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Have any of you heard about paranormal stuff related to lighthouses? I’ve looked everywhere, but I haven’t been able to find anything that could explain the experience I had. I’m sorry this post is so long, I just want to get all the background information into it. I’ve been really stressed about this and I need any help I can get.

The town I live in used to be a port. Nowadays, the docks have all but completely dried up, but it was pretty large back in the day. I live in the part of the town that used to be the port. I’ve lived here all my life. The area doesn’t have many jobs, but I work from home anyway, so it doesn’t bother me very much.

Growing up, I don’t think I ever realized how bad the area was, economically. My parents always seemed to have enough money, but nobody else did. The stores were always understaffed, and wherever you looked, you could find someone living on the street. Even the people with houses weren’t much better off. I remember my neighbor, an old woman, who I only saw the day she died. They say she hadn’t left her house in months. Despite how bad the local economy was, I never saw anyone die of anything other than old age, and there was next to no crime. At the very least, there was never any crime that I heard of.

Like I said earlier, the docks dried up before I was born, cutting off a lot of business from the town. But even though the basin is dry, we still get frequent rain. About 100 days a year, and almost 30 inches. I don’t know how it didn’t fill back up. All the rain management systems directed the water to the lake. I should have found it more strange that the lake was dry, but when I was growing up, I barely thought about it. Some people really hate rain, but I always loved it. The cozy feeling of staying in a warm building while the world outside grasps at you. The bone-chilling yet welcoming cold. The sound of rain, drowning out everything in the world until you are the only person left in it. I love when it rains.

Whenever it gets dark and stormy, they always turn on the lighthouse. It shouldn’t be surprising that they do so, the building is absolutely historic. It was built sometime in the 1700s, but I haven’t been able to find the exact date. Maybe the reason it scares me so much is because it’s so old. The lighthouse is rendered in a gothic style, with tons of spikes grasping up towards the sky and gargoyles looking down at the ground. The worst part is how the gargoyles look. They’re supposed to look like people, but their expressions are completely inhuman. Their faces were carved with expressions of extreme emotion, sneers of anger and screams of agony. When it rains, the water makes it look like they’re crying. I don’t know who would carve them like that.

Despite the age of the lighthouse, the light it emits is blinding. Someone must have replaced the original light source with a high-power LED or something similar at some point. I remember laying in bed on stormy nights, having the light slam through my window. In high school, the lighthouse would always keep me awake before school. Eventually, I got blackout curtains for my room. When I moved out of my parents' house, I didn’t bring them, since the bedroom window didn’t face the lighthouse anymore.

Let’s get to the actual encounter now. It was raining, and I had been working away for a while. I think I had lost track of time. My laptop said that it was 10 AM, but I think it was broken, because I had been working for much longer than that, and it was pitch black outside. It wasn’t just storm dark, it was nighttime dark, so it couldn’t have actually been 10 AM. The only thing I could see from my living room that lit up the sky was the long beam of the lighthouse. There weren’t any other lights, not even from the other houses. As I stared at the beam of light, I realized that it was behaving oddly. The beam was moving sluggishly and sporadically, like a wounded animal. Sometimes it would even reverse directions, but it always seemed to right itself and resume its path in the proper direction. I don’t know how long I watched the beam struggle to move, but I know it took a long time for it to eventually settle on my home.

The white light pierced through the slats of my blinds, and the strangest feeling overcame me. When I tried to move, there was a long delay between wanting to do the action and my body actually moving. I know that when this happened, I should have been afraid, but at the moment, I couldn’t feel anything, just the cold, damp drone of consciousness, and the cold, damp patter of rain. It felt like being on the other side of a mirror. I don’t know how to describe it. I’m sorry.

I stood there for what felt like hours. Time stretched out towards infinity, towards the lighthouse, and I knew that the only things left in the entire universe were my house and the structure in the distance. There was nothing left. Nothing but the lighthouse. I turned my head back at my laptop, a motion that took so much longer than it should have. The clock said that it had been 10 minutes. I tried to exit the living room, to retreat into the darkness, away from the blinding gaze of the lighthouse, but every door I tried was locked or stuck. Perhaps I had simply lost the ability to open doors, now that my reality had been drowned in a puddle. Outside, the rain continued to fall, and the lighthouse continued its watch.

At one point I fell asleep. There was nothing else to do. I tried to go on my computer to pass the time, but the network was down. Even if it was up, my hands were so numb that I kept missing the keys. I was stuck. There was nothing to do but watch and be watched. I was eventually woken up by a quiet rapping on the window.

At first, I thought it was the rain, pounding down even harder on my isolated world. That notion was quickly dispelled when I saw the silhouette of one of the gargoyles. It was standing there, unmoving in the storm and yet I still knew it was what had caused the noise. It was just the one, at first, but slowly, more and more began to trickle towards my pocket of warmth until all four had amassed at the window, the lighthouse glaring behind them.

At first, they didn’t move. They simply stood, motionless. They didn’t continue to do so. Through the corner of my eye, I could see them twitching, and underneath the patter of the rain, I could hear the cracking of stone as they shifted and stirred. They were trying to get inside. The light cracking turned to a rancorous roar, a symphony of breaking and reforming slate desperately clawing at the window, pounding on it.

The window broke open and the gargoyles, with their tortured visage, climbed through the window alongside the pouring silver light. I moved to grab anything to fight them, but my motion was still slow, sluggish, and numbed. I fell over, and when I turned my head, I realized that one of the gargoyles had grabbed my ankle. I tried to shove it away, to get it off, but my limbs failed me. I became aware of a cracking noise, and an intense pain. The gargoyle who had grabbed my legs was meticulously snapping the bones in my foot, one by one. It was agonizing. The other gargoyles shambled towards me, slamming their fists against my body with wet slaps, stomping on my arms as they held me down. I felt all of it. The only thing I remember is pain.

Then, instantaneously and with no warning, the rain stopped. The gargoyles vanished. The lighthouse was no longer glaring into the room. Everything was normal, and it was a sunny day outside. All the injuries inflicted upon me were gone. The only indicator that anything happened is the fact that I remember it happening.

I took the day off of work and went to visit the lighthouse. But when I went to the spot where the lighthouse should’ve been, there was nothing there. Just a spot of undisturbed land, with grass high enough to touch my knees. It hasn’t rained in my town since that day.