Episodes
The Man Who Heard the Song at Mile 13
Ray Aldridge works the graveyard shift at a grain silo east of Morrow, a nothing town on a two-lane road. One November night, he takes the long way home and his truck's radio picks up a faint signal at Mile 13. The song is an old country ballad, but the lyrics are wrong—detailing a crash that hasn't happened yet. The more he listens, the more the song becomes about him. By the time he turns the key, the music won't stop, even with the engine off. Luna tells the story of a man who heard himself…
The Man Who Painted the Center Line
Late summer, on a two-lane road outside Lark's Creek, I met a man named Garrett who spent his nights repainting the faded center line. He believed the road was eating itself, mile marker by mile marker, and that if the line vanished, so would he. I watched him work—brush, bucket, a Ford pickup idling in the dark—and he told me about the other side of the line, the one he could hear whispering when the paint was wet. This is what I saw at Mile 13, just before the road remembered how to forget.…
The Woman Who Turned Back at Mile 13
It was late autumn 1997, and I met a woman named Eleanor at a diner off County Road 13, just outside Cedar Crossing, Colorado. She told me about a night years ago when she almost made it to the coast—almost got out—but turned back at that mile marker. She’d been running from something, she said. But when she turned the car around, she found the road behind her didn’t lead anywhere she remembered. The diner waitress said Eleanor had been telling that story to strangers for six years. I asked why…
The Man Who Measured the Road at Mile 13
In the autumn of 2019, a county surveyor named Elias Keane was sent out to recalibrate mile markers along Route 9 in rural Nevada. His notes were meticulous, his measurements precise—except for mile 13, which he recorded as 0.2 miles longer than it should be. He returned at night to check his work, and his truck was found abandoned near the marker, engine running, door open. Luna found his field journal tucked under the driver's seat, the last pages covered in cramped handwriting that grew…
The Woman Who Followed the Footprints at Mile 13
In the deepening dusk of late autumn, Sarah Benoit noticed a set of footprints pressing into the frozen mud beside County Road 13. They were fresh—no dew, no leaf fall—and they led away from the asphalt into the tall grass. She told herself she was just curious. But the prints were too deliberate, too clean, as if someone had just stepped out of the road and walked into the field without a backward glance. When she followed them, she found a house that shouldn't be there. A white clapboard…
The Woman Who Found the Photographs at Mile 13
In July 1995, Eleanor takes a wrong turn on County Road 13 after her grandmother's funeral and stops at an abandoned Sinclair station near Mile 13. Inside, she finds a metal box of photographs—each showing the same stretch of road, each with a woman in a red dress, spanning decades. The most recent photo, dated 1990, is blurry—but the handwriting on the back says 'You'll be here soon.' Eleanor's name is Eleanor. She leaves the box, but the red dress starts appearing in her peripheral vision.…
The Woman Who Closed the Motel at Mile 13
Luna meets an old woman who has been running a motel at the edge of the vanishing mile for forty years. The motel has no guests, no vacancies sign perpetually lit, and a ledger full of names that never check out. As Luna helps her close up for the season, she learns why the doors must stay locked after dark, and why the headlights that sweep past the windows never slow down. A quiet, lingering story about hospitality, loneliness, and the ones who wait at the threshold. #TheVanishingMile #Mile13…
The Woman Who Counted the Trucks at Mile 13
At three in the morning on a rain-slicked stretch of Route 17, just past the collapsed barn, Luna meets a woman in a yellow raincoat sitting on a folding chair beside the road. She's counting trucks. Not logging them — counting them out loud, one by one, in a steady whisper. She says she's been counting for seven years. She says the trucks don't stop. But tonight, one does. And what happens when that truck pulls over unravels everything Luna thought she knew about the road, the dark, and the…
The Woman Who Measured the Distance at Mile 13
In the summer of 1997, a woman named Eleanor parked her station wagon at Mile 13 every night for three weeks, unspooling a surveyor's tape across the asphalt. She claimed the road was shrinking—that the mile between markers was no longer a mile. Luna met her on the third night, sitting on the tailgate with a thermos of coffee and a notebook full of measurements. Eleanor showed her the numbers: 5,279 feet. Then 5,278. Then 5,277. Each night the distance shortened by a foot, and the crows…
The Woman Who Collected Headlights at Mile 13
On a foggy November night in 2019, Luna pulls over at Mile 13 to help a woman with a broken-down station wagon. The woman, Miriam, isn't fixing the car—she's collecting headlights. She shows Luna a mason jar filled with pale yellow light, gathered from passing cars that never stopped. Miriam claims the lights contain fragments of the drivers' intentions—their destinations, their regrets. As Luna watches, the jar begins to glow, and Miriam's face shifts, revealing the cost of holding so many…
The Woman Who Mended the Fence at Mile 13
A woman driving home late on an October night stops at mile 13 to fix a fallen section of barbed wire fence. The repair feels necessary, almost urgent, but the land beyond is fallow and unmarked on any map. A farmer arrives to help, but his hands move wrong and his voice doesn't match the shape of his mouth. By morning the fence is whole again, strung with something that glitters when the headlights hit it. #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #TheVanishingMile #Mile13 #Luna #SoloNarrated #Anthology…
The Woman Who Counted the Crows at Mile 13
Late autumn, 2017. A rural stretch of County Road 17, just north of the old Farrow Bridge. Luna meets an elderly woman named Elara who sits in a folding chair at the edge of a cornfield every evening, counting crows as they gather in the bare trees. Elara claims the crows are messengers from the other side of the road—the side where the road doesn't go anywhere. She's been counting for fifty-three years, and she says the number is always wrong. Luna stays until dusk, watching the birds settle…
The Woman Who Planted the Orchard at Mile 13
It was autumn 1998, just north of the small town of Pineridge, where the mist hangs low over the apple orchards at dawn. Luna met a woman named Esther who spent her nights planting trees along a stretch of road known to locals as the Vanishing Mile—a place where maps refuse to stay accurate, where the mile marker reads 13 no matter how far you drive. Esther wasn't trying to grow fruit; she was trying to anchor something, to give the road a reason to stay still. Luna helped her dig holes in the…
The Woman Who Tended the Wildflowers at Mile 13
In the summer of 2022, just past midnight on a stretch of County Road 7 that locals call The Vanishing Mile, I met a woman tending a patch of wildflowers at mile marker 13. She was on her knees in the gravel, bare hands working the soil, a mason jar of water beside her. She told me she was keeping the flowers alive because they marked something important—something she'd found buried there years ago. But when I asked what, she just smiled and pointed to the flowers. I came back the next night.…
The Woman Who Counted the White Stones at Mile 13
A bitter November evening on a rural Vermont road. Luna meets an old woman named Hester who spends her nights placing white stones at the edge of the pavement beside mile marker 13. Each stone represents a car that never made it through the bend. But the stones keep rearranging themselves, and Hester insists they are counting something else—something that has nothing to do with cars. Luna stays long enough to see the stones shift, and to hear the sound of gravel crunching where no one walks. An…
The Woman Who Knocked at Mile 13
A woman driving home from a late shift on Route 19 sees a figure at the side of the road near the Mile 13 marker. She offers a ride to a young woman in a torn raincoat who speaks only in fragments, and who seems to know things about her she never told anyone. The mile stretches longer than it should. The dashboard clock stops. And when she finally reaches town, she finds the passenger door open and the seat damp with something that isn't rain. Set on a cold October night in 2017, on a rural…
The Woman Who Found the Key at Mile 13
October 1997, just past midnight on a dirt access road off Route 9 in western Maine. A woman named Cora pulls over at Mile 13 to check a rattle in her engine and finds a brass key taped under the bumper of her own car. She doesn't remember putting it there. The key fits nothing in her life—not her house, her car, her job, her ex-husband's place. But the gas station attendant at the last town, a man with too-still eyes, told her to keep driving until the road ends. This is what she found…
The Woman Who Saw the Map at Mile 13
November 1989. A rural highway in eastern Oregon, a few miles outside the ghost town of Lost Creek. A woman named Nora pulls over at a familiar mile marker to check her atlas, only to find the map has rewritten itself. Roads that dead-end at empty sky. Towns that don't exist. A single handwritten line: 'You are here.' But 'here' isn't the Oregon desert anymore. It's somewhere older. Somewhere that shouldn't fit on paper. Luna recounts the story Nora told her one night at a diner — the kind of…
The Man Who Listened at Mile 13
I met a man at a gas station outside Fayetteville, Tennessee, in the fall of 2019. He was filling up a rusted sedan at 2 AM. He told me about the mile marker that plays back sound—not just any sound, but your own voice from a few seconds before. He said he had been driving that stretch for weeks, testing it, and that the delay was shrinking. I asked him why he kept coming back. He didn't answer. He just stood there, listening to the dark road behind us. That night, I learned that some echoes…
The Man Who Mapped the Stars at Mile 13
A late-autumn night, 1997. A man named Arthur stands at Mile 13 every clear night for three weeks, sketching constellations in a worn notebook. He tells me he is not an astronomer. He is looking for a pattern in the lights above—one that matches a line he saw on the road the night his wife drove away. The stars won't hold still. The mile marker flickers. And when I finally look at his drawings, the constellations are not the ones I recognize. #TheVanishingMile #Mile13 #Arthur #Constellations…
The Man Who Pulled Over at Mile 13
On a bone-dry October night in 2019, Luna stops at a roadside diner outside Deming, New Mexico, after a stretch of highway that feels longer than it should. She meets a man named Elias, a retired geologist with a paper map and a story about a mile marker that refuses to stay still. His truck is full of survey equipment and road logs. He says he has been measuring the same half-mile for six weeks. Luna listens as he explains the impossible geometry of Mile 13—the way distances stretch and…
The Man Who Lived at the Bottom of Mile 13
On a frozen December night in 2021, I met a man living in a culvert beneath Mile 13 on Old Hollow Road. He'd been there for seven winters, he said — not hiding, not camping, but waiting. He showed me his home: a dry concrete pipe with a mattress, a kerosene lamp, and a wall of handwritten dates. He told me he was the only one who remembered what the mile marker had been before it was changed. When I asked him what it used to say, he just pointed to the ground. I looked down. There was another…
The Man Who Filled the Potholes at Mile 13
It was a dry autumn in 1987 when old man Corso started patching the potholes on Route 9, just past the Mile 13 marker. He said the road was 'bleeding through' and that the county wouldn't listen. I met him at dawn near the old grain elevator, his truck bed full of cold patch and gravel, his hands shaking. He told me about the sounds—like something breathing up through the asphalt—and about the woman in a blue dress who stood at the same spot every night, waiting for a ride that never came. He…
The Man Who Counted the Trucks at Mile 13
It's late autumn, 1998, on a forgotten stretch of County Road 17 just outside the town of Harland, where the mile markers skip from 12 to 14 no matter how many times you drive it. Luna meets a man named Corvin, who has been sitting in a folding chair at the side of the road for three nights, tallying trucks on a clipboard. There is no reason for him to be there. There is no truck traffic on this road. But the numbers on his page keep climbing, and the headlights keep coming out of the dark even…
The Man Who Watched the Headlights at Mile 13
In the summer of 1997, on a dead-straight stretch of County Road 13 outside the dried-up town of Holden, Missouri, a retired highway patrol officer named Harlan Keene spent his nights in a lawn chair beside the mile marker, watching headlights approach and vanish. He claimed he was counting cars for a traffic study the county never authorized. But when a young woman stopped to ask for directions, she saw something in his notebook that made her drive through the night without ever looking back.…
The Woman Who Burned the Roadmap at Mile 13
June 1999, a gas station off Highway 13 in rural Oklahoma. Luna meets an old woman burning road maps in a steel drum behind the pumps. She claims every map of this stretch has a deliberate error — a town that doesn't exist, a road that goes nowhere — to trap anyone who follows the wrong line. She's been correcting them for forty years, but tonight she's burning the last one. Because the cartographers finally noticed. And they're sending someone to collect what she erased. A quiet, fragile story…
The Man Who Sold Maps at Mile 13
Luna recalls a July night in 2017 when she pulled over at a gas station outside the small town of Marrow, Illinois, just past mile marker 13. Inside, an old man named Harlan sat behind a counter cluttered with hand-drawn maps. He didn't sell gas or candy—just maps of roads that didn't exist on any official chart. He told her about a stretch of asphalt that could fold in on itself, and the people who paid him to help them find their way back. When she left, her own map felt heavier, and the road…
The Woman Who Fed the Dogs at Mile 13
On a cold November night in 2021, Luna stopped at a gas station outside of Nowhere, Tennessee, and met a woman named Cora who had been feeding the stray dogs that gathered around Mile 13 every night for three years. Cora told her about the dogs — how they appeared out of the fog, how they never barked, how they seemed to be waiting for someone who never came. Luna helped her carry bags of kibble to the treeline, and what she saw there changed how she understood the road. A story about kindness…
The Man Who Painted the Yellow Line at Mile 13
Township Road 13, rural Pennsylvania, autumn 1998. A highway striper named Earl Rourke gets a night contract to repaint the center line at Mile 13. The road is empty, the fog is low, and the yellow paint glows like something liquid. Earl trusts his equipment and his instincts until he sees a figure standing on the line he just painted. The figure does not move. The line does not dry. And the closer Earl gets, the more he understands that some roads are not meant to be marked. They are meant to…
The Man Who Opened the Trunk at Mile 13
On a humid August night in 1987, outside the crossroads of Pender and Route 9, Luna's cousin pulled over to help a stranded motorist near mile marker 13. The man in the sedan wore a clean suit but had dirt under his nails and asked only for a jump start. But when Luna's cousin popped the hood, he heard a sound from the trunk that made him freeze—a rhythmic tapping, like knuckles against metal from the inside. This episode follows what he did next, what he saw when the trunk finally opened, and…
The Woman Who Fueled the Lights at Mile 13
September 2004, just past midnight on a Tuesday. A woman named Cora Martin pulls her sedan into the last gas station before Mile 13 — a single pump under a buzzing fluorescent canopy on a two-lane highway in eastern New Mexico. The attendant is young, maybe nineteen, with a name tag that reads 'Jesse'. He doesn't look at her when he asks for cash upfront. The pump clicks and whirs but nothing comes out. She taps the glass. He says the pump works fine. She tries again. Nothing. Then she notices…
The Man Who Fed the Pines at Mile 13
Late October, 2018. A stretch of county road in rural Tennessee where the pines grow close to the asphalt and the needles fall so thick they muffle your footsteps. Luna parks her pickup at mile 13 and meets an old man in a canvas coat who spends every night feeding the trees. Not with fertilizer or water—with something he carries in a rusted metal bucket. He says the pines remember what happened here. He says they get hungry after dark. She follows him into the woods to see what he pours at the…
The Man Who Read Aloud at Mile 13
It was the summer of 1998, just past midnight, when I pulled off at a rest stop near the Oklahoma-Texas line and found a man sitting alone at a picnic table, reading aloud to no one. His voice was steady, unhurried, like he'd been at it for hours. The book in his hands was a paperback with the cover torn off, and he was reading about a road that went on forever, about a driver who never arrived. I sat down across from him, and he told me he'd been reading the same book for thirty years, every…
The Woman Who Collected the Dust at Mile 13
In the summer of 2019, a woman named Etta started sweeping the shoulder of Route 9 near Mile 13. She lived in a rusted camper behind the gas station at the junction, and every night around 2 a.m., she'd walk out with a hand broom and a metal dustpan, collecting the dirt that settled on the asphalt. Nobody asked why. Nobody wanted to know. But the dust had a smell to it—like old pennies and wet fur—and the pile in her camper grew faster than it should have. I met her on a humid July night when…
The Man Who Haunted the Crossroads at Mile 13
It was autumn of 2019 when I met a man named Elias at a gas station near the crossroads just past Mile 13. He was filling up a rusted sedan with a backseat full of road atlases and coffee-stained notebooks. He told me he'd been driving the same stretch of Route 9 for eleven years, trying to find the exact spot where the road forgets itself. He showed me a photograph he'd taken at midnight — a crossroads that didn't appear on any map, with a signpost pointing into nothing. That night, I followed…
The Boy Who Found the Mile at Mile 13
It was the summer of 1998 in Carthage, Illinois, a town that clings to the Mississippi River like something too tired to let go. I was seventeen, and I worked the register at the U-Stop on Route 96, where the highway goes from four lanes to two and the corn closes in on both sides. That's where I met the boy. He came in just after midnight, wearing a shirt too thin for the damp August air, and he asked me if I knew how to get to Mile 13. Not the mile marker, he said — the mile itself. The…
The Man Who Counted the Signs at Mile 13
Summer 1998. A state road crew worker named Eddie Doran spent eleven nights counting every sign on a 13-mile stretch of County Road 17 in eastern Montana. Not the number of signs — the number of times each sign had been touched by a dead hand. He kept the tally in a spiral notebook. When the foreman found the notebook, the last page said 'They touch the green ones first.' Then the foreman went blind in his right eye. I met Eddie at a rest stop outside Miles City. He showed me his left hand.…
The Woman Who Heard the Hum at Mile 13
On a humid August night in 2017, on a dead-straight stretch of County Road 17 outside Nowheresville, Missouri, a woman named Cora pulled over at mile marker 13 because her engine was making a sound she couldn't place. But the sound wasn't coming from the engine. It was coming from the road itself — a low, rhythmic hum that seemed to vibrate up through the tires, through the seat, through her bones. Cora was a sound engineer by trade, so she did what she always did: she listened. She recorded.…
The Woman Who Fixed the Sign at Mile 13
In the fall of 2019, a woman named Ellen parked her pickup at Mile 13 on County Road 17, just outside the town of Bitterweed, Oklahoma. She had a toolbox and a can of reflective paint, and she intended to repair the rusted mile marker sign that had been crooked for as long as anyone could remember. The road was quiet that Tuesday night—too quiet. No traffic, no wind, no crickets. Ellen worked by flashlight, tightening bolts and straightening the post, and when she finished, she noticed…
The Woman Who Waited at Mile 13
December 1994. A woman named Eleanor has been waiting at Mile 13 for twenty-two years. She arrived as a teenager on a Greyhound bus, told to wait for a man who never came. Now she lives in the gas station's back room, sweeping the same floor, watching the same headlights slide past the same window. When Luna stops for gas, Eleanor tells her about the road's habit of taking things — people, memories, even the sound of your own name. And about the moment she realized she wasn't waiting anymore.…
The Girl Who Walked the Shoulder at Mile 13
Luna recalls a cold October night in 2018 when a girl named Mira appeared on the shoulder of County Road 13, just past the mile marker. She was barefoot, wearing a thin hospital gown, and wouldn't say where she came from. The road that night seemed longer than it should have been. The headlights caught something in the gravel that didn't belong there. Luna drove her to the gas station at the junction, but when she turned around, the passenger seat was empty and the door was still closed. A…
The Man Who Dug the Culvert at Mile 13
It was late October, about three in the morning, and I was driving the back roads near a stretch they call the Vanishing Mile. The trees were bare, the leaves long gone. I pulled over near mile marker 13 to check my map. That's when I saw him — a man in a yellow raincoat, standing beside a culvert pipe, holding a shovel. He wasn't moving. He was just staring into the dark mouth of that pipe. I asked if he needed help. He said he'd been digging for three days. He said the water kept running, no…
The Woman Who Measured the Skid Marks at Mile 13
A forensic road investigator named Margot shows Luna a set of skid marks that appear to emerge from the asphalt itself — curving impossibly for nearly a mile before vanishing into the shoulder at Mile 13. She has logged thirty-seven such marks over the past decade, each one appearing overnight, each one ending at the exact same GPS coordinate. The state police dismissed her reports. The county refuses to repave. But Margot has the photographs, the measurements, the tire tread patterns that…
The Man Who Mended the Guardrail at Mile 13
Luna returns to the stretch of highway she's been avoiding for weeks — the curve just past mile marker thirteen where the guardrail was crumpled and someone kept coming back to straighten it. She meets a man in a reflective vest who tells her he's been repairing the same damage every night for ten years. Not because it gets hit again. Because it never happened in the first place. A story about a road that can't remember what it was supposed to be, told from the gravel shoulder on a damp October…
The Man Who Built the Bridge at Mile 13
October 1998. A cold night in the town of Stillwater, thirty miles from Mile 13. I met a man named Elias Crane, a retired civil engineer who once built a bridge on that exact stretch of road. He told me about the bridge's construction, the workers who refused to return after the first night, and the sound that came from under the deck every time a car passed overhead. He showed me photographs. He showed me the plans. And then he opened a locked drawer and pulled out a spool of audio tape that…
The Trucker Who Forgot How to Stop at Mile 13
November, just after midnight on a cold stretch of State Route 9. I was parked at the pull-off by the old mile marker 13, engine off, watching the fog roll in over the corn stubble. That's when I saw the headlights — a single pair, coming from the east, moving steady. They didn't slow for the curve. They didn't slow for anything. The truck passed me doing maybe seventy, and I saw the driver's face in the dash glow — blank, eyes straight ahead, hands locked on the wheel at ten and two. I thought…
The Man Who Tried to Leave at Mile 13
It was November, just after midnight, when I pulled off at mile 13 to check a rattle under the hood. That's when I saw him — a man in a tan windbreaker, standing at the edge of the ditch, staring into the dark field beyond. He was trying to leave. He had been trying for hours. He told me about the road that won't let you turn around, the exits that loop back to the same mile marker, and the thin place where the asphalt doesn't hold. I listened with my hand on the door handle. I didn't get out…
The Woman Who Painted the Mile Markers
One evening in late October, I met an old woman on a gravel pull-off near the county line. She had a bucket of white paint and a brush, touching up the numbers on a mile marker. There was something methodical about the way she worked — like she was performing a ritual she'd done a thousand times before. She told me her name was Eleanor, and that she had been painting this road for sixty-three years. She said the road forgot itself sometimes, and the markers kept it honest. I asked her what she…
The Man Who Swept the Crosswalk at Mile 13
Outside the town of Cragmire, just past Mile 13 on a forgotten county road, there is a crosswalk that leads nowhere. No stop sign, no traffic light, no sidewalk on either side—just faded white stripes painted across the asphalt between two fields of dry grass. Every morning at 4:47, an old man in a yellow raincoat sweeps it with a push broom, back and forth, as if waiting for someone to cross. When Luna stopped to ask him why, he told her he had been sweeping the same six feet of road for…
The Man Who Measured the Road at Mile 13
Summer 1993. A retired surveyor named Henry Pullman arrives in the small town of Crayburn, Texas, to re-measure State Road 17 after a fatal accident at mile marker 13. The town's records show the road is exactly 13.0 miles from the county line to the old bridge—but his instruments keep reading 13.2. The extra two-tenths of a mile don't appear on any map, yet they exist every time he drives it. As he walks the phantom stretch on foot, he finds a guardrail that shouldn't be there, a patch of…
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