EP 08 · June 23, 2026 · 0:47
The Lighthouse Tapes
with Iris Kelleher
A keeper left a cassette recorder running in the lamp room for years. His granddaughter is listening to all of it.
0:000:47
Cold open: a recorder in the lamp room
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Transcript
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Mara
You're listening to Room Tone. I'm Mara Voss. Episode eight: The Lighthouse Tapes. In 1987, a keeper named Donal Kelleher started leaving a cassette recorder running in the lamp room of a lighthouse on the Atlantic coast. His granddaughter Iris has spent the last four years digitizing what he caught.
Iris
Two hundred and eleven tapes. Weather, mostly. Fog signals. Him narrating his rounds as if someone might one day need to know. Then, on tape ninety, he starts answering the sea back, and it stops being an archive and becomes a correspondence.
Mara
Do you remember hearing that tape for the first time?
Iris
I stood in my kitchen with one hand on the counter and let it run to the end. He had been gone six years by then.
Iris
But the tape room is a time machine, and the door only opens one way.
Mara
What does he say to the sea? Give me one line.
Iris
On tape one twenty-six, after a November storm: "You took the slip rail and the good ladder, and still you want conversation." Then he laughs and pours his tea. The laugh is what I was digitizing for, if I'm honest.
Mara
Is there weather on the tapes? Weather you can actually hear?
Iris
You can hear the horn twice a minute for nine hours straight. You can hear him wind the clock. On the winter tapes you can hear the tower itself — a hum in the stone when the wind gets over fifty knots. Engineers told him he was imagining it. The tapes say otherwise.
Mara
What happens to the archive when you finish?
Iris
It goes to the maritime museum, every reel and every index card. But I am keeping one cassette back — the one where he sings. Some things you digitize. Some things you keep in the shape he left them in.