Scottish lighthouse, late 1800s. The keeper vanished. They found scratch marks.

I wasn't going to post this but it's been living in my head so here we go.

This is reconstructed from a real lighthouse keeper's journal found on the northern Scottish coast. The keeper's name was William. Late 19th century. Alone on a remote island where the North Atlantic just... never stopped hitting the cliffs.

He'd been stationed there three years. His whole life was simple. Light the lamp at dusk. Maintain it at dawn. Keep ships from dying in the fog. He wrote in his journal that the beam felt like the only thread connecting him to the rest of the world.

Third winter. That's when things got weird.

One particularly foggy night, William looked down from the top of the lighthouse and saw something on the rocky beach. Small stones. Arranged in a line. They were glinting faintly through the fog, laid out like they were pointing somewhere. Leading somewhere.

Next night. Same thing. Night after that. Same.

The stones led all the way to the base of the lighthouse.

He grabbed a lantern and went down to check. Nothing there. Just fog. Just waves. He told himself he was hallucinating from loneliness and went back inside.

Then one night the light went out.

He ran to the control room. Machinery was fine. So he climbed the iron ladder himself to replace the bulb manually. And that's when he heard it.

A voice. Singing. Coming from directly below the lighthouse.

It was... wrong. Like the sound was coming from deep underwater. Thick and slow and wrong. William said his heart just DROPPED. He scrambled back down, looked out the window.

Fog. Darkness. The sea.

And something white, floating above the water. Moving toward the lighthouse. Slow. Like it was walking on the surface.

Wet hair hanging down. Pale skin. Not a person.

He locked the door. Curled up inside. The singing didn't stop all night. It went until dawn.

After that it came every night.

Knocking on the door. Scratching the windows. And the singing. always the singing. but what messed with him the most was what it was singing. He wrote that it sounded like "come inside. come inside."

He started turning off ALL the lights when night fell and just hiding in the dark. The lighthouse beam stopped shining. Ships in danger. He didn't care anymore.

His last journal entry:

"Tonight they climbed to the top. There is nowhere left to hide. They hate the light and only exist in darkness. I... cannot hold on any longer."

That's where the journal ends.

A few days later, a rescue crew arrived at the lighthouse.

No William.

Just an old lantern swinging in the wind at the top. And scratch marks on every window.

The lighthouse has been abandoned ever since. Locals say that on certain nights you can see a faint light circling the rocks around it. And you can hear singing. Coming up from the water.

Some people say it's William's ghost, still keeping watch from wherever the sea took him. Others say it's whatever was out there that night, still wandering, still looking for a light to follow home.