Episodes
The Compass at Gates Pass
In late October, on a lonely stretch of road above the treeline in Montana's Gates Pass, Luna's radiator gives out. She meets an old man standing by a wooden post, who presses a compass into her palm without a word. The needle doesn't point north—it points southeast, unwavering. Following it leads her to an abandoned homestead and a root cellar with a locked door. The compass seems to know something she doesn't. A quiet, unnerving encounter about trust, direction, and the things we choose not…
The Map at Silver Lake Campground
Early spring, a closed campground in the Bitterroot Mountains. I met a caretaker who found a hand-drawn map in a hollow log. He showed it to me, and my name appeared on it. I followed the map to a tree with a door built into its trunk. Inside was a room with a book that described my own actions before I took them. The map changes as you hold it. I left with the map still in my pocket, and I haven't been able to get rid of it. This is a story about being chosen by a place that wants to be found…
The Signal at Whitcomb Pass
In the autumn of 2019, a bird migration researcher named Claire set up recording equipment at Whitcomb Pass, a high-elevation rest stop on the spine of the Cascades. For weeks she catalogued thrushes and warblers. Then one night, a tone appeared on the spectrogram—low, continuous, not animal, not machine, not weather. She traced it to a single pine at the treeline. When she listened back with headphones, she felt a pressure behind her eyes. Years later, over coffee at a trailhead diner, she…
The Feather at Granite Pass
At Granite Pass, high in the autumn woods, a ranger presses a hand-drawn map into Luna's palm and warns her never to follow the trail marked with a feather. She does anyway. The path leads to a clearing, a log cabin, and a woman who has been waiting for her husband to return from a hunting trip for longer than anyone should wait. The woman's hair is full of feathers—each one a year passed—and she asks Luna to take one as a reminder. Luna escapes with the feather and a sinking feeling that the…
The Mirror at Coyote Lake
Late autumn at Coyote Lake. I met a man named Ezra who runs the boat rental. He told me about a mirror he found at the edge of the treeline — a full-length mirror leaning against a pine. When he carried it home, the reflection showed a different time: the sky wrong, his dead wife smiling in a blue dress. He kept it, talked to her, watched his younger self. Then he smashed it with a rock and buried the shards. But at dusk, he still sees glints of light from that spot. As I walked away, I glanced…
The Well at Lost Canyon
In October 2019, just after sunset, Luna descended from Lost Canyon Ridge. The trail lay in shadow, the forest silent. There, among the pines, stood a stone well — unmarked, unexpected. A woman in a worn wool coat approached, her eyes fixed on Luna. 'You looked in,' she whispered. 'Now it knows you.' Before Luna could ask what she meant, the woman vanished. The well vanished too. But the sound of water dripping from stone followed Luna down the trail, through the treeline, and into the dark.…
The Stone at Quartz Creek General Store
In the summer of 2017, Luna stopped at the Quartz Creek General Store in the eastern Sierra Nevada. The storekeeper, an old man named Harlan, told her about a black stone he kept in a drawer behind the counter. He said it had been found by his grandfather in the creekbed after a drought. Every person who touched it, he claimed, left a piece of themselves behind. Luna didn't believe him until she held it herself. Now she can still feel the cold weight in her palm, and she hasn't touched another…
The Stitch at Dry Creek Bridge
Summer 2007. Luna is driving a back road through the Oregon Coast Range when she stops at Dry Creek Bridge to check her map. An old woman in a blue dress is standing at the railing, mending a tear in the air itself with a silver needle and black thread. The woman speaks without turning around, and the words she says make the temperature drop. Luna watches her mend the same tear three times, each time the thread coming away stained with something that isn't water. When the woman finally turns…
The Post at Stony Man Overlook
In the spring of 2019, I found myself at Stony Man Overlook, a narrow pullout on a gravel road in the Monongahela National Forest. I was tracing an old survey line from a 1970s USGS map, looking for a marker that supposedly sat at the edge of the cliff. The map showed a single blue dot—no label, no elevation, just a dot. I found the marker, a rusted iron post driven into the rock, and a small tin box wired to it. Inside were three photographs, a cassette tape, and a note that read: 'If you're…
The Cross at Stony Man Overlook
In the summer of 2019, Luna's friend Elara took a solo hike up Stony Man in Shenandoah National Park and came back with a story she couldn't finish. She kept stopping mid-sentence, staring at her hands. Something happened to her up there — something to do with a wooden cross lashed to a tree near the overlook, and the way the light fell through it at dusk. Elara left town two weeks later, but Luna still has the photo she took of the cross, and sometimes she looks at it and thinks she sees the…
The Post at Larkspur Fire Road
In the summer of 2003, Luna's cousin Ellie took a seasonal job at a fire lookout in the Larkspur National Forest. She lasted six weeks. When she came down, she wouldn't talk about what she'd seen — just sat on the porch staring at the treeline. Years later, Luna hiked up to the old lookout herself, hoping to understand. She found the tower still standing, the logbook still on the desk, and a single post driven into the ground at the edge of the clearing. This is what Ellie wrote in the margins…
The Root at Lost Creek Trailhead
July, 2019. Luna meets an old man named Emmett at a trailhead outside the town of Lost Creek, Colorado. He warns her away from a particular route—the Root Trail—with a story he tells only once. He speaks of a tree that was never meant to grow, of roots that pulled a boy named Caleb into the ground in 1973. She hikes the trail anyway, and finds the spot where the earth splits open. The story ends with her standing at the edge of a hole, a root moving beneath her boot, and a sound from below that…
The Light at Cooper Ridge Fire Lookout
A fire lookout tower on the Montana border, a summer of watching for lightning strikes, and the radio call that started coming in after midnight. The woman on the other end said she was in the same tower — only she'd never left. Luna retraces the story of a volunteer named Jess who spent one August alone at Cooper Ridge, who kept a log of every storm she saw, and who started answering a radio that wasn't supposed to receive anything. A story about solitude, repetition, and the voice you begin…
The Hand at Picketwire General Store
December 2019. A woman named Cora runs the Picketwire General Store at the edge of the San Juan National Forest. She's been there twenty-three years and knows every creak in the floorboards. But when a stranger walks in just before closing on a Tuesday night, carrying something wrapped in a rag, she learns that some things stay open long after they should have closed. The hand he leaves on the counter isn't a threat — it's a question. And the answer, she tells me, is still sitting in the back…
The Crossing at Slate Run Creek
On a late October night in 2017, Luna's ex-boyfriend Caleb drives his pickup across a low-water bridge on Slate Run Creek, outside the tiny town of Sutherlin, Oregon. The creek is running high from autumn rains, and he hits a patch of gravel wrong. The truck flips. He wakes up trapped in the cab, water rising to his chin, pinned by the steering wheel against the passenger door. For the next four hours, he hears footsteps on the road above, voices calling out, flashlights sweeping the surface…
The Gauge at Picketwire Trailhead
High summer in the San Juan Mountains. Luna takes a shortcut between two marked trails and finds a locked gate with a rain gauge mounted to its post. Inside the gauge is a strip of paper covered in handwriting that gets smaller and smaller, dated every single day for the past sixteen years. The most recent entry is today's date, and the ink is still wet. #TheTreeline #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #PicketwireTrailhead #SanJuanMountains #RainGauge #HighSummer #LockedGate #LostTrail #Handwriting…
The Lock at Slate Creek Meadow
August 1997, somewhere east of Slate Creek. Luna's great-aunt kept a small cabin at the edge of the treeline, where the pines gave way to open meadow. Every summer, Luna visited. Every summer, she was told never to go into the woods after dark. But one night, a light appeared in the trees — not a flashlight, not a lantern, but something that pulsed like a heart. Ten years later, Luna returned to the cabin after her great-aunt's death. She found the lock on the back door had been changed. And…
The Rope at Buckhorn General Store
Luna remembers a summer evening in 2017 at a general store on the edge of the San Juan National Forest. A man in a dusty cowboy hat buys a length of nylon rope and asks for directions to an old mining road that no one uses anymore. The clerk, an old woman named Rita, tells him no one's gone up that way in thirty years. He leaves. She counts the change twice. Luna, sitting on the porch steps, watches his taillights disappear into the dusk. Later, she sees the rope coiled perfectly on the store's…
The Swing at Ponderosa Campground
August 1998, just outside the small town of Winthrop, Washington. Luna's uncle owned a failing campground on the edge of the Okanogan National Forest, and she spent two weeks there helping him clean out the cabins before the bank took the property. The place had been empty for three seasons, but someone had been living in Cabin 7 — the one with the boarded-up window and the rope swing hanging from the old ponderosa pine. The swing moved in windless air. The cabin door was always unlocked. And…
The Car at Pine Hollow Overlook
A woman returns to her childhood home in Pine Hollow, a small town in the Colorado Rockies, and finds her father's old car—a rusted station wagon—parked exactly where he left it thirty years ago. But the odometer has rolled forward by seventeen miles, and there's a child's handprint on the inside of the rear window. She begins to remember the summer she was nine, when her father took her on a drive that never seemed to end. This episode is a quiet meditation on memory, grief, and the roads we…
The Light at Stillwater General Store
Luna stops for gas at Stillwater General Store, a small-town relic run by an old man named Ezra. He warns her about the light that sometimes flickers in the boarded-up back room — a light that, according to local lore, was left on by a boy who vanished in 1983. Luna doesn't think much of it until she sees the light herself, and Ezra tells her the rest of the story: the boy's name was Tommy, and every night at exactly 3:17 a.m., the light clicks on by itself. Luna decides to stay. What she finds…
The Key at Juniper Gap Fire Lookout
Luna recounts her night at Juniper Gap Fire Lookout in the summer of 2017, where she met an old fire watcher named Harlan. He had a key he never used—a key to a door in the foundation of the tower, a door that led to a room that wasn't on any blueprint. He told her about the scratching he heard on the inside of that door, every night, for forty years. He gave her the key before he left. She never opened the door. But she kept the key. And sometimes, when she holds it, she feels something on the…
The Gate at Green Lake General Store
In the summer of 2018, Luna stopped at a general store on the edge of Green Lake, Wisconsin, to buy a can of ginger ale and a map. But the store's owner, an old woman named Elsie, had something else to sell — a key to a gate that should not exist. The gate was a simple iron arch at the end of a trail that didn't appear on any map, and behind it was a meadow that felt like a wound. Luna went. She saw things that don't belong in the waking world. And she came back with a feather caught in her…
The String at Grass Creek General Store
Luna recalls the last time she saw the old man who ran Grass Creek General Store, a year before he died. He told her a story about a spool of red string that had hung on a nail behind the counter since the store opened in 1947. Nobody knew where it came from, but every few years someone would come in needing it — to tie a bundle of wildflowers, to mark a trail, to bind a wound that wouldn't stop bleeding. The string never ran out. The old man never sold it. When Luna asked why, he just pointed…
The Stitch at Black Creek General Store
Luna returns to Black Creek General Store in the dead of winter, 2022, to learn why the owner sewed every single item in the store shut. A story about thread, silence, and the thing that crawled under the porch. No neat closure—just a cold February night and a woman who wouldn't speak. #BlackCreek #GeneralStore #WinterHorror #Thread #SewnShut #Silence #PorchCrawling #February #2022 #LunaStory #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #Anthology #Solitary #Atmospheric #Unsettling #RuralHorror #NoClosure…
The Feather at Slate Creek General Store
On a grey October evening in 2017, I stopped at the Slate Creek General Store for gas and ended up listening to the owner's story about a woman who came in every night at exactly 11:47 PM, bought a single pack of orange lighter, and left without a word. She never lit anything. She never bought anything else. After three weeks, he asked her why. What she told him made him board up the store's back door the next morning and never open after dark again. A quiet, aching story about grief and the…
The Hoop at Three Forks General Store
In the autumn of 2007, a traveling carnival sets up for one night in the high desert town of Three Forks, Colorado. Luna's old friend Emily, a carny with a gift for reading people, invites her to see the show—and to witness the hoop, a game that seems to know things about its players that they have never told anyone. The proprietor, a silent woman in a cream linen dress, watches from the shadows. Emily says the hoop is not wooden; it is made of bone. That night, Luna learns why the carnival…
The Sound at Deep Creek Church
In October of 2019, Luna spent three nights in the abandoned Deep Creek Church outside the ghost town of Cerulean, Wyoming. She went looking for a story about a vanished congregation. She found something still singing in the walls. This is what she heard — what she tried not to hear. The church had no bell, no organ, no electricity. But every night at 2:17, a single low note rose from the floorboards. Not a hum. Not a whistle. A voice, maybe, stretched so thin it became a tone. Luna traced it…
The Shelter at Black Creek Summit
Summer 2018. I spent a week alone at an old fire lookout on Black Creek Summit, cataloguing lichen for a grad student whose name I've forgotten. The tower had no radio, no cell service, just a cot and a stove and a logbook no one had touched since '94. On the third night I heard something moving below the catwalk — not an animal, not the wind. The next morning I found the rope ladder coiled neatly on the ground, and a single word scratched into the doorframe: 'Loam.' This is the story of what…
The Bell at Saint Elmo Trailhead
Some trailheads mark distance, not danger. At Saint Elmo, a rusted bell hangs from a cedar branch. No one remembers who hung it. But when Luna rang it at dusk, a figure emerged from the treeline — and the air turned cold. In a clearing where the wind doesn't reach, she learned why the locals whisper about the bell, and why they never hike Saint Elmo alone. #SaintElmo #Trailhead #Bell #AlpineMeadow #Treeline #HorrorPodcast #FexingoHorror #SoloNarrated #Luna #ColoradoRockies #Backpacking #Mystery…
The Light at Lost Creek Schoolhouse
October 1987, Lost Creek, Oregon. A young teacher named Sarah begins staying late at the abandoned schoolhouse, drawn by a flickering light in the third-floor window. The light never moves, never flickers like flame — it pulses, slow, like a heartbeat. She keeps a log. The log is found under her desk months later, the last entry unfinished. I was the one who found it. I'd come to inventory the building for the county. The light was off that day. But the log… the log had a map drawn in the…
The Post at Chandler Ridge General Store
Luna recalls a night in late September 2009 when she stopped for gas at Chandler Ridge General Store, a faded clapboard building at the junction of two dead-end county roads. The old woman behind the counter, Eula, warned her about the mail—letters that arrive with no return address, no postmark, and a name written in ink that looks like yours but isn't. Luna didn't believe her until she found one wedged under her wiper blade three miles down the road. She kept it. She still has it. The…
The Stitch at Black Creek General Store
In the deep woods of Washington's Olympic Peninsula, the general store at Black Creek is the last stop for thirty miles—a place where a stranger's kindness might feel a little too careful. I stopped there one September evening in 2018, hoping for gas and a hot meal, and met a woman whose hands told a story her mouth refused to confirm. She sewed a patch on my jacket with a precision that made my skin prickle, and the thread she used—I'm still not sure what it was made of. This is a quiet…
The Trail at Broken Bridge Creek
August 2003. A solo hiker on the Pacific Crest Trail, just south of Crater Lake, takes a side trail marked on no map. A hand-painted sign reads 'Broken Bridge Creek — 0.7 mi'. She meets an old woman sitting on a fallen log, wearing a dress with no seams, who asks for the time. The woman's fingers are stained with something dark that flakes when she moves. She tells the hiker she walked this trail sixty years ago with her husband and never left. The hiker walks on, finds the bridge — intact…
The Stone at Deep Creek Crossing
A warm October afternoon in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, 1998. Luna meets an old man named Elias at a collapsed stone bridge over Deep Creek. He tells her about the crossing that was never rebuilt — not because the county ran out of money, but because every crew that started work found something in the water that made them stop. A story about a stone that was never meant to be moved, a girl who vanished in 1923, and the sound of a skipping rock that never hits the other side. Quiet…
The Fence at Needle Creek Ranch
In the summer of 2006, a stretch of barbed wire fence on the old Needle Creek Ranch began fixing itself overnight. Not patching—reweaving, strand by strand, as if something on the other side wanted the boundary closed. Luna heard about it from a Forest Service vet named Cora, who'd been riding that line for thirty years. Cora said the fence had been dead wire since the eighties. Then the posts started humming. Then the cattle stopped grazing within a quarter mile. This is a story about a line…
The Bell at Saint Elmo Trailhead
Luna remembers a late autumn hike outside the ghost town of Saint Elmo, Colorado, where an abandoned chapel's bell began to ring at dusk—though its clapper had been removed years before. She recounts meeting an old man at the trailhead who warned her not to follow the sound, and the story he told about the last wedding held there in 1921. A quiet, snow-threatened evening, a cast-iron bell that tolls for no one, and the question of who—or what—keeps the rope pulling. #TheTreeline #FexingoHorror…
The Watcher at Birchwood General Store
Luna recounts a night in 2017 when she stopped at Birchwood General Store, a gas station and grocery on the edge of a small mountain town. The clerk, an older man named Ray, warned her about a local girl who went missing every autumn and returned with stories no one believed. Luna didn't think much of it until she saw the girl — or something like her — standing in the meadow beyond the store, watching the headlights. She never found out who the girl was or where she came from. But she still…
The Map at Three Forks Ranger Station
In the summer of 2019, a volunteer at the Three Forks Ranger Station in northern Montana began receiving hand-drawn maps slipped under the door at night. The maps showed trails that didn't exist on any official survey — trails that led to places the volunteer recognized from dreams she'd never told anyone about. When she followed one of those maps into the woods, she found a cairn of stones with a notebook inside, written in her own handwriting from a date that hadn't happened yet. Tonight…
The Route at Lost Creek General Store
In the fall of 2022, a woman named Carla pulled into the Lost Creek General Store on a Tuesday night, asking for directions to a route that didn't exist on any map. Luna was behind the counter. Carla was wearing a green jacket with the hood up, even though it wasn't raining. She smelled like wet pine and something metallic. She kept looking over her shoulder at the dark window. When Luna told her there was no such road, Carla showed her a hand-drawn map on a paper napkin—the ink was smudged…
The Knife at Windy Pass General Store
It's late August, 2019, and Luna stops at the Windy Pass General Store on the Montana-Idaho line—a low-ceilinged place that smells of dust, motor oil, and something else. The old man behind the counter has a story about a knife that vanishes from its display case every time the wind picks up. But it's always back by morning. He tells Luna how he found it in the woods seventy years ago, how it fits her hand perfectly, how he won't sell it. She buys a bottle of water and leaves. On the way out…
The Arrow at Dogleg Meadow
On a July evening in 2019, I stopped at Dogleg Meadow Campground in the Sierra National Forest. A man named Ted had been living there alone for three weeks, ever since his fiancée walked into the trees during a fight and never came back. The search parties found nothing — not a footprint, not a scrap of fabric. But Ted stayed, marking a grid in the meadow with survey flags and waiting. He showed me the pattern the flags made from above. It looked like an arrow. He said the forest was trying to…
The Pole at Deep Creek Trail
A search-and-rescue volunteer recounts the night she was called to Deep Creek Trail in early spring, when the snow was just beginning to melt. The missing hiker was a geology student named Caleb, who had gone out to photograph a remote waterfall. But what she found at the end of the trail was not a body or a survivor—it was a twenty-foot wooden pole, driven deep into the earth, its surface covered in symbols that looked like a language she had never seen. And in the dirt around it, footprints…
The Fern at Lost Valley Camp
July 1997. A solo camper at a remote site in Lost Valley, Oregon, finds a girl's diary buried under a fern. The entries start innocent—a family vacation, a skipped rock, the way the lake turns black at dusk. Then the handwriting changes. The last page is a single sentence, written in someone else's hand. Luna tells the story of what she found when she dug deeper, and why she never camped alone again. #LostValleyCamp #FernEntry #TheDiary #Oregon #CampHorror #BuriedThings #GirlsHandwriting…
The Blue Door at Lost Creek General Store
September 2022. I drove through Lost Creek, Oregon, a town that exists on some maps but not on GPS. The general store had a blue door that shouldn't have been there — it opened onto a hallway that ran about thirty feet and ended at a wall of unfinished pine. The owner, a woman named Enid, told me the door has been there since 1973. She said it used to lead to the back room, but one morning the room was gone. Just the hallway and the wall. She showed me the ledger where customers have written…
The Last Fire at Lonesome Pine Lookout
In the summer of 2009, I spent a season as a fire lookout at Lonesome Pine Tower in the Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest. The tower stood above a sea of lodgepole pine, with a faint dirt road winding up from the ranger station. My relief was a man named Hollis — sixty-eight years old, quiet, with a habit of leaving his boots unlaced. He had worked the tower for thirty years before retiring in 2008. But on the night of August 17th, after a string of dry lightning storms, I saw a light moving…
The Girls at Juniper Creek Trailhead
The morning after a summer storm, Luna hikes to Juniper Creek Trailhead in Oregon's Willamette National Forest and finds a campsite abandoned mid-breakfast: eggs half-eaten, coffee still warm, a child's pink sneaker propped on a stump like a marker. The girl who left it, a seven-year-old named Emmy, is the only child in a tight-knit group of three single mothers and their daughters who've been camping here every August for a decade. But Emmy's mother is frantic—her daughter vanished from her…
The Boy at Opal Creek Crossing
August on the Olympic Peninsula, and the fog doesn't burn off until noon. Luna meets a twelve-year-old named Caleb at a trailhead near Opal Creek — he is waiting for his mother to come back from a hike she started three days ago. He has her phone, her car keys, and a water bottle she filled before she left. He has not moved from the picnic table since yesterday morning. The ranger says no solo hiker has been reported missing in that drainage. The trail camera at the upper crossing shows a woman…
The Dog at Wolf Creek Fork
September 1997, just outside the ghost town of Molino, Nevada. Luna was twenty-two, camping alone for the first time at an abandoned fork in Wolf Creek. She met an old man named Hollis who lived in a rusted school bus and kept a dog that never blinked, never barked, never left his side. He told her about the thing that lived under the fork — a pale shape that came up through the gravel when the moon was right. She stayed anyway. She woke to the sound of wet footsteps and a low, hollow hum from…
The Lamp at Lost Creek General Store
August 1997. A heat wave settles over Lost Creek, Montana, population 211. The general store stays open late for anyone who needs ice or a cold drink. Luna arrives just before closing and finds the owner, a woman named Edie, restocking shelves by the light of a single kerosene lamp. Edie says the power has been flickering all week. But the lamps on the shelves are not plugged in. And the light behind the glass door of the pie case is not the fluorescent hum of a cooler. Edie tells Luna about…
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