Episodes
The Laundromat in Bouse
It was the hottest night of the year in Bouse, Arizona, and I pressed the button for floor twelve because that button shouldn't exist. The elevator rose, and the doors opened onto a laundromat so clean it felt like a morgue. A woman in a pale dress was folding white sheets in endless repetition, her hands never stopping, her lips moving without sound. I stood there for what felt like hours, folding alongside her, until I understood that every sheet was a shroud and she was waiting for someone…
The Chapel in Truth or Consequences
The elevator opened to a small adobe chapel in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. Inside, a woman in a yellowed wedding dress sat in the front pew, holding wilted roses. She had been waiting since 1952 for a groom who never arrived. The candles didn't flicker. Her voice was soft from disuse. She asked Luna to dance. And as they turned in the aisle, the chapel began to remember its intended night. Luna pulled away and ran back to the elevator, but the image of the bride lifting her bouquet to…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Diner in Silver City
One night, I pressed the glowing 12 and stepped out into a diner in Silver City, New Mexico. It was three in the morning, the neon sign buzzed, and the waitress poured coffee that tasted like memory. The clock didn't move, the jukebox played a song I almost recognized, and a man in the corner read a newspaper with no print. Every time I tried to leave, I ended up back at the counter. Some places you check into, and they never let you check out. This is the story of that night. #FexingoHorror…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Taxidermist in Nara Visa
In a forgotten corner of the New Mexico desert, Luna steps out of the elevator into a taxidermy shop that smells like dust and formaldehyde. The old proprietor speaks in riddles about the last of their kind. A deer's glass eyes seem to follow her. She leaves with a hollow feeling, as if something has been preserved that should have been left to rot. This is a story about quiet obsession, the weight of what we keep, and the things that look back from inside the glass. #EmptyFloorTwelve…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Kitchen in Winslow
On a rainy November night in Winslow, Arizona, Luna rides the old elevator to a floor that shouldn't exist. The doors open onto a warm, yellow-lit kitchen where an old woman named June is baking apple pie. June doesn't seem surprised by the visitor, and she tells a story about a child who vanished from this building sixty years ago — a child who still leaves footprints in the flour on the floor every November. Luna stays for a slice of pie, but when she looks back from the elevator, the kitchen…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Basement in Wamego
In Wamego, Kansas, the elevator doors of a building that shouldn't have a twelfth floor opened onto a dusty basement filled with shelves of old film canisters. Luna found a note taped to a projector: 'For when you need to remember something you never knew.' She threaded the first reel and watched a home movie of a family she didn't recognize, yet every detail felt like her own childhood—the same porch swing, the exact crack in the sidewalk, her mother's laugh but a stranger's face. When she…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Drive-In in Deming
When the elevator doors slide open on a moonlit drive-in movie theater in Deming, New Mexico, in the summer of 1987, Luna steps out onto a gravel lot scattered with old cars. The film playing is familiar but wrong, and the audience seems frozen, watching something that never changes. A boy in the front row offers her popcorn, but his hand is too cold, and the screen flickers with an image she shouldn't recognize. This is a story about repetition, about the places we get stuck between floors…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Library in Lordsburg
It was the middle of July, the kind of heat that makes the asphalt ripple and the air hum with cicadas. I was in Lordsburg, New Mexico, a town that seems to be mostly gas stations and dust. I found a library, the old Carnegie building on Main Street, a relic of another century with a foundation sunk deep into the desert. I went inside to escape the heat, but the building had other plans. The librarian was a man named Elias, who spoke in a whisper and looked like he hadn't seen sunlight in…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Train in Wagon Mound
It was November, just after midnight, when the elevator doors slid open onto the platform of an old Santa Fe Railway station in Wagon Mound, New Mexico. The train was waiting—steam hissing from the engine, windows lit amber, a single passenger standing on the steps. She was wearing a blue dress from another decade, and she looked at me like she'd been expecting someone else. I stepped onto the platform because the air smelled like creosote and wet stone, and because the station clock was…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Bar in Terlingua
It's a Thursday night in late October. I step out of the elevator into a place called the Starlight — a low-slung adobe bar on the edge of Terlingua, Texas, with a tin roof and a jukebox playing Hank Williams. The floor is swept dirt. The bartender is a woman in her sixties named Lorna, who pours me a whiskey without being asked. And from the back booth, a man watches — scarred hands wrapped around a sweating glass of water. He tells me about the thing he saw in the Chisos Mountains, twenty…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel in Globe
Luna presses the glowing button for floor twelve and steps out into the parking lot of a motel in Globe, Arizona, under a bruised October sky. The motel's neon sign buzzes 'Vacancy' in flickering pink, but every room is dark. A woman in a yellow dress sits on a concrete bench near the ice machine, her hands folded in her lap. She doesn't look up. Luna learns that the motel has been closed since 1987, after a fire in room 6. But the woman keeps waiting—every night, for someone who never arrives.…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Dry Lake in May
Luna steps off on floor twelve and finds herself on a dry lake bed outside a town called Goodwater, Nevada, population seventy-two. The motel sign reads 'Lakeside' but the lake has been gone for fifty years. She meets an old man named Dale who tells her about the night the water came back, about the sound of a motor that never quite reaches the shore, and about a woman who has been waiting for someone to sit beside her on the dock. By the time Luna leaves, the air smells like rain, and a single…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel in Terlingua
The elevator doors opened onto a motel parking lot in Terlingua, Texas, under a sky so star-bright it looked fake. It was August, maybe 2019, and the air smelled like creosote and dust. A man stood by a pickup, drinking beer from a can. He waved me over. I shouldn't have gone. He told me about the room he was staying in—room 9—and the woman who'd been knocking on his door every night since he checked in. She wasn't real, he said. She was something that had been waiting in that room for a long…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Bedroom in Picher
Luna recalls a night in late summer 2024 when the elevator doors slid open onto a bedroom in Picher, Oklahoma — a town that was erased from the map decades ago. A man sits on the edge of a narrow bed, his hands folded in his lap, and he tells her he's been waiting for someone to find him since 1971. No confession. No explanation. Just a name — Dennis Ray — and a question he never answers. The dust of a collapsed mine hangs in the air. The window shows a street that no longer exists. And when…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel in Needles
It's August in Needles, California, and the heat doesn't break at midnight. The elevator doors open onto a motel courtyard where the pool is black and still, and the ice machine hums like a dying insect. Luna meets a woman named Margot who's been sitting on the same plastic chair for three days, waiting for a phone call that never comes. The room key she offers Luna is for a room that doesn't exist on any map. A story about the places you end up when you stop running, and the people who wait…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Hospital Ward in Deming
It's the coldest night of the year in Deming, New Mexico, and the elevator on floor twelve opens onto a dim hospital ward that shouldn't exist. Luna meets a woman in a lavender cardigan who has been waiting for her husband for forty-seven years. The fluorescent lights hum, the clock on the wall reads 3:03 AM, and the vending machine sells only peanut butter crackers from 1978. There are no nurses at the station, no patients in the beds—just the woman, the clock, and a story about a man who left…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel in Tucumcari
Episode 68 of Empty Floor Twelve. Luna recounts a night in 1986 when the elevator doors parted onto a motel room in Tucumcari, New Mexico — a room that still held an unresolved conversation from 1952. A man in a brown suit sat on the edge of the bed, talking to someone who wasn't there. The ice machine hummed through the wall. The curtains never quite closed. A story about words left unsaid and the way some places refuse to let you finish. #EmptyFloorTwelve #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel in Holbrook
Luna rides the old elevator in the Art Deco building, pressing the glowing button for floor twelve — a floor that doesn't exist. The doors open onto a motel parking lot in Holbrook, Arizona, under a bruised desert sky. A man named Earl sits on a cracked curb, nursing a beer, and tells her about the room he's been trying to leave for seven years. She follows him inside, where the air smells like burnt toast and the wallpaper has a pattern that doesn't repeat. There is a door in the back of the…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Funeral Home in Gila Bend
It's August in Gila Bend, Arizona, 117 degrees at midnight. The elevator doors open onto the dim, floral-scented parlor of the Desert Rest Funeral Home. A woman in a black dress sits alone in the front row, facing an empty casket. She doesn't look up when the doors open. Luna steps out anyway, drawn by something she can't name. The woman's hands are folded in her lap, perfectly still. When she finally speaks, her voice is dry as the desert outside. She tells Luna about the man who should be in…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Drowning in August
The elevator doors open onto a concrete pool deck in the dead of summer. The air is thick with chlorine and heat. A boy floats face-down in the deep end, perfectly still. Luna is pulled into a memory she doesn't own — of a swim team, a missing girl, and a splintered wooden dock on a lake in Ohio. The elevator keeps visiting the same date: August 7th, 1999. Each time, someone is drowning. Each time, Luna is the only one who sees them. This episode circles a single image — a hand slipping beneath…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Greenhouse in February
Luna boards the elevator on a Tuesday night in early February, heading home from her shift at the copy center in Bernalillo, New Mexico. The old brass buttons glow under her thumb, and the car shudders upward through a building with only eleven floors. But tonight, the doors open onto a humid glass room filled with ferns and flowering jasmine — a greenhouse she's never seen, somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Inside, an old woman in a canvas apron prunes a lemon tree by lantern light. She…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Church in Deming
Luna's elevator opens onto a small adobe church in Deming, New Mexico, on a Tuesday night in late November. Inside, a woman named Rosa is waiting — not for Mass, but for twelve years of unanswered prayers to finally find their voice. What she shows Luna in the confessional, and what the candles in the back pew begin to spell, lingers long after the doors close again. A quiet, dust-choked episode about faith, patience, and the things that listen when no one is speaking. #EmptyFloorTwelve…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Dentist's Office in Junction
The elevator doors slide open onto a small-town dentist's office, empty and fluorescent-lit at two in the morning. Luna steps out, expecting nothing but dust and quiet. Instead, she finds a chair still warm, a tray of instruments laid out, and a single patient waiting with his mouth open too wide. There is no dentist here. There hasn't been one for years. But something in this room remembers how to drill, how to fill, how to keep a person still and compliant. Luna learns that some places hold…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Meat Locker in Council Bluffs
Luna rides the elevator to floor twelve and steps into a walk-in meat locker in an abandoned packing plant outside Council Bluffs, Iowa. The year is 1997, late November, just after midnight. The cold is wrong — dry and still, like the air inside a sealed tomb. She finds a man in a bloodstained apron sitting on a milk crate, counting on his fingers in a loop. He doesn't seem surprised to see her. He asks if she knows what a person smells like when they've been dead three days. He's not a threat…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Pumpkin Patch in October
It's the last night of October in Atoka, Oklahoma—a small town where the county fairgrounds host an annual pumpkin patch. When Luna steps off the elevator on floor twelve, she finds herself standing in a field of pumpkins under a moonless sky, the air thick with smoke from a distant bonfire. A woman in a mustard-yellow coat tends the fire, turning a pumpkin on a spit like a rotisserie. She offers Luna a slice, and the flesh tastes of cinnamon and something metallic—like old pennies. As they…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Freeway Overpass
It's a humid October night in 2002 when the elevator doors slide open onto a freeway overpass outside of Kingman, Arizona. Luna steps out to find a man in a gray work shirt leaning against the railing, watching the headlights stream below. He doesn't seem surprised to see her. He tells her he's been waiting for someone to show up — someone who could confirm the date. The conversation that follows is quiet, almost mundane, until he asks if she knows what happens to a place when no one remembers…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Waiting Room in Clifton Forge
November in Clifton Forge, Virginia, after midnight. The elevator doors opened to a small waiting room — wooden bench, a single lamp, and a woman named Grace who had been sitting there since 1987. She wasn't waiting for a train or a bus. She was waiting for news that never came. This is the story of how I sat with her for forty minutes, how she told me about her daughter's drive to Roanoke, and how the telephone on the wall rang once — then stopped. No resolution. No comfort. Just the cold…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Gymnasium at Dusk
Luna takes the elevator to floor twelve again, but this time the doors open onto a high school gymnasium in Shady Bend, Nevada—polished hardwood, folded bleachers, a scoreboard reading 47–47. A woman in a red cardigan sits alone in the top row, waiting for a game that ended decades ago. Luna sits beside her and learns about the night the team came back from the dead, the shot that never missed, and the point guard who never left. As the lights flicker and the ball begins to bounce on its own…
The Night the Elevator Opened to an Empty School Hallway
Luna presses the button for floor twelve in an Art Deco elevator that only has eleven floors. The doors open onto a high school hallway in Garnett, Kansas, circa 1987. A janitor named Frank sweeps the same spot for hours. The pay phone rings every seventeen minutes. Nobody answers. Luna stays long enough to learn what happens when you pick up the receiver — and why the water fountains run rusty at 3:17 AM sharp. A quiet, slow-burn episode about repetition, unfinished business, and the weight of…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Record Store in Tulsa
It's past midnight in late autumn, and the elevator opens onto a narrow record store in Tulsa, Oklahoma—dusty, warm, and lit by a single yellow bulb. Behind the counter sits a woman named Elaine, who seems to have been waiting for Luna. She talks about the store's history, about the people who used to come in, and about the one customer who never left. The shelves are full of albums that don't exist, and the air smells of old paper and something else—something that makes Luna's throat dry.…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Waiting Room in February
Luna steps off the elevator on floor twelve into a waiting room that smells of old paper and floor wax. A nurse at a sliding window, a clipboard with her own name already written, and a door that should lead to an exam room but opens onto a long corridor lined with photographs of people she almost recognizes. Every picture has a date — tomorrow's date. The nurse tells her the doctor will see her soon, but the clock on the wall has no hands, and the woman in the next room keeps asking for…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Bar at Last Call
The button for floor twelve glowed. It always glows. But tonight, when the doors opened, I stepped into a bar called The Rusty Nail in a town called Garnet, Oklahoma. It was just after two in the morning, the air smelled like spilled beer and burnt coffee, and the jukebox was playing a song I almost recognized. The bartender was the only other person there—a man in a white shirt, sleeves rolled, polishing a glass. He didn't look surprised to see me. He just asked what I was drinking. And as I…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Library
Luna rides the elevator to a floor that shouldn't exist and steps into a small-town library in Garnet, where a woman named Helen tends the desk at midnight. The books feel wrong, the shelves seem to breathe, and Helen speaks of a patron who has been borrowing the same book for ninety years. Luna stays until dawn, unable to leave, and when she finally does, she finds a yellowed card in her coat pocket — due back yesterday. #EmptyFloorTwelve #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #ElevatorStory #Garnet…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel Pool at Midnight
Luna recalls a night in early October when the elevator on Empty Floor Twelve opened onto the cracked concrete deck of a motel pool in Red Bluff, California. The water was lit from below, a single figure floating face-down near the deep end. No ripples. No breath. She stood on the edge and watched until the figure turned its head — not to breathe, but to look at her through the chlorine haze. What it wanted is still unclear. What it told her, in a voice that came from the filter grate, she has…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Glassblower's Studio
A solitary elevator in a forgotten Art Deco building carries Luna to a floor that shouldn't exist. When the doors part on the twelfth floor, she steps into a glassblower's workshop in the dead of a Montana winter — a studio suspended above a frozen river, where a woman named Elara works alone at 3 AM. Elara claims she's been waiting for someone to witness the final piece: a glass bell that holds the last sound ever made by her grandmother. But the bell does not ring. It breathes. And the longer…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Diner in Laramie
It was February in Laramie, Wyoming, and the diner was called the Warbonnet. The waitress's name was Darla, and she'd been working the graveyard shift for eleven years. She poured me coffee and told me about the man who came in every night at 2:17 AM, sat in booth four, ordered black coffee and apple pie, and never spoke. She said he'd been coming for seven years, ever since his daughter disappeared from the truck stop on I-80. And then she told me what happened when she finally asked him his…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel in Abilene
December 1987, Abilene, Kansas. Luna steps out of the elevator into the parking lot of the Sagebrush Motor Inn — a place she's never seen before, in a town she's never visited. The air smells of diesel and dust. A man in a stained overcoat stands at the payphone by the office, receiver pressed to his ear, but he doesn't speak. Luna waits by the ice machine for twenty minutes, watching him. The receiver is silent. The cord hangs in a loose loop. When she finally walks past him, she hears what's…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Laundromat in Red Bluff
It's late October, 1998, and Luna steps out of the elevator into a 24-hour laundromat in Red Bluff, California. The air smells of bleach and wet cotton. A woman named Diane is folding a single white sheet, over and over. She hasn't been paid in weeks. Her husband hasn't come home. The machines are running empty, and the fluorescent lights hum with something older than electricity. Diane talks to Luna like she's known her for years, maybe because she has. The longer Luna stays, the more she…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Fishing Cabin
Somewhere in the Maine woods, off a logging road that belonged to a company that stopped logging fifty years ago, there is a cabin. The door was unlocked. The fire was lit. The person who lived there had left everything untouched. In this episode, Luna follows a dust road to a cabin that had been waiting. What she found inside was not abandoned. It was occupied in a way she still cannot explain. A single kerosene lamp. A handwritten logbook. A voice from the other room that knew her name. A…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Locked Ward
Empty Floor Twelve takes you to the Ellis Wing of Mercy Hospital in Beatrice, Nebraska, on a cold November night. Luna rides the elevator to a floor that shouldn't exist — a locked psychiatric ward left abandoned for decades. Inside, she finds a nurse's station still lit, a logbook still open, and a patient named Alice who has been waiting for someone to bring her drawing. The episode is a slow-burn encounter with residual grief, institutional silence, and the weight of a promise never kept. No…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Roadside Diner at 2 AM
It's three in the morning in late October when the elevator doors slide open onto a dusty roadside diner somewhere off Highway 50 in Nevada. The neon sign flickers 'Vera's' but the parking lot is empty except for a single rusted pickup. Luna sits in a cracked red vinyl booth across from a woman named Vera who hasn't aged a day since 1972. The coffee is cold. The jukebox plays only one song. And Vera tells her about the night she stopped serving food to strangers… and started serving something…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Diner in Garnet
Luna steps off the elevator into a diner called Ma's, just off Highway 50 outside Garnet, Nevada. It's 3:17 AM in late October. The place is nearly empty — just one waitress and a man in a booth who never looks up. Luna orders coffee she didn't want, sits, and tries to understand why every detail feels wrong. The pie case is empty but clean. The clock ticks but never changes. The waitress hums a song Luna almost recognizes. Then the man in the booth speaks without turning his head, and Luna…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Laundromat at 3 AM
It's the kind of place you only notice when your clothes are wet and you have a pocketful of quarters. The 24-hour laundromat on Main Street in Carthage, Nebraska—fluorescent lights, a dryer that swallows socks, a vending machine that's always out of detergent. I ended up there at 3 AM, the only person awake in a town that feels like it's holding its breath. But I wasn't alone. An old woman sat in the corner, folding and refolding the same white sheet. She told me she'd been coming here every…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Concession Stand at a County Fair
It's the last night of the county fair in Holloway, Oklahoma—August, 1987. Luna rides the elevator to floor twelve and steps out onto the midway after closing. The lights are still on, the rides still creak in the wind, but the crowd is gone. A single concession stand glows under a string of bulbs, and the man behind the counter is waiting. He knows her name. He knows her father's name. He knows things he should not know. And he offers her a choice—leave with a bag of kettle corn, or stay and…
The Night the Elevator Opened to an Empty Church Pew
It was late November, just before Thanksgiving, when the elevator opened on a small church in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The air inside smelled of old hymnals and dust, and a single woman sat in the third pew, facing the altar. She didn't turn when Luna stepped out. She just kept whispering something under her breath—a prayer, maybe, or a list of names. Luna sat down beside her, and the woman began to speak without preamble, her voice like gravel rolling downhill. She told Luna about…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel Pool at Dusk
In the summer of 2014, Luna steps off the elevator on floor twelve and finds herself beside a motel pool in the outskirts of Tucumcari, New Mexico. The water is still. The air smells of chlorine and dust. A woman in a white sundress sits at the edge, feet in the water, and tells Luna about the man who has been swimming laps every night for fifteen years. She hasn't seen him leave the pool. The water never ripples. Luna listens as the woman explains why she stays: because the first time she…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Church at the Edge of Sundown
A small-town church in Mercer County, Illinois, with a congregation that hasn't missed a Sunday in thirty years — until last winter. Luna steps off the elevator into a cold sanctuary where a single candle burns at the altar, a woman in a blue dress waits in the third pew, and the silence isn't really silence at all. It's the night the doors stayed open, and the prayer never ended. A story about faith, absence, and the sound of a voice that won't stop singing. #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Slaughterhouse in Winter
It was the first week of January, 1987, when the elevator doors slid open onto a slaughterhouse floor in a town called Grimstead, Nebraska. The air was cold and thick with the smell of salt and rust. A single light swung over a row of hooks, and a man in a blood-stained apron was hosing down the concrete. He didn't look up when Luna stepped out. He just kept working, and the hose water ran pink toward a drain in the center of the room. Luna stood there for a long time, watching him work, before…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Motel at the Edge of June
Luna steps off the elevator onto a dusty motel courtyard in the high desert of New Mexico, just outside a town called Penca. It is the last week of June, and the air smells of creosote and sun-baked asphalt. The motel has a pool that glows turquoise in the dark, and a neon sign that hums but says nothing. She meets a woman named Cora, who has been sitting by the pool since sunset, counting the moths that drown in the water. Cora tells her about the guest in room seven, a man who checks in every…
The Night the Elevator Opened to a Drive-In in Autumn
In the fall of 1987, on a night so cold the frost bit through my coat, the elevator doors slid open onto a drive-in movie theater in a town called Elkhorn, Missouri. I'd never heard of it. The screen flickered with a film I almost recognized, and the gravel lot was half-filled with cars from a decade I couldn't place. I wasn't supposed to be there. But something about the place pulled me in — the smell of popcorn and exhaust, the crackle of the speaker box, the way no one seemed to notice I was…
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