp, heavy, like it had been
08:47dragged up from the ocean floor. He didn't open it. Now listen, if you've made it this far into the
08:52story, then you're probably like me. You love these eerie, true or maybe not so true tales that keep
08:58you up at night. So before we go further, if you're already feeling chills, do me a favor, hit that like
09:05button, drop a comment if you've ever experienced something similar, and subscribe for more
09:10unsettling stories like this one. Trust me, you won't want to miss what comes next. That night,
09:16Marcus was woken up by a sound. But it wasn't just a sound, it was the absence of all sound.
09:21No waves, no wind, just a dead silence, so complete it felt suffocating. And then, faintly at first,
09:29came footsteps, not from outside, but from above. They moved slowly, deliberately, up the spiral stairs.
09:37Not down, up. He lay frozen, flashlight in hand, staring at the stairwell's entrance. But nothing
09:44came. When morning finally arrived, he swept the entire tower, top to bottom. Nothing. No animals.
09:52No people. Just the same damp box, now inexplicably placed halfway out of the closet and into the
09:59stairwell. That was when Marcus began to feel fear. He dragged the box to the base of the stairs,
10:04not sure what to do with it. The lid was nailed shut. The wood was bloated with seawater. Something
10:10about it. It was wrong. He went outside to clear his head, and that's when he saw them. Footprints.
10:16Bare. Human. Wet. Leading from the far side of the lighthouse, toward the cliff's edge, and stopping.
10:23No returning steps. No signs of struggle. Just the prints and the void beyond the rocks.
10:29Marcus told me he tried every rational explanation. Maybe another boat had landed. Maybe a prank.
10:36Maybe he was just sleep-deprived. But that didn't explain what happened that night.
10:40Around 1.30 a.m., the door to the top beacon room slammed shut, violently. The whole tower
10:47shuttered. Dust fell from the rafters. And then, came the knocking. Three deliberate knocks.
10:53Not on a door. Not on the windows. But from inside the wall. He didn't sleep after that. Who would?
11:00He wedged the stairwell shut with a rusted iron pipe, and waited for daylight. But when he went
11:05to check again, the box was gone. The closet was wide open, and the silence returned like a heavy
11:10cloak. He used his marine radio, and called in an emergency pickup, faking a medical issue. They said
11:16it would be hours. Fog was too thick. Visibility was near zero. He waited outside, near the landing
11:23ledge, all day. The sun began to fade behind the wall of white mist. Then he heard footsteps again,
11:30this time behind him, on the gravel path around the base of the lighthouse. But when he turned,
11:35there was nothing. Only fog. Thick. Moving. He backed toward the cliff, clutching his flashlight.
11:42Still nothing. No boat. No voice. Just the sound of footsteps growing fainter. As if whatever was
11:49behind him had decided to stop and watch. When the county boat finally arrived, it was just after
11:55dusk. They said they nearly passed the island entirely, unable to see the shoreline. Marcus boarded,
12:02pale and silent. The deckhand told him he looked like he'd seen a ghost. He didn't argue. Marcus
12:08filed a report the next day, stating the tower was structurally unsafe and not suitable for
12:13restoration. He didn't mention the footsteps, or the box, or the knocks on the wall. He told me later
12:19he left those details out, because he wasn't sure what had happened. Maybe he was losing it. Maybe
12:24isolation had finally gotten to him. But deep down, he didn't believe that. The thing that haunts me most
12:31isn't what Marcus told me, but what he didn't. I once asked him if he ever figured out what was inside
12:36that moss-covered box. He looked at me like I'd asked something forbidden and shook his head.
12:41Some things, he said, aren't meant to be opened. And some places aren't meant to be visited. I tried
12:47looking in a crane's hollow point myself. Searching maps, county records, satellite imagery. But there's
12:53nothing. No official listing. No name. Just an empty gap in the charts where that rock should be.
12:59Almost like it was never there at all. But Marcus remembers. And now, so do you.
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