Episodes
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Storage Unit on Buck Creek Road
Luna inherited a backup drive from her late uncle. Inside, she found a folder labeled 'Buck Creek Unit #17 — Aunt Cora's things.' The folder contained photographs of a storage unit on Buck Creek Road in El Dorado Springs, Missouri. In every photo, a tall man in a hat stood in the background, though Aunt Cora had written on the back of the first one: 'No one else was there that day.' Luna drove to the facility on a cool October evening in 1999. She unlocked the unit, found a trunk, and opened…
The Cabin on Stillwater Lane
In this episode of The Backup Drive, Luna finds a folder on an old Seagate hard drive labeled 'Stillwater Lane' — a gravel road off County Road 12, east of Millbrook. She remembers a weekend in January 2012, when she and a friend named Claire rented a cabin there. The owner warned them not to open the basement door. They laughed it off, but at 3 AM they heard something scraping across concrete below. They left at dawn and never spoke of it again. Now, years later, the drive contains photos from…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Porch on Beech Creek Road
In the summer of 2021, a backup drive containing the meticulous video logs of a woodworker named Carl leads me to a porch on Beech Creek Road. Carl built that porch himself—treated lumber, shaker-style railings, a single rocking chair. But the videos show something was wrong with it. Strange shadows flickering across the wood grain. A low humming at night. And then the final footage of Carl walking out the back door, the camera still rolling, the screen showing only the empty chair and the…
The Crossroads Store on Old Stage Road
Late November, 2 AM. I was scrolling through an old backup drive when I found a folder from 2008. Inside: one photo of a crossroads store at night, one video file. The video shows a sedan pulling in, a man walking to the door, and slipping inside after a pause. He never comes out. The store was demolished the next year after a disappearance. But the drive's owner? I'm still not sure I want to know who left it here. In the photo's reflection, something stood behind me — something that wasn't…
The Bathroom Mirror at the Conoco in Roscoe
One rainy Tuesday night in October, Luna plugs in the backup drive and finds a video file she did not create. It shows the bathroom of a Conoco station in Roscoe, Texas — a place she stopped at three years ago, alone, in the small hours of the morning. There is no one else in the video. But the mirror in the frame reflects something that shouldn't be there. Something that moves when she doesn't. Something that seems to know she is watching. A slow-burn episode about memory, the uncanny…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Pit at Old Sarah's Hollow
Luna finds a folder on her backup drive labeled 'Marrow' with date-stamped subfolders and GPS coordinates. One leads her to an abandoned farmhouse in Old Sarah's Hollow, Kentucky, on a cold October night. In the basement, a narrow pit in the concrete floor breathes warm air and makes a sound like wet clay being worked. She never sees what's below, but the drive keeps updating with new locations. A quiet, lingering episode about a place that won't stop calling. #HorrorPodcast #FexingoHorror…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Bridge on Jackson's Ford Road
In late October of 2019, I found a folder on the backup drive labeled simply 'Bridge.' The photos inside were taken at night — a single-lane iron bridge crossing a creek so narrow I almost missed it in the dark. I didn't recognize the location at first, but something about the way the rust flaked off the railing felt familiar. I drove out to Jackson's Ford Road the next evening, parked at the bridge, and waited. I didn't know what I was waiting for, but the photos had a timestamp — 2:47 AM…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the House on Turtle Creek
It was late August in Cedarville, and the backup drive had been sitting untouched in a box from my grandmother's estate — one of those old external drives from the early 2000s, thick and heavy, with a green LED that blinked slow. I plugged it in expecting family photos, maybe tax returns from 2005. Instead, I found a single folder labelled 'Turtle Creek' with over a thousand JPEGs — all dated the same summer: 1999. The first few were ordinary: a white house with peeling paint, a gravel…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Window on Wilderness Trail
It was October, the third week of the season, and I was in a rented cabin on Wilderness Trail in Tamworth, New Hampshire. The drive was supposed to be full of old family photos from the 1990s—someone's summer vacations, a child's birthday party, a woman in a yellow dress on a porch. Instead, it showed me a window I didn't recognize, filmed from the inside of a dark room. The footage was silent, dated 1998, and the woman in the yellow dress was looking out at the same trees I saw from my own…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Storm Drain on Red Hill Road
It was the summer of 2019, just past midnight on a Tuesday in July. I was parked at the dead end of Red Hill Road in a town called Prosperity, South Carolina—a town that had stopped prospering about forty years ago. I had the backup drive with me, plugged into my laptop, and I was scrolling through the folders when I came across one labeled simply 'Red Hill.' Inside were fourteen videos, all shot from a phone camera held at waist level, all taken in the same place: the mouth of a storm drain at…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Field on Bethel Church Road
It was September 2023, just after midnight, when I found the folder labeled 'BETHEL CHURCH ROAD' buried deep in the backup drive. The field looked wrong—too flat, too still, the grass a shade of green that didn't match the late-summer brown everywhere else. And then I saw the fence. It was new. Galvanized steel, six feet tall, topped with barbed wire, running straight across a field that had no livestock, no crops, no reason for a fence that high. I drove out there the next night. I stood at…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Church on Fox Creek Road
It was late autumn, just before Thanksgiving, when an old photograph appeared on the backup drive. The image showed a white clapboard church with a bell tower, set back from a gravel road. A handwritten note on the back said 'Fox Creek Road — 1972.' I drove out there the next afternoon. The church was still standing, but the front door was padlocked. Through the side window I saw pews pushed against the walls, a pulpit overturned, and something dark smeared across the floorboards. I didn't go…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Cemetery on Sand Ridge
October 2022. A cold rain falling on Sand Ridge Road. I was cataloging old video files from a forgotten hard drive when I found a folder labeled simply 'Sand Ridge.' Inside, a single video file dated 1998. The footage showed a cemetery I'd never visited—tilting headstones, a chain-link fence, and a figure standing motionless at the back of the property. But the timestamp was wrong. The date was two years before the cemetery was supposedly built. And as I watched, the figure turned. Not toward…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Well on Flat Rock Road
A September evening on Flat Rock Road, just outside a town called Linville that no longer has a post office. A well in a cow pasture, an old woman in a white dress who calls to you from inside it, and the moment you realize the sound of your own breathing is not the only rhythm in the dark. Luna recounts what she found on a drive labeled '73' — not a photograph, not a video, but a single audio file with a timestamp she couldn't explain. The voice was not her own. Or maybe it was. This is a…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the House on Jericho Road
In the winter of 2019, Luna drives past a house on Jericho Road outside Harlan, Kentucky, that shouldn't still be there. A blue two-story with a porch light on, a truck in the driveway, smoke rising from the chimney. She's not sure what draws her to pull over and knock. The woman who answers the door doesn't seem surprised. She offers Luna coffee, tells her she's been waiting. And she shows Luna something in the basement — something that makes the drive home feel a lot longer than eight miles.…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Room at the End of the Hall in Milford
Luna recalls a summer night in 2017 when she stayed at a motel off Route 17 in Milford, Pennsylvania. The place was called the Pines — a two-story horseshoe of rooms painted a faded peach. She was the only guest. Around midnight, she heard a noise from the room at the end of the hall: a repetitive thump, like a heavy object being dropped on carpet. She went to check, and the door was unlocked. Inside, the room was empty, but the bathroom light was on. On the mirror, in soap, was written a name…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Well on Grassy Lick Road
December 1998. A gravel pull-off on Grassy Lick Road, just outside a town called Nunnelly, Tennessee. Luna's friend Emily calls her from a gas station payphone, her voice hollow and wrong, saying she found something in her grandmother's well. When Luna gets there, the well has no water. The bucket comes up wet, but the water evaporates before it hits the air, leaving a fine white dust that smells of burnt sugar and old bone. Emily won't tell her what she saw at the bottom. She just keeps saying…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Crossroads at Dark Hollow
It was late September, just past midnight, when I found a folder on the backup drive labeled 'Dark Hollow.' Inside were six photographs of a crossroad in rural Tennessee — a place I'd never heard of. The first photo showed an empty intersection at dusk. The second, the same spot but with a figure standing at the center. The third, that figure closer, its head tilted. By the fourth, I could see its face — or what should have been a face. I drove there the next night. The crossroads was real. The…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Diner on Highway 25
A late-night drive through central Kentucky lands me at a diner that shouldn't exist. The waitress knows my order before I speak. The clock on the wall is stopped at 3:17. And in the back booth, a man sits alone, staring at a plate of food that has been sitting there since 1987. This is the story of how I learned that some places don't serve food — they serve sentences. #Highway25 #TheMeadowDiner #KentuckyHorror #LunaStory #SmallTownDiner #UncannyValley #TimeLoop #TheWaitingMan #3:17 #1987…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Parking Lot at River Bend
Luna recalls a cold November night in 2019 when a stranger's hard drive, salvaged from a pawn shop in River Bend, Tennessee, refused to let her look away. Inside, a single video file — dated 1997 — showed a man standing alone in an empty parking lot, speaking into the dark about something he'd buried. The man's name was Paul. The parking lot was behind a Piggly Wiggly. And the longer Luna watched, the more she felt the video was watching her back. A story about the weight of unclaimed secrets…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Sign on Possum Trot Road
November 2023, Possum Trot Road, just outside Bell Buckle, Tennessee. I was cataloging folders from a drive a retired sheriff's deputy had dropped off — old case files, mostly, from the mid-nineties. Most of it was what you'd expect: juvenile records, traffic citations, a few missing-person reports that never went anywhere. But one folder had no name, just a string of numbers — a date. I opened it. Inside were seven photographs, each one taken from a car window at night. The same curve of road.…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Ramp at Wolf Creek
Winter, 2021. Luna drives out to a decommissioned boat ramp on Wolf Creek in western Kentucky. A local named Ezra has been seeing headlights at the water's edge every night at 3:11 a.m.—lights that shouldn't be there since the ramp was closed and chained off years ago. What Luna finds is not a truck or a car, but a submerged vehicle that never came back up. Ezra's own pickup, missing since October. And inside, something that has been waiting for the water to drop. A story about what rises when…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Doorway at Dixon Hollow
It was the second week of November, 2017, and I was cataloging a set of archived files from the Fentress County historical society. Most folders were traffic citations, tax ledgers, old church pamphlets. But one folder was labeled in a way that made me pause — no date, no extension, just a single name I didn't recognize. Inside was a single video file. The thumbnail showed what looked like a doorway in a limestone bluff, deep in Dixon Hollow. I started watching at just past midnight. By the…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Pavement
Route 17 cuts through eastern Tennessee like a scar. On a humid July night in 2019, I found myself parked at the dead end of a service road that didn't appear on any map. A man stood beside a truck with a cracked windshield, holding a cassette recorder. He said he'd been driving for six hours, trying to get home, but the road kept looping back to this same stretch of pavement. He showed me the tape. I listened. And then I understood why his knuckles were white. #Route17 #Tennessee #Loop…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Motel on Highway 17
It was the last week of October, and I was driving home through the foothills when the fog closed in hard around a place called Whitaker's Rest. A motel sign flickered through the white — Vacancy — and I took the exit because my eyes were burning. The clerk at the front desk was a woman named Della who didn't seem surprised to see me. She handed me key 9 and said, 'Don't open the connecting door to 10. It's not locked. Just don't open it.' I asked why. She said, 'Because the man in 10 has been…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Trestle on Lick Creek
October 2021, just past midnight on a two-lane road outside a town called Corbin. I was following a set of coordinates I'd found buried in a folder labeled 'maintenance logs' — a folder that shouldn't have existed on a drive that had been wiped seven years ago. The road dead-ended at a railroad trestle over Lick Creek. The rails were rusted through. The ties were splintered. But the light under the bridge was warm and steady, like a lantern left burning. I walked down the embankment because the…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Seminary on Mount Horeb Road
On a humid November night in 2019, Luna finds a single folder on the backup drive labeled 'St. Dymphna's Seminary, Mount Horeb Road.' Inside are 187 photos of an abandoned Catholic seminary in rural Tennessee, each more wrong than the last. A chapel with pews facing the wrong direction. A dormitory where every bed is made. A basement hallway with wet footprints leading into a wall. And then a photo taken at 3:17 a.m. that shows a figure in a cassock standing in the refectory, facing the corner.…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Crossing on Possum Creek Road
Luna recalls a night in late October when a file titled 'Possum Creek Road — 2007' opened a grainy video of a rural railroad crossing. A blue Ford Bronco idles on the tracks as a woman's voice whispers a name. The video ends before the train. But when Luna drives to that crossing the next afternoon, she finds a rusted medallion in the gravel, engraved with the same name. A slow-burn story about the weight of a message delivered too late, the freight train that runs at 3:47 AM, and the crack in…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Gravel Lot on Stonewall Jackson Highway
In the summer of 2014, a string of missing-person cases along the Stonewall Jackson Highway in western Virginia led me to a gravel lot behind a shuttered gas station. The lot was empty except for a single picnic table and a payphone that rang whenever I approached. No one ever answered, but the ringing followed me home—first in my ears, then from the backup drive itself, that same two-tone pulse, even when the drive was disconnected from power. This episode is about the call that never ends…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Hive on Pine Mountain
In the summer of 2021, Luna's uncle sends her a dusty external drive from his hunting cabin on Pine Mountain, Tennessee. He says it's full of old family photos, but when Luna opens it late one July night, she finds one folder — unlabeled — containing a single image file. The photo shows a stone foundation deep in the woods, and carved into the stones are symbols that look like honeycomb. Over the next few hours, Luna cross-references the image with local folklore and discovers a story that no…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Barn on Mud Creek
It was late October, three years ago, when I found the folder labeled 'Mud Creek Road' on a drive I'd never seen before. Inside were photographs of a white barn at dusk, each one taken from the same window of a house across the field—until the last photo, where the barn door is open and a man in coveralls is looking up, directly at the camera, as if he knew I'd be watching. I drove out to Mud Creek the next weekend, found the barn, and learned that the man in the photo had been dead for seven…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Field on Cold Springs Pike
Luna returns to a memory she's tried to bury: the summer of 2017, the abandoned field at the end of Cold Springs Pike, and the woman who stood motionless among the weeds every night at exactly 2:17 AM. She was thin, dark-haired, and she never blinked. Luna tells what she saw when she finally walked out to meet her — and what followed her home. A slow-burn encounter about grief, repetition, and the things that keep appointments long after everyone else has forgotten. #TheBackupDrive…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Deacon of Gander Creek
Luna plugs in the drive and finds a folder labeled 'Gander Creek — 1987' — inside, three photographs of a wooden footbridge at dawn, each with a man standing at the center. The man wears a dark suit. The first photo: he is looking at the bridge. The second: he is looking at the camera, smiling, holding a Bible. The third: he is gone, but the Bible is still there, lying open on the planks. Luna drives to Gander Creek, West Virginia, in early October — finds the bridge unchanged, finds a local…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Trailer on Old County Line
Luna recounts the night she stumbled upon a folder labeled '1993' on the backup drive. Inside were photographs of a single-wide trailer at the dead end of Old County Line Road in Bledsoe County, Tennessee — a place she knew well. The images showed a woman she recognized, frozen in time, and a series of details that did not match the story she had always been told. As she clicked through the files, the house in the photographs began to look less like a home and more like a cage. And then she…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Keeper of the County Records
Luna discovers a folder on her backup drive labeled 'Reynolds County — Vital Records, Pre-1957.' Inside are scanned pages from a ledger kept by a man named Emmett Hargrave, who served as the county's sole registrar from 1921 until his disappearance in 1956. The entries start mundane — births, deaths, marriages — but shift into something else: records of people who were never born, never died, and never left. Luna visits the old courthouse in Jessup, Mississippi, and finds a locked room in the…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Dead Letter Office
It was late autumn in Smithton, Virginia, 2019. A small gray mailbox on a dirt road, nothing special. But the letter inside wasn't mail—it was a summons, written in pencil on yellowed notebook paper, dated 1973. The dead letter office had been forwarding messages from the missing for decades, and this one was addressed to a woman named Nora Hartley, who vanished from her farmhouse on Holloway Lane the same year. Luna finds the letter in a folder labeled 'UNCLAIMED' on the backup drive. She…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Subdivision on Buckhorn Road
Luna recounts the night she found a folder labeled 'Buckhorn Ridge Estates' on an old hard drive. Inside were dozens of photographs of a half-built subdivision in rural Tennessee, taken at dusk in late October 2019. Each image showed the same six houses, identical except for the number nailed beside each front door. But the numbers didn't match any logical order. And in every photo, the light was wrong — shadows falling east when the sun was supposed to be setting in the west. Luna drove out…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Well on Harpers Creek
Luna returns to a story she heard years ago from a man named Cal Harwood, who lived on Harpers Creek Road in Yadkin County. Cal told her about a well on his property that was never dry, even in the worst drought of 2007. He said it was deeper than the county records showed, and that sometimes when he leaned over the stone lip, he could hear someone breathing back. Luna never believed him until she visited that September night, standing in his overgrown backyard with a flashlight, listening to…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Porch on Big Lick Road
It was late October, the kind of cold that settles into a house and stays. I was going through an old hard drive from a storage unit auction—just photos, mostly, from the early 2000s. One folder was labeled 'Big Lick Road.' The pictures showed a white farmhouse with a wraparound porch, a tire swing, a woman in a floral dress. But every photo had the same thing: a man standing in the background, half-hidden behind trees, inside the barn, at the edge of the driveway. In later photos, he was…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Cello on Miller's Creek
October 2021, just past midnight on Miller's Creek Road in eastern Kentucky. A retired music teacher named Cora Bellamy calls Luna about a cello she found in a storage unit auction — a beautiful, unstrung instrument with a single inscription inside: 'Play me once, and I will remember.' Luna drives out to meet her, expecting a ghost story about an old musician. Instead, she finds a woman who has been playing the cello every night for two weeks, even though it has no strings. The sound comes from…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Playground on Possum Creek Road
It was late autumn, around eleven at night, and I was parked at the dead end of Possum Creek Road in a town called Smithfield. I'd been hired by a retired sheriff's deputy to salvage photos off a corrupted drive he'd kept since the summer of 1997. The images were from a playground dedication ceremony—a small metal sign bolted to a swing set, a ribbon cutting, kids running. But some of the files didn't match. They showed the same playground at night, empty, the swings moving in still air. And in…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Smoke on Drainage Ditch Road
Luna pulls a drive from a cardboard box labeled 'Drainage Ditch Road — 2006' and finds footage shot by a woman named Eleanor Phelps. The files show a dry, overgrown drainage ditch in August — a place Eleanor was documenting because her dog kept running there at dusk. The first few clips are boring: grass, a rusted pipe, the dog panting. But by the third clip, the dog is staring at something the camera can't catch. By the fifth, Eleanor's voice changes: she's not narrating anymore. She's…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Tree on Bethany Church Road
October 2021. Bethany Church Road, a dead-end gravel lane off Route 58 in rural Pittsylvania County, Virginia. Luna is hired to recover photos from a water-damaged laptop belonging to a woman named Cora Bell, whose husband disappeared four years ago. The drive yields ordinary snapshots — a birthday party, a tire swing, a garden — except for one recurring detail: in the background of every picture, a specific oak tree looks different. The bark shifts. The branches rearrange. In one image, there…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Well on Heron Road
Luna drives to the end of Heron Road in late October, following a tip about an abandoned property. She finds a well in the backyard, covered with a rusted grate. The grate is heavy, and when she peers into the darkness below, she hears something breathing. Not water dripping, not wind. A slow, wet, rhythmic sound, like something large and tired waiting beneath. The owner's son, a quiet man named Caleb, tells her the well was sealed after his mother claimed she heard a woman singing from…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Keyhole on Drowning Creek
December 2021. The phone rings at 2:13 AM. A woman named Annette from the old Drowning Creek fire tower says the drive you gave her last spring just showed her something she can't unsee — a keyhole in a photograph of a burned-down house, and through it, a room that hasn't existed since 1987. You drive out to the tower with a flashlight and a full tank of gas, telling yourself you're just going to look at the file yourself. But when you get there, Annette is standing at the base of the tower in…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Woman in the Photograph on Cypress Creek Road
Luna finds a single photograph buried in a folder on an old backup drive—a Polaroid of a woman she doesn't recognize, standing in front of a gas station that closed down before she was born. The timestamp on the file says it was taken last Tuesday. The woman in the picture is wearing a name tag that reads 'Molly.' Luna starts asking around town, and no one named Molly has lived in Wainwright County in fifty years. But the gas station—the one that's been boarded up since 1974—has a light on…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Burned House on Old Hollow Road
August 2017. Two in the morning on Old Hollow Road, outside a town called Misenheimer. A friend of a friend named Cora asks me to recover photos from a melted laptop she pulled out of a house fire. The drive itself is fine, but inside the fire-damaged chassis I find a single file — a video recorded the night of the fire, from inside the house, by a camera that should have been destroyed. Cora says she doesn't remember filming it. She says she was alone that night. The video shows someone…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Motel on Highway 421
Luna finds a folder on a thrift-store hard drive labeled 'Motel 421' — security footage from a small roadside motel in Cumberland County, autumn of 2019. The grainy black-and-white footage shows a man checking in alone, then re-emerging hours later covered in something dark. But it's what the camera doesn't show — the room door opening on its own, the light flickering under the gap, the sound from the audio track — that makes her unplug the drive and sit in the dark for an hour. A story about…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Sinkhole on Jakes Creek
October 2019. A Tuesday night, just past midnight. Luna is scrolling through folders on the backup drive when she finds a single, unnamed file from a town called Jakes Creek, up in the Ozarks. The file contains a voice memo—a woman's voice, recorded on the night the ground opened under a gas station convenience store. But the memo doesn't end when the sinkhole collapses. It keeps recording, beneath the limestone, into something that should not have been underground. Luna listens. Then she…
The Night the Backup Drive Showed Me the Dry Cleaner on Main Street
Luna recalls the summer of 2019, when she found a forgotten backup drive in a box of junk and plugged it in. The drive contained a single file: a year's worth of security footage from a dry cleaner in Three Rivers, Kentucky. The footage showed the same woman coming in every Tuesday night at 11:47 PM, never picking up anything, never dropping anything off, just standing by the pressing machine for exactly four minutes, then leaving. When Luna finally went to the address, the dry cleaner had been…
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