Episodes
The Tape at the Bottom of the Hematite Drift
In the autumn of 1998, Luna and a friend slip into an abandoned hematite mine outside Elkford, West Virginia. The entrance is boarded, but they find a way in. Three hundred feet deep, they discover a small chamber with a cot, a rusted stove, and a portable cassette recorder. Inside it, a tape labeled 'For you.' When Luna presses play, her own voice comes out—older, wearier—warning her not to open the door behind the stove. She opens it anyway. At the bottom of a hidden passage lies another…
The Notebook in the Sealed Chamber Under Dryden Throat
In early spring of 2022, Luna joined a university survey team mapping the Marrow Caverns near Dryden, Kentucky. Following a narrow crack behind a curtain of moss, they discovered a stone door sealed for centuries. Behind it: a small cell with a cot, a burnt-down candle, and a notebook. The entries describe a person trapped—first grateful, then terrified—convinced that their own reflection is leaving food, moving the lamp, answering notes. The final page reads: 'I saw my reflection in the water…
The Photograph in the Mud Tunnel at Little Creek Cave
Late autumn in Marrow County, West Virginia. A caver named Jesse follows a forgotten lead to a sinkhole in the woods, one that had swallowed a man named Eli Voss forty years ago. Inside, a mud-choked passage opens into a dry chamber—and on the wall, a single photograph of Eli, smiling, dated last week. This is a quiet, creeping story about what gets sealed underground, and what climbs back out. A story about time, memory, and the thinness of the dark between now and then. #MarrowCounty…
The Clock in the Chamber Under Marrow Ridge
In the autumn of 1992, Ellis Weaver entered a cave beneath Marrow Ridge in West Virginia alone. He emerged two days later with no memory of the time underground, but with a small, perfectly circular bruise on his wrist. His widow Ruth told Luna that from that night, he could hear something ticking inside the walls. When the ticking finally stopped, Ellis walked out into the night and never came back. Luna retraced his steps, descended into the same chamber, and found a stone table with a single…
The Echo at the Bottom of the Needles
In the autumn of 2005, a solo caver named Elias Tanner disappeared into a limestone fissure beneath Harpers Mill, West Virginia. He was searching for a rumored underground river system called the Needles. Three weeks later, his body was found in a chamber no one had mapped—his face locked in a silent scream, no marks on him, but his caving lamp still burning. Luna went looking for answers and found something far worse: a place where sounds repeat, but never quite the same. This episode is a…
The Room Behind the Waterfall at Cavern Creek Preserve
September, Cavern Creek Preserve. The waterfall had nearly dried up when Jenna called me. She'd found a slit in the rock behind the falling water—a low entrance, wide enough to crawl through. We went back together. Inside, a round chamber with walls smooth as bone. Sound died instantly. A faint red glow from a pile of drilled stones. Behind them, a clay pot sealed with cloth, containing dried stems and a strand of dark hair. Then the air shifted. We left fast. But weeks later, Jenna dreamed the…
The Bell at the Bottom of the Split in Thistle Creek Cave
In the summer of 2021, Luna descended into Thistle Creek Cave with a borrowed rope and a handheld GPS, looking for an old side passage she had marked on a topo map years ago. What she found was not a passage but a split — a vertical fracture so narrow she had to turn sideways and breathe shallow to squeeze through. On the other side, a small chamber with a bell on a stone pedestal, and a name scratched into the limestone beside it. This episode is about what happened when she rang it, and the…
The Hatch Under the Barn at Moffett's Farm
October 1987, outside the town of Red Hill, Kentucky. A man named Walt Moffett found something beneath his barn that had been there longer than the foundation stones. Not a root cellar. Not a cold cellar. A square of concrete with a rusted ring set into it, and beneath that, a shaft that went down farther than it should have. Walt's oldest son Andrew told me this story two summers ago, sitting on the porch of a house he hasn't entered since that night. He doesn't talk about what he heard coming…
The Bell in the Crawlspace Under the Harwick Road Bridge
Luna returns to a story she overheard from a man at a gas station outside Temperance Falls—a tale about a bridge that wasn't there the day before, and the sound of a bell ringing from beneath it at midnight. The man was a trucker named Carl, who took a detour down Harwick Road on a rainy October night in 2019. He found a bridge that shouldn't exist, heard a bell tolling from the crawlspace underneath, and saw something that made him swear off night driving forever. No one else in town would…
The Bell in the Crawlspace Under the Harwick Road Bridge
In the summer of 1998, a teenager named Derek Mears claimed he could hear a bell ringing from inside the concrete arch of the Harwick Road Bridge, a narrow single-lane crossing over a dry creek bed outside the town of Beryl, Kentucky. He went down to investigate one July night and came back speaking in a voice that wasn't his own. Months later, his younger sister found the same crawlspace—a cramped, trash-filled hollow between the bridge deck and the creek bed—and heard the bell too. This is…
The Bell at the Bottom of the Blackwood Borehole
In the autumn of 1992, a retired schoolteacher named Emery Dade lowered himself into a limestone borehole behind his property in Blackwood, West Virginia, chasing a sound he'd heard every October for forty years: a single bell note, deep and clear, rising from the earth. When he stopped coming up, the county sent a search team down on a winch. I was on that team. What we found in the borehole was not a body, and not a cave. It was a room, at the bottom of a shaft that shouldn't have a bottom…
The Mark at the Bottom of Wheeler's Cave
In the summer of 2022, a survey team in Wheeler's Cave, Tennessee, found something that shouldn't have been there—a passage that appeared on no map, leading deeper than the limestone should allow. Luna was the one who crawled into it, following a draft of warm air that smelled like old copper. What she found at the end was a chamber that felt deliberately shaped, with a single mark carved into the floor. Not a symbol she recognized. Not a date. Just a mark. And when she touched it, the rock was…
The Map at the Bottom of Skull Spring Cave
In the summer of 2018, a dry spell in eastern Kentucky lowered Skull Spring Cave's water table enough to expose a side passage no one had ever mapped. Luna went in with a group of four. They followed the passage for hours, until the ceiling dropped and the air went still. That's when they found the room with the drawings on the wall — not prehistoric glyphs, but something that looked like a map of the cave itself, updated with markings that didn't match any known survey. The last symbol on the…
The Ladder in the Silo at Thorne Hill
Luna recounts a trip to an abandoned grain silo outside Thorne Hill, Indiana, in the late autumn of 2019. A missing local teenager's last known location was the silo's base. Inside, she finds a ladder descending into the grain—and a series of hand-carved markings on the steel wall that tell a story no one else has seen. As she climbs deeper, the air thickens with dust and something else: the sense that she was expected. A quiet, claustrophobic episode about the things left behind when a person…
The Cradle at the Bottom of Sorrow Creek
In the fall of 2018, Luna accompanies her friend Delia to an abandoned homestead on the outskirts of Millbrook, Indiana, to retrieve a family heirloom—a wooden cradle that has sat in an open cellar for fifty years. Delia’s grandmother always said the cradle was never to be moved. But Delia is expecting, and she wants that cradle. What they find in that cellar—the movement in the dark, the sounds from the cradle, the way the shadows seem to breathe—suggests the old woman’s warning was not…
The Stone That Moved Under the Floor of the Old Grist Mill
In the winter of 2019, Luna drove through a blizzard to reach an abandoned grist mill outside of Tabor, Iowa. The mill had been closed since the 1950s, its waterwheel still turning in the frozen creek. Inside, the floorboards were loose. Under one of them, a stone that did not sit right. Luna pried it up and found a shaft, perfectly square, descending into absolute darkness. She lowered her lantern on a rope and saw something at the bottom that she has not stopped seeing since. This is the…
The Bookshelf in the Root Cellar Under the Hendersons' Barn
It was August of 2017, just outside of Temperance Falls. I was helping a friend clear out her late uncle's property. The barn had stood empty for years, its hayloft caved in, the floorboards soft with rot. But it was the root cellar underneath that stopped me cold. A small room, maybe six by six, with a wooden bookshelf built into the wall. Not for canning jars. Not for potatoes. It held a dozen leather-bound journals, each one filled with the same tight cursive, each page a record of something…
The Bell in the Tower at St. Agnes Church
In the autumn of 1998, a storm uncovers a forgotten bell tower at St. Agnes Church in Temperance Falls, New York. Luna's cousin, a restoration carpenter, is hired to assess the damage. Inside, he finds a bell that rings on its own, a rope that moves without hands, and a child's name scratched into the wood. The story unfolds through his letters, each one more frantic, each one ending with the same question: who left that bell ringing, and why won't it stop? This episode is a slow-burning…
The Hand in the Wall at the Thacker Motel
In the summer of 1998, Luna checked into the Thacker Motel on a two-lane highway in central Oklahoma, a place she'd been told had the cheapest weekly rate for a hundred miles. She needed somewhere to stop for three nights while she mapped the drainage caves under the nearby Wichita Mountains. The motel was quiet, almost empty, and the room at the end of the strip had a strange patch of drywall that felt warm to the touch. This is what she heard through the wall on the second night: a sound like…
The Breath at the Bottom of Fenton's Well
In the summer of 2003, a drought in Temperance Falls exposed something at the bottom of an old well on the Fenton property. Luna's friend Cora, who grew up there, always swore the well was deeper than anyone measured. When the water level dropped for the first time in living memory, she saw a stone spiral staircase descending into dry darkness. She went down alone. She found a room. She found a chair. She found a tape recorder on the chair, still running, with a voice she almost recognized.…
The Breath at the Bottom of Fenton's Well
In the summer of 2017, Luna traveled to the small town of Fenton, Kansas, to investigate a collapsed well on an abandoned farm. The property had been vacant for decades, but locals reported hearing a rhythmic, almost breathing sound coming from the hole at night. Luna descended into the darkness, expecting to find water or debris. Instead, she found a narrow passage that opened into a chamber filled with warm, moist air—and something else. Something that breathed in unison with her. Something…
The Steps in the Concrete at the Holloway Dam
In the summer of 2007, a drought drained the reservoir behind the Holloway Dam in eastern Kentucky, exposing the remains of the town that had been flooded forty years earlier. Luna's uncle, a retired county surveyor, took her out to walk the cracked mud of the dry lakebed. They found the old schoolhouse foundation, the rusted water tower, and a set of concrete steps that led down into the silt. But the steps didn't belong to any building on the maps. They descended into the lakebed, deeper than…
The Window at the Bottom of Devil's Sinkhole
In the summer of 2009, a woman named Ellie Harper lowered herself into a narrow limestone shaft on her family's farm outside Temple Hill, Kentucky. She was looking for a lost heirloom — a silver locket her grandmother had dropped into the hole in 1962. What she found instead was a perfectly square room at the bottom, with a single window set into the far wall. No light came through it, but something moved behind the glass. Luna retraces Ellie's final climb out of the sinkhole and the thing that…
The Rock Under the Bridge at Emery Gap
Luna remembers a night in late October 2017, driving back from a failed cave search near Emery Gap, Tennessee. She stopped on a one-lane bridge over a dry creek bed to check a map. Below the bridge, a single limestone boulder sat alone in the gravel. It wasn't there when she crossed an hour earlier. She got out. The rock was warm to the touch, even in the cold air. From a crack in its center, a thin black liquid seeped and pooled. She touched it. It was lighter than water. She followed a trail…
The Door at the Bottom of the Siphon in Dry Creek Cave
In the summer of 2019, Luna followed a rumor into the limestone maze beneath Dry Creek, Kentucky—a passage that flooded every spring, a siphon that had never been fully mapped. A local caver named Delia claimed she'd found something down there, something that wasn't rock. Luna went to see for herself, and what she found was a door. Not a natural formation, not a miner's barrier, but a door with a handle. And behind it, a sound like a heartbeat, slow and wet, echoing through a room that…
The Crawlspace Under the Church in Temperance Falls
In the summer of 2003, Luna's cousin Jesse took a job clearing out the crawlspace beneath an old Baptist church in Temperance Falls, a town so small it didn't even have a stoplight. What he found under the floorboards—a child's shoe, a bundle of letters, a door that led nowhere—was bad enough. But what followed him home, what sat on the edge of his bed every night for a week, was worse. This is the story of a hole in the ground that should never have been opened, and the thing that crawled out…
The Handprint at the Bottom of Hangman's Drop
In October of 2008, a geology student named Cora Vance rappelled into a vertical shaft called Hangman's Drop, a sinkhole in the Daniel Boone National Forest that had never been fully mapped. What she found on the floor of the pit—a single black handprint pressed into the limestone—was not the kind of thing she could explain to the ranger who pulled her out. This episode follows Cora's obsessive return to the cave, her discovery of a faint corridor too narrow to be natural, and the marks that…
The Reflection in the Flooded Section of Coon Creek Cave
It was August, the year the drought cracked the clay fields outside of Sweetwater, Tennessee. I went down into Coon Creek Cave with a borrowed helmet and a single headlamp, not looking for anything — just the cold. The cave had been dry for months, but a hundred yards in I found a pool where no pool should have been. The water was black, still, and warm. When I leaned over it, the reflection was not mine. Not completely. The face had my hair, my jacket, the same scratch on my chin. But the eyes…
The Room Beneath the Foundation at the Maybell Post Office
In the autumn of 2002, Luna's uncle Dave was night clerk at the Maybell Post Office, a squat brick building on a dead-end street in eastern Kentucky. One slow Tuesday, a woman came in after hours to mail a letter with no address, written on paper that smelled like wet clay. Dave followed her into the basement after she didn't come back up. What he found under the foundation was a room that wasn't on any blueprint, with a floor that gave like wet cardboard and a sound like something breathing…
The Bell in the Flood Tunnel Under Afton
June 1987. A woman named Eleanor calls Luna from a payphone in Afton, Oklahoma, saying she's been hearing a church bell ringing underground every night at 2:17 AM. The sound comes from a capped flood tunnel beneath the old grain elevator. Luna drives out to meet her. They descend together through a rusted grate into dry concrete corridors, following the sound deeper than the tunnel should go. What they find at the bottom is not a bell. It's something that has been ringing for a long time, and…
The Room in the Wall at the Grissom House
Luna recounts a story from a listener about a narrow hallway that shouldn't have been there, discovered in the upstairs of a rented house in Smith's Grove, Kentucky, in the winter of 2019. The room was warm when the rest of the house was cold, and the smell inside was something the listener's mother recognized at once. A quiet, devastating episode about a man who never left, a woman who never forgot, and what happens when you open a door that was meant to stay closed. There is no monster in…
The Chimney at Darkwater Cave
In the autumn of 2018, Luna joined a guided caving trip into Darkwater Cave, a sprawling limestone system under the hills of eastern Tennessee. The group descended through a narrow vertical shaft known as 'the Chimney,' where the walls were slick with condensation and the rope hummed under their weight. At the bottom, the guide led them into a chamber called the Loop — a circular room with a low ceiling and a floor of packed silt. That's where Luna noticed the sound: a low, rhythmic breathing…
The Loop at the Base of the Chimney at Darkwater Cave
In the summer of 2017, Luna and a local caver named Dwayne descended into Darkwater Cave, a mapped system in the hills outside Cookson, Oklahoma. At the base of a hundred-foot chimney they found a steel loop driven into the limestone—a fixture that appeared in no survey log. Dwayne dismissed it as a forgotten anchor from the 1950s, but something about the way the rock had healed around the metal kept Luna looking. Then she noticed the rope. A single strand of static kernmantle, frayed at both…
The Staircase Under the Dry Well in Beulah
In the summer of 2005, a boy named Caleb Mears vanished from his backyard in Beulah, Tennessee. His mother said he'd been drawing spirals in the dirt for weeks. When they finally found him, he was standing at the bottom of a dry hole behind the old Hargrave property—a hole that hadn't been there the day before. He said there was a staircase. He said it went down. And he said something at the bottom had been calling his name. This is what I found when I went to see for myself: a well that didn't…
The Breathing in the Cistern at the Pickett House
Near the edge of Morgan County, at the old Pickett House off Route 72, there's a cistern nobody talks about. In the summer of 2019, a woman named Della rented the house for a month and started hearing something from underground — a slow, steady breathing that seemed to come from the cistern behind the kitchen. At first she thought it was pipes or a trapped animal. But it kept time with her own heartbeat, and when she finally opened the iron lid, the sound didn't stop — it just got closer. This…
The Hole in the Floor of the Root Cellar at the Tuttle Homestead
In the summer of 1998, on a farm outside Emporia, Kansas, a woman named Dana Tuttle found a hole in the floor of her root cellar. Not a dirt-floored cellar—a concrete floor, laid by her grandfather in 1954. The hole was perfectly circular, about the width of a dinner plate, and it went straight down. When she dropped a pebble in, she counted seventeen seconds before she heard it hit something—water, or mud, or something that made a sound like a wet mouth closing. Over the next three weeks, the…
The Staircase at Sundown Point
A solo spelunker descends into a narrow cave beneath an abandoned fire tower in the Daniel Boone National Forest. At the bottom of a 60-foot drop, she finds a staircase carved into the limestone — descending further than the geology allows. The air smells of cut grass and something metallic. She follows it down to a room where the walls are not stone but something pale and warm, and where something breathing in the dark asks her a question in a voice that sounds like her own. A quiet…
The Sealed Room at the Milliken Funeral Home
In the summer of 2017, Luna's cousin Tommy took a job as night watchman at an old funeral home in Cambria, West Virginia. The building had been a private residence in the 1800s, then a mortuary for sixty years. Tommy called her three weeks into the job, his voice odd, asking if she remembered the story about the room that was walled up in the basement. She didn't. He said the funeral director who built the place had a daughter who died in 1932, and that her body was never found. That night…
The Black Floor at the Catoosa Feed Store
In the winter of 2019, Luna's friend Marta inherited a feed store in Catoosa, Oklahoma, that had been sealed shut for forty years. When they pried open the back room, the floor wasn't concrete — it was a slick, humid surface that gave underfoot like living skin, and it breathed. This is the story of what they found beneath the pressed-tin ceiling, the smell of sweet rot, and the thing that tapped back from below. Luna tells it in the hushed aftermath of standing at the edge of a hole that…
The Sound Under the Abandoned Chapel on Hogback Ridge
November 1998. A solo climber on Hogback Ridge, north of Harlan County, takes shelter from a sudden ice storm in a long-abandoned chapel. The building is wrong from the inside—the altar faces a wall, the pews are bolted to the ceiling, and the floor is warm. Beneath the flagstones, something is breathing in a slow, deliberate rhythm. A trapdoor leads to a chapel below the chapel, where the walls are covered in finger-painted symbols and the air tastes of old copper. The climber stays for three…
The Room With No Ceiling at Morton's Gap
November 2021. A sinkhole opens behind a gas station in Morton's Gap, Kentucky, revealing a subterranean room with no ceiling — just a dark shaft rising into infinite black. Luna talks to the cashier who found it, a man named Dale who went down alone on a dare and came back with a pocketful of gravel that doesn't feel like rock. It feels like teeth. It feels like it's still growing. This is a story about the thing we find when we look too long at the hole in the ground, and the small, terrible…
The Pit Under the Gas Station in Maysville
In the summer of 2007, a gas station attendant in Maysville, Oklahoma, disappeared during the night shift. His coworker, a woman named Carla, heard sounds from beneath the station that she still can't explain. The station had been built on a filled-in sinkhole, and the new owner had ignored warnings about a sealed door in the basement. When Carla finally opened it, she found a room that defied the laws of space and time. This is her account, told to me last fall. She doesn't sleep much anymore.…
The Thing That Crawled Out of the Well at Blue Springs
In the summer of 2012, Luna's cousin Owen took a job at a crumbling farmhouse outside Blue Springs, Missouri — just a summer gig cleaning out an abandoned well. But the well had been capped for a reason. By the time Luna visited in late August, Owen had stopped sleeping, and the dirt around the cistern was wet with something that wasn't water. This is a story about what happens when you pull up something that was never meant to see daylight — and why you should never, ever look down a well…
The Hands in the Wall at Sulphur Springs
In November of 2019, Luna's friend Annie took a job as the night clerk at the Sulphur Springs Inn, a crumbling roadside motel in the Texas Hill Country. The place was old, cheap, and mostly empty. But on her third night alone, she started noticing things about Room 14—the way the wallpaper seemed to breathe, the sound of something pressing against the drywall from inside, and the small, hand-shaped impressions that appeared on the walls each morning. By the end of her first week, Annie had…
The Room Below the Dance Hall at St. Agnes
Winter 1999. Luna's cousin Marie takes a job sorting donations in the basement of St. Agnes Catholic Church in Burnham, Ohio. The dance hall upstairs is being renovated, and someone has walled off a storage room that wasn't on any blueprint. Marie finds a locked door behind a fallen shelf of choir robes. Inside: a child's bed, a stack of letters dated 1964, and a single crack in the concrete floor that breathes warm air up from below. The priest says the room was never there. The janitor says…
The Grate at the Bottom of Burnt Mill Creek
In the summer of 2006, a ten-year-old girl named Margie pulled a steel grate from the mud of Burnt Mill Creek and crawled into a drainage pipe that was not on any map. Thirty years later, I went back to find the pipe, and what I found inside was still breathing. This is the story of a culvert that swallowed children, a town that learned to look away, and the sound of something wet and large shifting in the dark just past the last bend. #BurntMillCreek #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #Culvert…
The Door at the Back of the Hardware Store in Wilton
In the winter of 2018, a small-town hardware store in Wilton, West Virginia, held a secret behind a locked door that no employee was allowed to open. When a night-shift worker named Dale finally breaks the rule, he discovers a narrow staircase leading down into the limestone beneath the town — and a series of rooms that seem to belong to someone else's life. The deeper he goes, the more the darkness begins to remember him. This is a story about the places that exist just beneath the ordinary…
The Breathing in the Bone Cave of Lost River
In the winter of 2019, Luna took a weekend job mapping an unmapped cave system under a ridge nobody in Lost River, West Virginia, talked about. The locals called it the Bone Cave — not because of any remains found inside, but because of the sound. A deep, slow breathing that seemed to come from the rock itself. What she found on the third day of survey was not a geological formation. It was something that had been waiting. A story about the weight of stone, the things that echo through…
The Root Cellar Under the Cutbank Road
In October of 2019, a dry summer and a collapsed section of Cutbank Road in eastern Kentucky revealed an old root cellar no one in town remembered building. Luna's cousin Rayanne, who works for the county road crew, was the first to climb down. The cellar was clean—too clean. Stone shelves cut into the limestone, empty jars still sealed, a single wooden chair facing the far wall. And on the wall, someone had written the same date in charcoal, over and over, in handwriting that got smaller and…
The Sinkhole on Tabor Road
In the summer of 2019, a sinkhole opened in the back pasture of the old Pruitt farm outside Dunmore, Tennessee. It was small at first—maybe three feet across—but by August it had swallowed a shed and half the hay barn. The county sent a geologist named Roger Hanks to assess it. He spent two days alone at the site, and when he came back he was different. Not scared. More like something had been taken out of him and replaced with a quiet, certain dread. He told me about it one night at the Waffle…
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