Episodes
The Gate at McElroy's Pasture
Autumn 1987. A rusty gate at the edge of McElroy's Pasture, outside Pender's Hollow, has a chain that was never supposed to be undone. But a boy named Richard unfastened it one evening, walked through, and came back three days later with a different kind of quiet in his eyes. His mother knew it wasn't him, and the gate has been whispering ever since. Luna heard the story from Mabel at the diner, sitting under a flickering fluorescent light, while the coffee went cold. An intimate, slow-burn…
The Scraping at Hollow Creek Diner
Luna stops at a diner on a lonely stretch of Route 9, past midnight in late October. Inside, the coffee is bitter and the waitress is quiet. Outside, something scrapes across the gravel, slow and deliberate—something that never opens the door. A story about the shape beneath the streetlight, and the sound you can't unhear. #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #BackwoodsAndBlackSalt #Anthology #Route9 #HollowCreek #Diner #LateNight #October #Scraping #Streetlight #Luna #SoloNarration #Atmospheric…
The Song at Durant's Well
Luna recounts a quiet September evening in Durant, West Virginia, where an abandoned well behind a forgotten church is said to sing at midnight when the moon is dark. The old woman next door, Mrs. Croft, warns her not to listen too long, but Luna can't resist the faint hum that rises from the stone. What she hears—and what she sees at the bottom—leaves her with a melody she can't shake, a resonance that feels more like a memory than a sound. This is a story about listening too closely and the…
The Salt at Durnham's Diner
Marta worked the late shift at Durnham's Diner on Route 9, a lonely stretch of Ohio highway that felt like it existed outside of time. Every night at 11:37, a man in a long coat would slide into the same booth, order black coffee, and never touch it. She noticed the salt shaker was always empty in the morning. She set up a camera. What she saw on the tape made her understand that some hungers don't need food. This is a story about the things that feed on small, everyday things. About what you…
The Cradle at Hettie's Fair
Last fall, I drove out to Hettie's Fair—a carnival that's been dead since '78. A woman named Elara lived in the fortune-teller's house at the edge of the grounds, and she had a cradle she couldn't get rid of. Not because she was sentimental, but because it wouldn't stop rocking. I spent the night in that house and learned that some things don't need children to call them. If you've ever heard a floorboard creak in an empty nursery, you know the sound. This is what happened after midnight in…
The Door at Finch's Hotel
Luna recounts a night last October when she drove out to the abandoned Finch's Hotel on the edge of Thornwood, Iowa. Drawn by local stories of a room that wasn't on any floor plan, she talked her way past the 'No Trespassing' signs and into the lobby. What she found in the basement was a door—unmarked, locked from her side, but not locked from the other. Behind it, a hallway stretched longer than the building had any right to hold, lined with doors that held the sound of someone breathing. One…
The Pitch at Maddock's Sawmill
It was late autumn, 1987, when the night shift at Maddock's Sawmill in Burkittsville, West Virginia, stumbled onto something in the log pile. Not a log. A man, perfectly preserved, wrapped in bark and sawdust, his hands folded over a sheet of paper covered in symbols no one recognized. Luna's uncle worked the graveyard shift there, and what he told her over coffee that November morning has stayed with her ever since—about the saw that ran backward, the tally marks on the wall, and the thing…
The Plow at Naylor's Ridge
In the autumn of 1974, a farmer named Orrin Naylor bought a second-hand plow at a farm auction in Balsam County, Iowa. The plow was old, rusted, and cheap — exactly what he needed for his rocky hillside. But the first time he used it, the blade struck something underground that rang like a bell. A sound that came up through the handles and into his bones. Something that made the horses balk and the soil turn dark and wet where it had been dry for weeks. Orrin dug. He found a fieldstone marker…
The Salt at Elsie's Doorstep
October, 1992. A two-lane blacktop outside Elkhorn, Indiana. Luna's grandmother taught her the old ways—black salt on the sill, a horseshoe over the door, never let the kitchen light go dark. But when Luna's friend Elsie starts finding things on her porch—a bundle of feathers tied with red thread, a jar of something dark, a single muddy footprint that doesn't match any shoe she owns—the old ways start to feel less like comfort and more like a warning. This is a story about thresholds. About the…
The Sign at Durbin's Fork
Luna recounts a cold November night on County Road 9, when her truck died in front of a hand-painted sign that read 'Durbin's Fork — Population 12.' A woman named Vera took her in, fed her stew, and told her about the thing that lived in the crawlspace — the thing that only came out when the wood stove went cold. The town had a rule: never let the fire die. Luna learned why when she woke to find the embers gray and the silence pressing in like a held breath. #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast…
The Hog at Milligan's Slaughterhouse
October 1987. Luna's uncle worked a double shift at Milligan's Slaughterhouse outside Shiloh, Tennessee, and came home with a story he wouldn't finish. Something in the kill room that night had stopped moving before the bolt hit. Something that hung on the hook longer than it should have. Something that made the foreman lock the door from the outside and walk off the job. Luna tells what she found in the records book, what the night watchman saw, and what still moves through the refrigeration…
The Station at Millburn County Line
Luna recounts the night she pulled into an old gas station on County Line Road, just past the Millburn turnoff. It was October, just before midnight, and the only thing open for thirty miles was a single fluorescent pump and a leaning convenience store. The man behind the counter was named Eldon — friendly enough, but he kept glancing past her shoulder at the road she'd come from. She bought a bottle of water and a bag of pretzels, and as she turned to leave, he said something she didn't quite…
The Loam at Enoch's Fill
October 1997, a few miles past the county line outside Manton, Ohio. Luna's cousin Eli bought forty acres of old bottomland at auction — black dirt so rich the realtor called it 'Enoch's Fill.' First week of clearing, Eli's shovel brought up something that wasn't rock or root. A hand — not bone, not skeleton, but whole and soft and warm. He called Luna that night with a voice she'd never heard from him before. By the time she drove out the next morning, the hole had grown three feet wider, and…
The Signpost at Durbin's Fork
October 1997, on a dead-end road outside the town of Balsam Creek, Luna finds a hand-carved wooden signpost that wasn't on any map. The names carved into it don't match any settlement she knows, but the arrow points down a gravel lane swallowed by kudzu. A woman at the last house before the fork warns her never to follow that road after dark. That night, from the window of her parked truck, Luna watches someone approach the signpost with a lantern and a hammer, adding a new name to the post.…
The Odometer at Sully's Garage
September 1987, just outside Eunice, Louisiana. Luna's uncle Sully ran a garage so far off the main road that the only customers who found it were the ones who were already lost. He kept a ledger of every car he ever worked on, and he told her never to look at the last page. But after he passed, she found a 1967 Chevelle sitting in the bay with the engine still warm and the odometer reading 666.6 miles. The car had been there for three years. The owner's name in the ledger was the same name…
The Window at Mavis Hale's Boarding House
October 1987. A traveling salesman steps off the Greyhound in Tullahoma, Tennessee, and takes the last available room at Mavis Hale's boarding house on Sycamore Street. The room has a window that looks out onto the neighbor's yard, but the neighbor doesn't have a yard. What he sees through that window each night—always at the same hour, always the same woman, always the same dress—doesn't match the geography of the street outside. By the third night he realizes the window isn't showing him the…
The Bell at Hoxie's Crossroads
October 1987. A single-lane bridge outside Opelika, Alabama, where the road meets a creek nobody maps anymore. Luna's uncle told her about the bell that rings under the bridge at three in the morning—a brass school bell tied to a rope that nobody ties. She went to hear it for herself. What she found wasn't a ghost story, wasn't a prank, and wasn't something she can explain away. A slow-burn encounter with a sound that doesn't belong, a woman who might not be alive, and the feeling that some…
The Fence at Barlow's Line
In the summer of 1998, a surveyor named Dale Phelps was hired to map an old property line through the woods behind Barlow's Lane in Harlow's Ford, Kentucky. The deed mentioned a fence—a split-rail fence that supposedly divided the land for two hundred years. But what Dale found wasn't wood and iron. It was something that had grown, something that had been waiting. The nearer he got to the vanishing point where the rails met the treeline, the more the air thickened and the light seemed to drain.…
The Switchboard at Minna's Toll Station
October of '91, on a two-lane blacktop outside Grundy, Virginia. Luna's car died at dusk near an abandoned telephone exchange — a wood-frame building with a single lit window and a switchboard still humming inside. The woman who answered the door, Minna, wore a 1940s operator's headset and spoke like she'd been waiting for someone to call. Every line on that board was patchy, crossed with voices from other years — children counting in German, a man asking for his mother, static that formed…
The Beekeeper at Gallows Hollow Road
In October of 2019, Luna spent a week at a rented farmhouse off Gallows Hollow Road in eastern Kentucky, hoping to finish a manuscript before winter set in. The house came with a neglected apiary and a handwritten note from the previous tenant: 'Do not take honey after the first hard frost.' She ignored it. By the third night, the bees began to gather at her windows after dark, pressing against the glass in patterns that looked like words. By the fifth night, she understood that the honey was…
The Root Cellar at Orrin's Ridge
October 1987. A man named Cobbett inherits a farmhouse on Orrin's Ridge, a road so crooked the mail truck won't run it. The root cellar under the kitchen holds jars of things his great-aunt put up—mason jars with labels in a language he doesn't read and contents that don't rot, don't freeze, don't change. He opens one. Then another. Then he starts to hear her humming at night, coming from under the floorboards. A story about what we preserve, what preserves us, and what happens when the air…
The Moth at Hargrave's Corn Maze
In October of 2003, Luna's cousin Molly took a seasonal job at Hargrave's Corn Maze outside Shiloh, Indiana. It was supposed to be easy money, guiding lost tourists out of the stalks before closing time. But some nights, the people who went in didn't come out the same way they went in. Some nights, the maze felt… bigger than the field it sat on. Molly started keeping a tally of guests who entered but never exited the exit gate. She stopped talking about it after the week of the false moon. I…
The Lettuce at Pringle's Greenhouse
In the fall of 2017, on the outskirts of Harristown, Indiana, a retired schoolteacher named Margaret Pringle began growing lettuce in her greenhouse. Not just any lettuce — the flavor was wrong, and the soil never froze. Her neighbor, a woman named June, brought me a sample in a mason jar because she couldn't sleep. The leaves were dark, veined like a hand, and they wilted as if they knew they were being watched. I went to see the greenhouse myself, and what I found inside — the root systems…
The Scratch at Parson's Gate
In the autumn of 1987, a dry season in the foothills of the Ozarks, Luna's uncle Nat found a stray dog with a three-clawed scar on its flank. That was the week the chickens started dying — not eaten, but marked. Then the cows. Then Nat himself. The scar appeared on his arm one morning, and the pattern of the scratch matched the bark of a tree he'd cut down the previous spring. Luna tells the story of what happens when you take from a piece of land that doesn't forget. A quiet, slow-burn folk…
The Bone Yard at St. Simeon's
In the autumn of 2023, Luna drives through the dying town of Mercy, West Virginia, and stops at a gravel lot behind a boarded-up church. A man named Elias is digging beside a low stone wall. He isn't a groundskeeper. He isn't a priest. He's been hired by someone who never shows their face, to exhume what was buried before the church was deconsecrated. What he pulls from the earth isn't a coffin. It's a child's shoe, still laced, and a rib cage that hums in the cold air. Elias tells Luna he's…
The Penny at Pruitt's General Store
October of '98 in the hill town of Elkins Creek, West Virginia. The old general store stood boarded up for ten years after old man Pruitt died, but folks still talked about the penny bin by the register—a wooden box of loose change no one ever touched. When I was seventeen, I took a penny from that bin on a dare. That night, something started scratching at my bedroom window. Not branches. Not an animal. Something that knew my name and wanted me to come out and play. I didn't sleep in that room…
The Well at Merriweather Farm
In October of 1998, on a back road outside Picket Post, there was a farm that had been dry for thirty years. The well had a lid bolted shut with six railroad spikes. Luna's uncle told her never to touch it. But after the last frost, she walked the fence line alone at dusk. She found a bucket beside the well, the spikes pried loose. Inside the bucket was a single brown egg, still warm. This is the story of what came out of the ground that night. It's about the smell of wet iron and the sound of…
The Gate at Gifford's Pasture
Late autumn, 1998. Luna's cousin calls from a payphone outside a convenience store in Gifford, Tennessee. She says there's a gate in the back pasture that keeps opening by itself. Luna drives four hours to find her cousin's family living in a strange new silence — the dogs won't bark, the neighbor's horses refuse to cross the road, and every morning the gate stands wide open, even though it's chained shut. The uncle says it's just the wind. But the wind doesn't leave footprints in the dew, and…
The Road Crew at Boggy Creek Bridge
In the summer of 2018, a small road crew working on a rural bridge in eastern Kentucky started hearing things. First it was a sound like stone grinding on stone, coming from deep under the creek bed. Then the foreman's dog started scratching at a patch of dirt that hadn't been disturbed in fifty years. And then one of the men found something in the mud that didn't belong there—a bone that was too long, too old, and still warm. Luna tells the story of what happened at Boggy Creek Bridge, where…
The Cradle at Haver's Gap
August 1994, a dry summer on the edge of the Monongahela. A woman named Cora Peele watches her neighbor's baby for a weekend and notices the child won't stop staring at the far wall of the spare room. The staring is constant. The smile is wrong. And the marks on the wallpaper — they weren't there when she painted the room in June. Luna tells the story of something that nested behind the plaster of a rented farmhouse, and the one question no one wanted to answer: what does a six-month-old know…
The Painting at Cold Creek Chapel
October 2021. Cold Creek, West Virginia. A traveling artist named Mariel rents the abandoned chapel at the edge of town for a month-long residency. She paints what she sees — the bent iron fence, the stained-glass rose window, the hollow where the altar used to stand. But by the third week, she starts painting something else. Something that watches from the corner of the canvas. Something that moves between brushstrokes. Luna was there the night Mariel locked herself inside, and she's been…
The Cistern at Flagg's End
In the late autumn of 1997, on a dead-end road in Hickory Ridge, West Virginia, a woman named Eloise Flagg called the county about the smell coming from her cistern. By the time Luna arrived with a flashlight and a crowbar, the water had already started whispering. This is a story about what lives in the dark when the dark has nowhere else to go. About a concrete tank sunk into the bedrock behind a falling-down farmhouse. About the thing that came up the pipe, piece by piece, over three nights.…
The Cold Frame at Newell's Nursery
In the autumn of 2019, Luna visited Newell's Nursery outside of Harlow, Kentucky, to buy mums for her porch. The old man who ran the place, Ezra Newell, kept a row of cold frames behind the greenhouse that he never opened. He said they were for a special order from a customer in the hollows. The price was too good to ask questions. But when Luna came back at dusk to pick up her order, she saw the frost patterns on the glass from the inside — and heard something scrabble against the lid. A…
The Dress at Lacey's Dry Goods
In the autumn of 1997, Luna's aunt bought a secondhand wedding dress from Lacey's Dry Goods in Riddle, Ohio. The dress was beautiful—ivory silk, seed pearls, a train that pooled like cream. But something had been sewn into the hem. A name. A date. A lock of hair. The woman who donated it had died in that dress, and the dress remembered. Luna tells the story of what she found when she looked too closely, and why she still keeps the lock of hair in a jar of black salt. #LaceysDryGoods #RiddleOhio…
The Windbreak at Crabtree Meadow
October 1998, just outside the town of Coldwater, Tennessee. Luna's neighbor Royce Barlow was a quiet man who kept to himself, but everyone knew about the windbreak he built along the eastern edge of his property — a dense wall of osage orange and cedar that blocked the view of Crabtree Meadow. After Royce disappeared, Luna walked the fence line one November evening and found what the trees were hiding: a clearing where the grass never grew, a pattern of stones laid in a spiral, and a sound…
The Silo at Harker's Pasture
In the summer of 2009, Luna's cousin Caleb bought a failed farmstead outside Yarrow, Missouri, sight unseen. The silo was the only structure still standing — a concrete monolith sealed with a rusted hatch that took three men and a crowbar to open. Inside, the silage had not rotted. It had grown. Not mold, not fungus, but something that moved when you watched it, something that whispered in voices that had never been human. Caleb said he heard his own voice calling from the dark, telling him to…
The Hollow at Gospel Cove
On a damp September night in 2003, Luna drives past a roadside cross on a curve of Old Gospel Road in Milledge, Georgia. The cross is new—white pine, no plaque. But the flowers at its base are wrong: not silk, not fresh, but something that looks like it's been growing there for years. She stops. She shouldn't have. Because the cross isn't for the dead. It's for the living who hear the singing from the cove below—a four-part harmony with no source, no breath, and no end. The people of Milledge…
The Well at Potters Hollow
In the summer of 1987, along a forgotten stretch of county road in Potters Hollow, West Virginia, Luna's great-uncle Earl kept a well that was never used for water. The family knew not to ask about it. When Luna visited as a girl, she heard the sound it made at night — a wet, rhythmic pulse, like something breathing from deep underground. Years later, after Earl's death, she returned to find the well uncovered and the sound louder. This is the story of what she saw at the bottom, and what she…
The Last Bell at Dyer's Millpond
Autumn 1998. A hundred-year-old bell lies at the bottom of Dyer's Millpond in southern Indiana. Everyone in Copper Creek knows the story—the 1906 mill collapse, the nine men who drowned, the bell that sank with them. But nobody talks about what happens when the pond runs low. I met a man named Hollis Pratt that October, a retired waterman with a johnboat and a story he'd kept forty years. He took me out on the pond the night they drained it for the first time since Eisenhower. He told me about…
The Bell at Dyer's Millpond
September 1987, Dyer's Millpond, Tennessee. Luna's great-uncle Jessup kept a bell rope hanging from a live oak limb over the water—a warning, he said, for when the pond pulled someone down. After he died, Luna found his logbook: every drowning back to 1902, names and dates, all with the same cause written in the margin—'Bell not rung.' She spent one night at the pond to see if the bell was real. She heard it ring three times, but nobody was there to pull the rope. The sound came from under the…
The Ash Man at Picket Post
October of '92. A night so dry the leaves sounded like breaking glass underfoot. I'd driven out past Picket Post, a dead-end road in the low country where the pines grow so thick they swallow the sky. A woman named Della Hardison lived in a house at the end of that road, and she called me because she couldn't sleep. A tapping at her window every night, she said, and when she looked out, nothing but her own reflection. But I knew Della. She wasn't the type to imagine things. So I went. I sat…
The Bells of St. Dymphna's Mission
In the autumn of 1994, Luna's uncle found work repairing the bell tower of a forgotten mission church outside Poca, West Virginia. The building had been closed for decades, but someone—or something—had been ringing the bells every night at 3:33 AM. When Luna visited to help, she discovered a hand-lettered list of names nailed to the sacristy door, each crossed out in dried rust-colored ink except for the last one: hers. A story about inherited debt, unholy promises, and the weight of a name you…
The Trestle at Teal Creek
October 1998. A rusted railroad trestle spanning a dry creek bed outside the town of Bitterwood, Missouri. Three nights before Halloween, a seventeen-year-old girl named Emmaline Dorny takes a dare from her friends: walk the full length of the trestle, touch the far side, and come back. The bridge is said to be haunted by a crew of men who died in a wreck there in 1923. She makes it across. But when she turns around to come back, the bridge is longer than it was. The rails have stretched. And…
The Johnboat at Salt Lick Landing
In the late summer of 2008, Luna's Uncle Hoyt disappeared for three days on the Blackwater River, drifting in a borrowed johnboat with a broken trolling motor. When they found him—miles past Salt Lick Landing, past where the river turns to swamp—he was sitting perfectly still, facing a cypress stump, and he wouldn't tell anyone what he'd seen. But he told Luna, years later, on a porch in the rain. This is that story. It's about the thing that waits below the tea-colored water, the thing that…
The Root Cellar at Hardwick Place
In the summer of 2017, Luna's cousin Ellie bought a foreclosed farmhouse outside Dunmore, West Virginia — a two-story clapboard with a root cellar that had been sealed with a padlock and a prayer. The previous owners left behind a single rocking chair in the parlor and a journal in the cellar written in a hand that grew smaller and tighter with every page. Ellie asked Luna to help clean the place out. What they found in the cellar wasn't rot or ruin — it was something that had been waiting…
The Scratchin' Tree at Dunlow Holler
I was passing through Wayne County, West Virginia, in the fall of 2017 when a waitress at a diner told me about the scratchin' tree—a massive sycamore in Dunlow Holler where, for generations, people have left offerings of salt and iron to keep something quiet. She said her great-uncle was the one who carved the first cross into its bark back in 1923, after his brother went up the hollow and came back with his ears bleeding. I drove out there one grey afternoon, found the tree, and saw the…
The Last Lock at Gray's Ferry
In the autumn of 1998, Luna's cousin Ray took a job as the night lock-keeper at the abandoned Gray's Ferry on the Cattahatchie River. The lock hadn't been used in decades, but the county paid him to check the gates once a month. The first night, he found a single muddy footprint on the concrete floor of the lock chamber. The second month, a child's jacket hung on the gate lever. By December, he understood that the lock wasn't empty—it was waiting. This is the story of what lived in the dark…
The Shed at McCaskill's Line
October 1987, two weeks before Halloween. A backwoods road in Jasper County, a red shed with a tin roof, and a man named Harlan who knew how to keep things out. But some things you invite in without meaning to. Luna recalls a night she spent at Harlan McCaskill's place, the salt lines he drew, the tobacco leaves he hung from the rafters, and what happened when she forgot to close the door all the way. A story about thresholds, about what crosses them, and about what waits on the other side of a…
The Warden at Drury's Lock
October 1997, a cool evening on the Tombigbee River. Luna's cousin Carter took a seasonal job as lock tender at an abandoned Army Corps of Engineers lock—a concrete ghost. He was supposed to open the gate once a week for a barge that never came. But something else started coming through. A repetitive, mechanical knocking in the lock chamber. A figure in the control shack that was never there when he turned around. And a voice on the marine radio that didn't belong to any human. A slow, quiet…
The Ward at Trinity Poor Farm
In 1937, Luna's great-aunt Hettie took a job at the Trinity County Poor Farm, a place meant to shelter the county's indigent, elderly, and disabled. But the farm had a hidden ward—a locked basement room where they kept the ones who didn't quite fit the story. Hettie never spoke of it, but Luna found her diary in the attic last winter. This episode is the entry from February 7th, 1937. Luna reads it aloud, her voice hushed by the coal-stained pages. The diary tells of a woman named Elsie who was…
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