In response to foreign threats during the Cold War, the US built a system of off-shore radar towers designed to monitor and detect anything that might constitute an attack. Due to their design being based on the off-shore oil rigs commonly deployed near the state of Texas, they were named the ‘Texas Towers’.

The purpose of the towers was to provide the United States with an extra thirty minutes of warning in the case of an impending Soviet attack. To be effective, they had to be built at sea more than 60 miles offshore. Each tower held dozens of workers in isolation, surrounded by vast stretches of deep, cold water.

During its construction in 1957, one of the structures, Texas Tower 4, was damaged by a storm that forced an emergency evacuation and caused half a million dollars worth of damage. By the time Hurricane Donna hit the following year, Texas Tower 4 had earned the ominous nickname ‘Old Shaky’.

Workers were bombarded with the constant vibration of equipment and haunted by an unusual acoustic effect that caused the structure’s steel legs to pick up and amplify distant sounds inescapably throughout the tower...

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