Creepy - The Chattanooga Lights

Episode Date: January 18, 2021

Don't look at the light***Written by u/StygianSagas***Check out our reward tiers at patreon.com/creepypod***You can also subscribe to us on YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/creepypod***Produced by Steve Blizin***Title music by Alex Aldea***Intro/Outro Narration by Joe Stofko Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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A podcast dedicated to sharing the most famous chilling and disturbing creepypastas and urban legends in the world. Whether these stories truly happened or are simply fabrications is for you to decide. These stories may contain graphic depictions of violence and explicit language. Listener discretion is advised. Creepy presents. The Chattanooga Lights. Written by Stigian Saga's and produced by Steve Blissen. I took the first description I heard of the Chattanooga Lights to be the ravings of a meth-addled madman.

Having just hiked and hitchhiked north from Huntsville, I decided on an impromptu stop in that ruin-haunted Appalachian. to rest my weary legs. The distant storm which loomed on the horizon looked nasty, and I didn't fancy being trapped down the road when it hit. Seeking shelter in a looming, dusty steel mill long left or rust in the humid Tennessee air. I'd only just hopped a fence and stumbled across the weed-eaten parking lot when Garth found me. Get out of the open!

He urged, motioning me towards his position. in the trees at the edge of the lot. Storm's coming our way. The lights ain't never far behind. He was older, gone, and sun-baked, after the fashion of men who live outdoors. Garth would turn out to actually be meth-addled, but despite my newcomer's worry,

he would also turn out to be harmless and good-humored. Moreover, he had proved to be entirely correct about the Chattanooga Lights. Garth led me to a huge cathedral-like warehouse off to the edge of the property, long vacant and rusted over. The soaring interior was a buzz with a clamor of a dozen squatters camped in the ruin. It was eerie. The intrepid fires we lit in barrels cast in dancing patterns across the aged metal far above. When the wind howled and the storms rained thundered off the aluminum roof, however, I was glad to have found

such a secure fortress against the gale. Garth and two other men from the odd little colony spent the whole evening holding firm a tarp used to cover the open entryway to the warehouse, fixing any jostled hole that might let lights live through. When I asked Andrea, an older woman sharing the fire with me, what the deal was with the tarp, she simply nodded to the screeching wind above and warned that the lights came during the storm. I had impressed my luck with my newfound company, too grateful for help to start grilling them

about the lights. I slept, as did they, taking it in shifts to mine the entrance through the rain-soaked night. It was only in the iron-gray morning that Garth found me eating a modest breakfast of stew with the others, and they cleared things up as best they could. The thick forest choked in the river banks near our factory hid many, such ruins, from warehouses to coal plants, all a decade or more out of business. This group of squatters got its water from the river, and pulled a fair few fish from its banks in the bargain.

They never left the safety of the trees along the shore, however, across the way, on the opposite bank. There brooded the ruins of an old pig-feed factory, whose aging bowels filled with abandoned slop, stink like death beneath the warmth. of the sun. It was there, near the distant shore, that the lights put on their ominous show. Something, they claimed, lit up the interior of the factory in the night, its glow dancing over the muddy waters of the river to the other industrial corpses in the woods.

Though it only seemed to occur at the height of storms, they had a strange, alluring brilliance to them which put the squatters on edge. Andrea swore up and down that her sister had wandered from amongst their number nearly a year ago during such a storm, leaving barefoot tracks down to the river bank through the leering dark towards distant lights. They'd never found her. This and several other local disappearances that solidified the dark reputation of the factory and the minds of the homeless population that dwelt within the overgrown industrial park. fearing the eviction a report to the police and a sweep of the industrial park might mean,

they'd resolved to react to the lights as best they could and took precautions to hide away when thunder clap beyond the horizon. When I asked how long the squatter colony had been aware of the lights, Garth wove me a yarn about a particularly bad gale, which had blown in from the distant coast the summer before last. Though the others laughed off the suggestion, He insisted he'd heard strange booming voices on the wind while walking the riverbank. As he looked for the source of the noise, a yellowish glow of pulse through the rain-soaked evening from the distant factory.

The flash had irritated his eyes, he said, leaving them itching for days afterwards. Despite the dismissal of the others, Carth held firm to the beliefs that this had been the beginning of the lights. intriguing as this was, I was more taken in by the camaraderie of the industrial park than disturbed by the eerie silhouette of the factory across the river. With my home life and tatters, I had few places to go, with no plan at an end goal other than escape. Upon being invited to stay a while, I gladly took up a spot in the steel mill with the others. There was a kind of relaxed community to the place, rampshackle. as it was. I won't pretend it was comfortable, but we were secure.

Staying focused on fishing the river during the day and scavenging around the town during the night kept my mind off the problems which had stocked me north from home. With the older members of the colony pushing out into Chattanooga during the day to collect supplies from churches and charitable missions in the city, we did relatively well for ourselves. While some, Garth in particular, spent most of the day in a drug to stoop, there were enough people on their feet to keep us above water. If the police asked questions of a member of the colony while we wandered Chattanooga, we closed ranks and kept our location hushed.

This meant we couldn't rely on the city when one of the colony members failed to pay dealers. But for the most part, our numbers kept ill-gotten attention from the steel mill. By the time a month had passed, I was far more worried about Garth overstepping his bones was someone dangerous, then about the lights. All that changed when balmy afternoon in August, when the suffocating heat was just beginning its retreat before autumn. A gale blew clouds over the horizon faster than anyone had anticipated, and though the colony did what it could to urge everyone back into the warehouse before the storm struck, we were

ahead short when time came to mask the entrance and hunker down. Andrea had not made it back. and as a rattling rain fell upon the old metal roof overhead. We debated among ourselves what her absence might mean. She'd been at a shelter, scoping out beds for the winter, some contended. A couple older squatters living with us at the mill weren't looking forward to the cold, and Andrea had taken a leading role in plotting out an escape route for them. Garth, however, had witnessed her return just afternoon,

injecting word murmuring back into the group. The last you'd seen of her was a flash of her Auburn-Hairs that bobbed over the embankment leading to the river. With each minute spent huddled in the warehouse against the droning wind of the storm bringing even more speculation. The decision was made that we combed the riverbank before the second the storm let up. There was some back and forth over whether the distant rumbling thunder had abated and often nullify the mysterious lights when the storm subsided. But with night closing in, it was decided that time was of the evening. essence. Garth asked for volunteers, and from among the pale-faced crowd, only myself and

stammering, wraith-like Lucas stepped forward. Lucas had only been with the colony a few weeks more than me. I suppose we were both stupid enough not to fully understand what we were getting ourselves into. Garth, for his part, was trying to help a friend. Jittery and drugged as he was. He didn't shy away from the task at hand. We set our goodbyes and follow Garth into the dying dusk with improvised rebar clubs in hand, the others eyeing us like they might have highed a gallows procession. The old man carried an age-dilgotten revolver in his waistband, a shallow relief against the ominous shadows choking the riverbanks.

Eyes dancing across the muddy shore, we followed a meandering trail of tracks through the slop, calling. out through the trees, hoping against hope that we'd hear Andrea's gravely voice call out and return. When the tracks ended just a hundred yards or so up the bank, we fanned out, scouring the ground and the fading daylight. It was then, as a gust of wind rocked and gnarled trees stooping low overhead, the lightning flashed in the distance.

There was more to it, though. A sort of agonized momentary daylight that breached the forest. For a second's harried passage, it was as if we stood in a clinical white room lit by fluorescent bulbs, the glow making me real in shock. I've been crouched along the ground, overturning an old sweater I'd picked out in the shadows. My back, as fate would have it, was to the river. The others had not been so fortunate. There was a thrashing commotion behind me on the bank. And I spun around to see Lucas thundering into the murky water while Garth lay kicking on his back in the mud.

I called for Lucas to stop, heart rattling my chest with its slipshot rhythm as he floundered further from shore into the placid lazy current. Garth, his eyes were ruined. The lids were shriveled and agitated. The pupils lost under great clouds of cataract-like film. The skin on his face was cruelly rent, peeling and, reddened, as if Garth were fresh off a week's march across the Sahara. Still, those unseeing orbs twitched back and forth, searching for purchase they never found while their owners sputtered and gasped for air.

Shocked as I was, my first foolish thought was that he'd been shot or assaulted somehow. I helped him up and began to stagger back up the riverbank, calling to Lucas all the while. I never spotted the acid hurling attack or my scattered brain had conjured up. My head swinging every witch way in the dark to find something, which wasn't there. Garth was blind and yammering, but otherwise unhurt, and he didn't fight me as I moved him along. When at last I'd handed him off to the confused pair of mining the tarp in the warehouse. I urged them to get help and sprinted back for the riverbank. The others too busy murmuring over Garth to notice my retreat.

No, I can't explain why I was so able to swallow my apprehension during that initial sprint of the river. The boldness didn't last. By the time I'd slid into a cheap corroded metal rowboat that we kept hide along the shore and dragged myself out into the silent river's motionless surface, I began to second guess myself. Whether it was due to fading and frowning it or not. the passage time and solitary thought.

The jagged silhouette at the pig-feed factory through the trees opposite me seemed every bit as foreboding as a crouched predator. The shadow of the building seemed alive on the water, loyling in slow motion. The whole scene was wreathed in a stench so foul it turns my stomach just to recall in words. It was wrought, to be sure. The leftovers of whatever slop had been abandoned to decay in the bottles of the tepid factory before me. But there was more to it. Something electric.

Like a spent fuse or blown light bulb laced through the antropic odor. I found myself gripping tight the thin rebar club I carried between pulls on the oar, wishing I thought to take Garth's gun. I had no reason to think a gun would be of any use then. but I'm sure I would have tamed my worry all the same. Finally, I scraped up onto the muck of the far bank and hopped out with club in hand, eyes darting through the woods. I clicked on a cheap plastic flashlight I had plucked from a gas station trash can a week prior

and forged into the trees. Tracing the distant cracking through the underbrush, Lucas had stumbled onto the bank now, I thought, and was probably thundering blind through the forest. I could hear what I took to be his voice mumbling incoherent syllables, half sobs echoing off the soaring concrete walls of the factory before us. I called out to him, yelling his name again and again as I pushed through briars and branches. Eventually his voice vanished into the ruin, putting me out of ear shot.

Only when I exited the woods and came face to face with the yawning front entrance of the factory did I really gag. The smell was far worse here, coating the back of my throat with a sickly taste of rust and spoiled meat. As I bumble up the shattered and bent double doors that had once barred the entryway, holding my shirt to my nose as if the fabric would hold the odor.

I heard breathless Lucas call out somewhere deep within. With a final look over my shoulder at the safety of the steel mill on the far bank, I pushed through, calling out once again. The interior was off as decay-made manifest. The front desks and staff cafeteria overgrown with the thick brown stuff I took to be vines. Only when I had turned up a wide industrial ramp toward an empty sorting room. Did I feel its moist squish beneath my boots, almost slipping on the blackish icker it released upon the floor?

The deeper I went, the more I found, parroting the names of Lucas and Andrea to the empty factory all the while. Each step was a test of will, the stink and the horribly organ-like feel of the strange growth conspiring to make my nerves roaring torrents of barely contained panic. I kept treading through the factory's innards. I focused on how much Andrea had done to make me feel it. home with the others. Remembering each muggy afternoon, Lucas had drake back a $20 hall from this or that shelter or donation box, I pressed onward. Near the rear of the factory, there is a gigantic rectangular reservoir of concrete silos,

used for mixing or sorting feet long ago. I saw the bright jacket Lucas wore flashed along the metal stairway leading up and into the center of the silos. and began the arduous climb behind him, swiping aside the tapeworm-like grows with hung here and there from the ceiling. My slick boots clattered up the stairs. My breath labored. My mind numb to the surreal nature of the situation.

Again, the smell worsened. And again, I forced myself to continue. My calls for my friends more rasping croaks than yells at the same. this point. Cresting the peak of the stairway, I saw that Lucas was standing at the edge of a precipice, a tall drop overlooking a central pool in the middle of the silos. Whatever it had once contained, there was now a morse of glistening half-solid slop akin to sewage. Its reeking service almost seeming to shift and swirl in the cavernous devouring shadow. I tried to reach him, but I couldn't make it.

He pitched lazily over the side and fell the 20 or so feet to the disgusting miasm up beneath us in silence. Never once crying out. Shocked, I pulled up just short of the precipice, staring down into the dark liquid, watching as his outline sank out of view. Stonding confused as I was, I became aware of a rippling current rolling over my body. Even through the fright I registered as odd. In childhood, I'd grabbed a plugs metal rungs as it had left a power outlet,

and the distant memory of that body-jarring paralysis played itself out at my fingertips while I stood there on the brink. Without knowing why, I scrunched shut my eyes. Somewhere outside, thunder shook the building. I sensed a blinding flash of light in which lit the murky pool. through the rusted wire netting overhead. The hot, prickly paralysis surged, and for a moment I worried that I would totter blind into that awful slot beneath me on shaky limbs, just like Lucas.

I regained my balance just as the feeling faded, however, and as I tentatively opened my eyes, I saw something which to this day drags me shaking from sleep. There was a kind of optical effect, I thought. A remnant did that half-seen glow from the lightning straight through my eyelids. There was a flickering motion in the pool. The silhouettes of great tendrils and limbs seemingly outlined by rippling white light. A massive jaded shape, vague and terrible, pulled itself up from the mire. And within the outline of barely traceable light,

The torn and tattered body of Lucas thrashed and squirmed. The thing's arms pulsed along the interior sides of the silos, immense and wriggling, searching for more prey. Just as this thought occurred to me, a shape sprinted past me on the walkway, clattering on shaky legs up the edge of the precipice before tumbling head over heels downward. This I would later learn was Garth. escaped from the others at the steel mill. How he'd managed across the river and that lightning-craze stupor, I don't know. Andrea and Lucas had done so, and he'd followed suit.

Unlike them, however, poor Garth did not make a clean landing in the filthy suit beneath him. Rather, he landed hard upon a low concrete walkway meant to service the silos. The thumping slam of the impact echoed loud enough. the cavernous space to jolt my ears, but the sound which came next was far more deafening. What I'm about to say is speculation, for I couldn't see Garth from where I stood upon the walkway. I'm merely piecing together what I can from what I know about that night. Whether it was to finish himself off or to stave off the wandering silhouette that half-visible thing in the pool, I can't say.

But Garth fired a shot from his revolver. In the intervening years, I've built up a mired explanation for this. I've long believed that in the ambient flash of that final shot. I saw the outlines of writhing arms sliding snake-like through the muck towards Garth on the platform below. The movement was clumsy, rushed, and slipshot. I'm tempted to say that whatever lurked in the pool was frightened. throwing out its grasping limbs in a desperate final reach for a crude weapon that had fallen so precipitously into its makeshift layer. Who knows what I saw?

For obvious reasons, I'm not even certain my memory isn't flawed. Haunted by visions that were never there in the wake of a brush with death, my mind struggled to reconcile. Regardless, the shot rang out, and the room ignited. Among city fire officials and interested laypeople of what set the stage for the fire that destroyed the factory. Most contend it was a methane-rich cloud above the rotten swell in the factory's long abandoned reservoir, sparked by the firing of the revolver. I didn't have time to wonder, grazed by the pillar of flame their roar with ear shattering protests up into the air from below. Shinged and half-blinded by the heat, I stumbled with smoking hair out onto the staircase and shambled in a daze through the ruins,

fleeing from the towering inferno on my back. I fled into the night, aimless and uncoordinated. I'd not be found until the following morning, having wandered on foot more than six miles across the city's battered old industrial sector, throwing frightened glances at the rumbling glow of the factory's pyre over my shoulder. I told the police about Andrea's disappearance, our search, and Carr's final gunshot in the reservoir. I told the other members of the colony much the same. I never told them of the vague shape in the pool, however. Even when the others commented on the awful screeching they'd heard emanating from the fire,

describing it as an inhuman core as deep as an earthquake booming out across the water. I did nothing to elaborate. The lights never reappeared in the wake of the fire, but that did nothing to calm my nerves. Even with the factory destroyed and demolished, the whole region was poisoned to me. I departed not long after, saying my shaken goodbyes.

There seems to be no number of miles or years I can put between myself and that night on the river that will bury the memory of that stinking, inexplicable charnel house. Much as it turns my stomach to dwell upon it, I find myself lying sleepless at night, running through possible excuses in my mind. Hallucination, supernatural entity, some hastily discarded experiment from beyond our own. atmosphere. All seem stupid. Stumbling grasps at a thing which should not have been. All I can do now is brood, sleepless and haggard, wondering. For more information, including pictures and videos of the stories told on this podcast, please visit creepypod.com. If you'd like to submit a story for consideration or recommend a story, please see our submission page at creepypod.com slash submissions.

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