Episodes
The Pew at Sardis Primitive Baptist Church
Luna visits Sardis Primitive Baptist Church in rural Alabama to photograph the interior for a preservation project. In the dim light of a fall evening, she notices one pew that seems colder than the rest. When she sits, she hears a whisper requesting a hymn number. The voice is insistent, and the hymn she finds doesn't match. A conversation with a local reveals the pew's history, but the voice has other ideas. This episode is about the dead who still expect their seat, and the chill of being…
The Chalkboard Hymn at Pilgrim Valley Church
Luna drives through the Kentucky hills in October, stopping at an abandoned church on a gravel road. Inside, she finds a chalkboard with hymn numbers—the last one smudged and incomplete. Driven by an impulse she can't explain, she redraws the number. Moments later, an organ begins playing that hymn from the basement. She descends to find an old phonograph with a hand-etched record that plays the melody wrong—a version that shouldn't exist. The song follows her home, lingering in her head like a…
The Descant at Crozet Chapel
In late October of 2010, Luna visited a small stone church in Crozet, Virginia, for a monthly service. During the singing of a familiar hymn, she noticed an old woman in the back row adding a haunting descant that wasn't in the book. The woman claimed it was the original melody—removed from the hymnal because it let people see through the veil. Luna hummed it at home that night and caught a flicker of something in the corner of her vision. Weeks later, the woman died, and Luna found a…
The Footnote at Farrow Primitive Baptist Church
Winter 1998 in Farrow, Alabama. Evelyn Marshall attends the Wednesday prayer meeting at Farrow Primitive Baptist Church, a white clapboard building at a crossroads. During the final hymn, the congregation spontaneously sings a melody no one has heard before, words that feel ancient. Afterward, Evelyn finds a small slip of paper in her hymnal with the phrase 'We sang it wrong' in pencil. That night, the church burns down, but the hymnal is recovered—and it now contains a new hymn titled 'The…
The Number in the Hymnal
In a dusty meeting hall in Mossy Creek, Georgia, Luna finds a yellowed business card tucked inside the spine of a hymnal. The card reads 'Dale's Livery Stable — Please Call for Service' with a telephone number. Curiosity gets the better of her, and she dials. The man who answers sounds confused, distant, and insists he's been waiting for a ride for over ninety years. The background noises shift from static to an old-timey hymn. As the call goes on, she begins to hear something approaching…
The Backward Hymn at Little Hope Church
In late autumn 2019, Luna travels to Hickory Ridge, Tennessee, after a woman named Clara shares a hymnal filled with cryptic marginalia left by her grandmother, Gertrude. The notes describe a ritual: singing a hymn backward under a full moon. At the abandoned Little Hope Primitive Baptist Church, Luna tests the instructions and encounters a presence bound to the music—a trapped soul waiting for someone to finish the song. Atmospheric and eerie, this episode explores the power of hymns as both…
The Hymn at Bethlehem Primitive Baptist Church
In the bone-dry summer of 2003, a traveling hymnbook collector named Elara Pratt arrives at a small white church off County Road 7 in Dooly County, Georgia. The pastor invites her to browse the unattended sanctuary, and she finds a single handwritten hymnal on the back pew—songs with no known titles, lyrics that feel half-familiar and half-wrong. She stays past sunset to copy them. The caretaker's granddaughter, a girl named Sissy, warns her not to sing them aloud. Elara doesn't listen. By…
The Foundation at White Oak Church
In the summer of 1998, Luna stopped at a rural church in Pickens County, Alabama, drawn by a sign that read 'White Oak Church — Est. 1843.' But the building was gone — only a stone foundation remained, moss-covered and silent. A local named Everett told her the church had been torn down in 1972, but the ground wouldn't stay quiet. He spoke of the singing that came up through the soil on certain nights, and the man who dug too deep. Luna stayed until dusk, listening. What she heard under the…
The Hymnbook at Little Dove Primitive Baptist
In the winter of 2019, Luna visited an abandoned church outside of Milledgeville, Georgia—Little Dove Primitive Baptist—where the pews were still stacked with hymnals dating back to the 1940s. But one book kept finding its way back to the pulpit. A worn blue copy of 'Hymns of the Morning Land' with a name written inside: Elara Wren. No one in the county remembered her. The church had been closed since 1962. Yet every time Luna returned the book to the shelf, she found it open again the next…
The Bells at Evening Promise Church
April 1997, just outside Tullahoma, Tennessee. Luna visits Evening Promise Church, a tiny white clapboard building that had been abandoned for decades. The bell rope is still there, knotted and frayed. An old woman on the porch tells her not to pull it. Luna does anyway. The bell rings three times before the rope goes slack. Then the answering bells start—from churches that haven't stood in a hundred years. This episode is about sound traveling through time, about the weight of a promise made…
The Window at Stoney Creek Meeting House
In the autumn of 1996, Luna drove past a small white clapboard church on a back road in Hardy County, West Virginia, every Sunday for six weeks. The building had a single stained-glass window above the door — a tree with twelve branches, each one a different color she could not name. She never saw anyone go in or out, but the window was always lit from inside. One night she stopped. The door was unlocked. The pews were clean. The glass was warm to the touch. And she found the photograph album…
The Mercy Seat at Buck Creek Church
Luna visits Buck Creek Primitive Baptist Church in central Kentucky one hot July afternoon. The building has been abandoned for thirty years, but someone has been leaving fresh flowers on the front steps every Sunday. The door is unlocked. Inside, a single hymnal lies open on the pulpit to a song she has never heard of: 'Mercy Seat, Mercy Seat, Swing Wide for Me.' The pews are clean. The air is still. And the wood of the mercy seat—the mourner's bench at the front—is worn smooth in a way that…
The Baptistry at Little Zion Church
June 1998, Lowndes County, Alabama. Luna's aunt Clara tended the baptistry at Little Zion Primitive Baptist for forty years. When she passed, Luna drove down to help clear the church basement. She found the baptismal records in a metal filing cabinet — ledgers dating back to 1889, listing every soul immersed in that water. The most recent entry was Clara's own name, dated three weeks before she died. But the ink was still wet. And the page after it held a date next month and a name Luna…
The Handbell at Mount Moriah Church
In the winter of 1998, Luna's aunt Carol served as the lone bell-ringer at Mount Moriah Church, a small white clapboard building on County Road 17 outside Pulaski, Tennessee. The brass handbell she used had been passed down through four generations of deacons — but nobody would tell her where it came from before that. One evening in January, after the last Sunday service, Carol stayed behind to practice for the upcoming Easter cantata. She rang the bell once, and the sound that came back was…
The Communion at Oak Hill Primitive Baptist
On a humid August night in 1998, Luna drove past the white clapboard of Oak Hill Primitive Baptist Church outside Dermott, Arkansas. The windows were dark except for the side door, which hung open. She went in. The pews were empty. The offering plates were stacked neatly by the altar. But the communion table was laid with fresh bread and a cup of something dark. She did not touch it. She only watched as the air thickened with the smell of salt and turned earth. No one came. But somewhere in the…
The Frame at Good Hope Primitive Baptist
In the autumn of 2018, I found myself at Good Hope Primitive Baptist Church outside Marion, Kentucky — a white clapboard building with a cracked bell tower and a cemetery that sloped toward the river. The deacon, a man named Hollis, asked if I'd help him take down a framed photograph that had hung behind the pulpit for as long as anyone could remember. He said it needed cleaning. But when I touched the frame, my fingers came away sticky, and the glass was warm — not from sunlight, because the…
The Heirloom at Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church
October 1987. A curved stretch of road outside Hardinsburg, Kentucky, where the trees lean in and the gravel never settles. Luna's grandmother gives her a family Bible bound in cracked leather and spine-glued with something that isn't glue. The inscription reads 'To Ruth, keep it close' in ink that shifts under lamplight. That night, Luna reads a name she's never seen before — and a number. A phone number. The line rings. A voice answers that knows her voice. A story about what gets passed…
The Candle at Dusk Creek Primitive Baptist
In the winter of 2019, Luna drove through a backroad in western Kentucky and found a weathered Primitive Baptist church with a single candle burning in the window long after dark. The door was unlocked. Inside, she found a woman named Ruth who had been sitting in the same pew every night for thirty-seven years, waiting for something she said would happen 'when the candle goes out.' The candle never went out. Luna stayed until dawn, and what she learned about Ruth's vigil—and the thing that once…
The Tithing Table at Shady Grove Church
In the fall of 2019, I drove out to Shady Grove, Kentucky, to see a church that had been closed for thirty years. The building was still standing, but the congregation had vanished overnight in 1987. No scandal, no financial collapse — they just never came back. The deacons locked the doors and walked away. What I found inside was a tithing table still set up in the foyer, with a leather-bound ledger open to the last Sunday. The names were there. The amounts were there. And someone had kept…
The Ladder at Pleasant View Holiness Church
Luna drives through a November rainstorm to a stone church in Red Hill, Mississippi, where a woman named Elsie waits in the foyer with a story about a ladder that appeared in the sanctuary overnight. No one knows who put it there. The wood is dry, the rungs feel cold, and every morning the top rung leans higher against the wall—toward a ceiling that Elsie has measured and remeasured. As the congregation prays for an answer, Luna watches Elsie climb. The ladder does not reach anything. But…
The Photograph at Gum Creek Methodist Church
In the summer of 2019, I spent a week in Cottondale, Alabama, cataloging the contents of Gum Creek Methodist Church before it was demolished. The building had been locked since 1972, and the air inside tasted like rust and dried flowers. On the third day, I found a photograph tucked into the back of a wooden collection box — a young woman in a white dress, standing alone on the church steps. The handwriting on the back read: 'Margaret, June 1964. She never came home.' What I learned about…
The Front Porch at White Oak Gospel Tabernacle
In the summer of 2002, Luna spent a week in the dying town of Bledsoe, Kentucky, cataloging the contents of the soon-to-be-demolished White Oak Gospel Tabernacle. The building was already hollowed out — pews cleared, hymnals boxed, stained glass removed for auction. But on the third night, she found something the demolition crew missed: a single folding chair on the front porch, occupied at midnight by an old woman who hadn't spoken in forty years. The woman held a photograph of a child who…
The Offering at Sandy Creek Primitive Baptist
October 1998, on a back road in Pickens County, Alabama. A woman named Cora Mayhew attended Sandy Creek Primitive Baptist for forty years without missing a single Sunday. But when she stopped showing up in the summer of '98, nobody thought much of it — she was old, she was tired, people said. Luna knew her well enough to check on her. She found the house unlocked, the tea kettle still warm on the stove, and a note on the kitchen table that read: 'They're still singing. I have to go back.' This…
The Supper at New Harmony Methodist Church
It's the last Wednesday of the month at New Harmony Methodist Church in Enderlin, North Dakota, and Luna is helping her aunt set up the monthly covered-dish supper. The church is tiny, the congregation is old, and the basement fellowship hall smells like coffee and mothballs. But this night, a new family arrives — the Grays — a mother and a boy who doesn't speak. They bring a dish nobody recognizes, and they sit at the folding table near the furnace. By the end of the meal, Luna understands why…
The Choir at Mount Horeb Free Will Baptist
In the summer of 2017, a traveling music teacher named Cora Bledsoe accepted a temporary position directing the choir at Mount Horeb Free Will Baptist Church in the tiny farming town of Leighton, Alabama. The church was old, the congregation small, and the choir loft had been unused for years. Cora found the hymnals still in their racks, untouched, with handwritten annotations in the margins. The notes were not musical. They were instructions. 'Breathe here. Listen here. Do not look up.' The…
The Organ at St. Cecilia's Mission Church
Luna follows a rumor to a boarded-up mission church in the Oklahoma panhandle where the pipe organ still plays every night at 2:17 AM. The caretaker, an old man named Hollis, claims he has never touched the keys. But the music is always the same hymn—a melody that wasn't composed until 1998, three years after the church was condemned. As Luna sits in the back pew, she notices the dust on the bench is undisturbed. The organ plays on. And when the final chord holds too long, when the air itself…
The Pew Tops at New Hope Church
In the winter of 2019, Luna visited New Hope Church, a small white clapboard building on a dirt road outside Mount Sterling, Kentucky. The church had been closed for thirty years, but the pews were still warm. She met an old woman named Ruth who came every night to clean the tops of the pews. Ruth told her about the people who used to sit there, and about the night in 1987 when something came down the aisle that wasn't a person. Luna sat in the back pew and listened. By the end, she understood…
The Pulpit at Pleasant Ridge Church
In the winter of 2019, Luna drove to Pleasant Ridge, Arkansas, a town so small the sign at the city limits had been painted over twice. She was there to meet a woman named Ruthanne, who had left a voicemail on the church office line about something in the basement. Ruthanne was in her late seventies, with a sharp jaw and a way of staring at the floor when she talked. She led Luna through a back stairwell into a room that smelled like wet lime and cold stone. The pulpit was not a pulpit. It had…
The Candle at Providence Missionary Baptist
On a September night in 1994, Luna's cousin Marlene drives her out to Providence Missionary Baptist, a tiny white church at the end of a gravel road outside Dutton, Alabama. Marlene has been coming here alone for months—she says the Wednesday night prayer meeting is different. There are no hymns. No sermon. Just a circle of people sitting in the dark with a single candle on the altar. Marlene tells Luna she needs to see it for herself. She needs someone else to witness what happens when the…
The Guest Book at Twelve Oaks Missionary Baptist Church
In the summer of 2018, Luna visited Twelve Oaks Missionary Baptist Church, a small white clapboard building tucked off a gravel road in Hardin County, Tennessee. The congregation had faded to a dozen elderly members, and the guest book near the door held names going back to 1947. But some names appeared twice — once in ink, once in a hand nobody recognized. One woman — Evelyn Cross — signed her name every Sunday for three years after she died. The pastor showed Luna the book, pointed to the…
The Offering Plate at Salem Primitive Baptist Church
In the autumn of 1995, outside the dying town of Chance, Kentucky, Salem Primitive Baptist Church held its last service before the building was sold to a developer. Luna's great-aunt had been the caretaker for forty years, and she asked Luna to help clear out the pews before the bulldozers came. The church was already hollowed out — hymnals boxed, the cross removed, even the pump organ carted away. But one thing remained, tucked behind the pulpit: a brass offering plate tarnished nearly black.…
The Bible at Gravel Switch
In the late autumn of 1997, Luna's mother took her to the rickety white-clapboard church on the outskirts of Gravel Switch, Kentucky, where a revival had been running for three weeks straight. The preacher was a man no one had seen before, and the congregation was made up of faces that seemed to know things they shouldn't. Luna sat in the third pew, sweating through her dress, while the preacher read from a Bible that was not the same book it had been when the service began. By the time the…
The Vestry at Bethel Grove Church
In the winter of 1998, Luna's cousin Judith took a secretarial job at Bethel Grove Church in Pikeville, Kentucky. The pay was good, the work was simple—filing hymns from the 1940s, typing up bulletins. But there was a room off the vestry that no one talked about. A door with a lock that clicked from the other side. A faint humming that started at 3:17 every afternoon. Judith started leaving early. Then she stopped leaving at all. This is what Luna found when she went looking for her.…
The Burying Ground at Zion Hill Church
Luna remembers a night in October 2022 near Wolf Creek, Kentucky, when she helped a stranger bury something that should have stayed in the ground. The woman called herself Sister Ruth, and she spoke about the hymns as if they were alive. By morning, Luna understood that some songs are not meant to be sung. A quiet, grief-soaked episode about the weight of words left unsaid. #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #HymnsFromTheCompound #SisterRuth #WolfCreek #ZionHillChurch #BuryingGround #Kentucky…
The Hinges at Deep River Community Church
In the summer of 2019, Luna visited Deep River, Tennessee — a town of three hundred people, one gas station, and a church that had been boarded up since 1982. The hinges on the main doors still turned, though. An old man named Everett told her the story of the last Sunday service, when the doors wouldn't open from the outside, and the hinges began to scream. What crawled out through the walls afterward was never found. Luna tells you what she saw in the basement, in the light of a dying…
The Baptism at Little Sandy Creek
It was June of 2022, just outside a town called Ruth, Mississippi—if you could call it a town. I drove past a crossroads church that wasn't on any map, red dirt road leading to a creek I'd never heard of. The pastor's wife invited me to a baptism service that evening. I sat on the bank and watched them go under one by one, and the water was so clear you could see the moss on the stones. But when the last one came up, she was crying—not from joy. She said something under her breath, and the…
The Gospel at Holly Springs Church of God
October 1987. Luna pulls over at a white clapboard church outside Holly Springs, Mississippi, drawn by the sound of a single voice singing an old hymn she hasn't heard in years. Inside, she finds a woman named Ruth Ann sewing a quilt at the altar. The hymn never finishes. The quilt tells a story Ruth Ann has been waiting sixty years to tell—about a revival that brought something back with the faithful. About a child who was born again and never came back. The air in that church still holds the…
The Stained Glass at Mount Olivet Lutheran Church
In the summer of 2004, Luna's grandmother took her to a small Lutheran church outside of Grundy, Virginia, where the afternoon light through the stained glass windows did something strange to the faces of the congregation. The windows showed scenes from the life of Christ, but there was one window in the back, near the choir loft, that showed something else—a woman with her mouth open, and her hands pressed flat against the glass from the inside. No one in the church ever talked about it.…
The Bell at Little Zion Primitive Baptist
In the summer of 2019, Luna spent a week in Enigma, Georgia, a town so small it barely has a dot on the map. She was there to record the stories of the last living members of Little Zion Primitive Baptist—a congregation that dwindled to seven before the doors closed in 1974. But it was the bell tower that kept pulling her back. The rope was frayed, the iron bell hadn't been rung in decades, but every night around 2 AM, it tolled exactly three times. No one in town would talk about it. The one…
The Hymnal at Redemption Road Church
Luna drives through an autumn storm in eastern Kentucky and pulls into a white clapboard church with no sign. The door is unlocked. Inside, a lone woman sits in the third pew, singing a hymn Luna has never heard. The woman's name is Ruth, and she has been waiting for someone to finish the song with her. Luna sits down and opens a hymnal on the pew. The pages are blank. But when Ruth sings, the words appear on the paper in wet black ink, and the air goes cold. Ruth tells her the song has no…
The Piano at Starlight Baptist Church
In October of 2019, Luna drove past a small white church on a back road in southern Illinois and stopped on impulse. The building was locked, but the piano inside was playing. No power to the building. No one around for miles. What she found in the hymnbook rack changed how she hears silence. #StarlightBaptistChurch #Piano #SouthernIllinois #October #LockedChurch #Hymnbook #SilentHymn #SmallTownHorror #RuralHorror #EmptyBuilding #BeneathTheKeys #Fingerprints #DustAndPlaster #Luna #FexingoHorror…
The Baptistry at Mount Moriah
In the summer of 1994, outside the dying town of Tilden, Arkansas, I spent a week helping my aunt clean out Mount Moriah Free Will Baptist Church before its demolition. The sanctuary was empty, the pews already sold, the hymnals boxed up. But behind the baptistry curtain, someone had left a single object: a child's chair, soaked through, the water still warm. What I found in the church records that night — and the phone call I made the next morning — changed everything I thought I knew about…
The Catechism at Mount Carmel Free Will Baptist
November 1997. A cold rain over Mount Carmel Free Will Baptist Church in Dumas, Arkansas. Luna's great-aunt Edna asked her to retrieve a box of old catechism booklets from the basement — the ones with the handwritten revisions from 1954. What Luna found instead was a single booklet, its cover blank, its pages filled with questions that were never meant to be answered. The woman who wrote them is still alive. The questions are still waiting. A story about the things children are taught to…
The Communion Rail at St. Elmo's
Luna drives through a January thaw to the abandoned St. Elmo's Catholic Church outside Bakersville, Indiana, following a rumor that the old communion rail still has its original red velvet kneeling pad—untouched for seventy years. She finds the rail intact, but the velvet is damp and warm, as if someone had been kneeling there moments before. The sacristy door hangs open. A single candle burns on the altar, though the electricity was cut in 1954. This episode is a slow, cold walk through a…
The Cross at Four Corners
A woman driving alone on a back road in southern Illinois stops at a crossroads with a wooden cross she's never noticed before. The next morning, she finds a note tucked under her windshield wiper — written in her own handwriting, dated twelve years earlier. What follows is a quiet, unsettling unraveling of time, memory, and the places where they fold. Luna tells the story of a hitchhiker who wasn't there, a gas station clerk who knew too much, and a cross that shouldn't have existed. Set on a…
The Psalm at Wolf Creek
Luna visits a remote chapel in the Missouri Ozarks during a wet October, where a blind woman named Hester has been transcribing the same psalm for forty years. The psalm is not in any hymnal. The paper absorbs the ink like it's drinking it. Hester says she is not the one writing. Luna stays until the bulb burns out, and the song that was in the chapel follows her home. #WolfCreek #MissouriOzarks #Hester #Psalm #BlindWoman #Chapel #Transcription #Ink #Paper #October #Rain #Luna #FexingoHorror…
The Door at Hanging Rock Church
In October of last year, Luna drove through the Ozarks on a winding county road that wasn't on any map she owned. She found a white clapboard church at the base of a limestone bluff, doors propped open, hymnals scattered on the pews. Inside, a woman in a blue dress sat alone in the front row, facing an empty pulpit. She didn't turn when Luna entered. She didn't speak. But the air in that room was cold, and the woman's lips moved without sound. Luna stayed until dusk, and what she saw in the…
The Locked Room at Liberty Baptist Church
In the summer of 1997, Luna visits a small Baptist church in Liberty, Missouri, to catalog their historical records. The deacon warns her about a locked room in the basement—a room that was sealed after an incident in 1972. She finds the key, opens the door, and discovers things that should not have been kept. Things that still move. A story about what gets buried in the name of faith, and what eventually wants to be found. #LibertyMissouri #LibertyBaptistChurch #LockedRoom #DeaconHarlan…
The Offering Envelope at Pleasant Grove Church
In the autumn of 1987, Luna visits Pleasant Grove Church, a small clapboard building outside Belton, Kentucky, to catalog their historical records. She finds a collection of offering envelopes dating back eighty years, each with a name and a date. One envelope catches her attention: from 1923, with no name and a cryptic date. Inside, instead of money, there is a single human tooth. She traces it to a woman named Mary, who disappeared in 1923 after bringing a complaint to the church board. The…
The Window at Mount Horeb Fellowship Hall
It's 2004 in the small town of New Effingham, South Carolina, and Luna's aunt Minnie has dragged her to a Wednesday night prayer meeting at Mount Horeb Fellowship Hall. The building is a converted one-room schoolhouse from the 1920s, with a heavy oak door and a single stained-glass window behind the pulpit—a dove descending, bathed in blood-red light at sunset. The regulars are there: Brother Tate, old Mrs. Gentry, the Orris twins. But so is a visitor no one invited. Luna notices him first…
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