The Lightkeeper’s Lampless Night

In the autumn of 1999, when the country was still mired in rolling blackouts, I lived in a converted lighthouse keeper’s cottage on a jagged stretch of coast. My cousin, Mara, had come to stay with me for a few weeks, seeking refuge from the city’s noise and the constant hum of generators. The cottage was old, with thick stone walls and a single round room on the ground floor, and a spiral staircase leading up to a glass-windowed lantern room that had not held a light for decades. We had no electricity, only oil lamps and candles, and at night, the darkness was so complete that you could imagine the world had ended beyond the garden gate.

One evening, the blackout was more profound than usual, and the moon was new. I lay in my bed, which was positioned beneath a wide, triple-paned window that overlooked the sea. The stars were out in a riot—cold, brilliant, and utterly indifferent. I had always been a stargazer, finding comfort in their fixed positions, but that night, they seemed to watch back. I felt a sudden heaviness, as if the air itself had thickened, and my limbs turned to lead. I could not move, not even my fingers. A weight pressed down on my legs, like a heavy animal settling there. Then came a high, thin ringing in my ears, so piercing it felt like a needle through my skull.

I tried to pray, forming words in my mind, but my thoughts were sluggish, as if wading through molasses. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, a dark shape crouched at the foot of the bed—a man, or a thing shaped like a man, with no face, only a smooth oval of skin. It reached out a hand, and its fingers were too long, the joints bending backwards. It touched my ankle, and the cold was like being plunged into a frozen lake. I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t even blink. And then, as suddenly as it had begun, it stopped. The weight lifted, the ringing faded, and I could move again. I sat up, sweating despite the chill, and saw nothing but the dim outlines of the furniture. I didn’t sleep again that night.

The next evening, I told Mara about the incident, trying to laugh it off as a night terror or my imagination playing tricks in the dark. She listened quietly, her face pale in the candlelight. She said, ‘I had something similar last night, in the circular room. I felt like something was sitting on my chest, and I couldn’t move. And I saw a shape by the window, like a tall man in a long coat. It held a lantern, but the lantern was dark.’ I felt a chill run down my spine.

We decided to investigate the lantern room the following day. We climbed the winding stairs, our footsteps echoing in the hollow space. The room was dusty, filled with old marine equipment and a brass telescope. In the center stood the decommissioned light fixture, a massive iron and glass contraption, now dim and spiderwebbed. On the floor, we found a tarnished brass lantern, unlit, with no oil reservoir—it was purely decorative. There was a name engraved on its base: ‘E. Thorne, 1921.’

That night, we set up two cots in the lantern room, thinking that perhaps being above the ground would feel safer. We kept a single candle burning between us. At around two in the morning, the candle flickered and went out. The room was plunged into darkness, but through the glass, we could see the stars. Then we heard it: a slow, rhythmic thumping, like footsteps on the metal stairway, only they seemed to be coming from inside the walls. The high-pitched ringing returned, filling our ears, and we both felt the paralysis. I could see Mara’s eyes in the faint starlight, wide with terror, as something invisible pressed down on us. This time, it was stronger. I could feel a cold breath on my face, and a voice—whispered, but clear—said, ‘You are not welcome here. This light belongs to me.’

As abruptly as before, it stopped. We scrambled for matches, relit the candle, and fled downstairs. We didn’t speak until morning, but we both knew we had to leave. Yet, as we packed our bags, I noticed something on the windowsill of the cottage: the brass lantern, which we had left upstairs, now sitting in the kitchen, its glass face turned toward the sea. There was a faint smudge on the glass, like a handprint, but the fingers were elongated and bent wrong.

We left that afternoon. As we drove away, I looked back at the cottage, and for a moment, I saw a tall, dark figure standing in the upper window, holding a lantern that was dark. And I knew that the light was waiting for another keeper to come, and that the darkness was always hungry. We never spoke of it again, but I still wake sometimes, in the middle of the night, with that high-pitched ringing in my ears, and the weight of something sitting on my legs, and the unshakeable feeling that I am being watched from a distance, by a lampless lighthouse. That was my second experience, and I pray it will be my last. But the stars are cold, and the sea is deep, and I know that there are some lights that never go out, even when they are dark. And they are always looking for a keeper. They are always looking for me. And they are always looking for you.