Lighthouse Logs — Fexingo Horror

Luna recounts a sleepless August night at the Desert Rose Motel on Route 66 near Needles, California, in 2003. The ice machine outside her door hummed without ice. She met a girl named Mira who never touched the ground, and an old clerk who warned her about the third floor. By dawn, Luna understood why the machine never stopped — and what it was waiting for. A slow-burn encounter about liminal spa...

On a frozen January night in 2003, Luna drove out to the old Beaman Observatory on the outskirts of a town called Stull, Kansas, following a rumor that the dome had been seen rotating at 2 AM. Inside, she found no sign of the caretaker who was supposed to be dead, but the telescope was still warm. The brass eyepiece bore a single thumbprint. When she pressed her eye to it, she saw a man standing i...

A lone traveler pulls into a small-town diner off Route 287 in the dead of winter. The place is open, the coffee is hot, and the only other customer sits in a booth that should have been destroyed by a fire years ago. The waitress knows the order before it's spoken. The jukebox plays a song that hasn't been recorded yet. And when the traveler tries to leave, the road out of town loops back to the...

In the winter of 2019, I stopped at a truck stop outside Deming, New Mexico, to let a blizzard pass. The place was nearly empty—just a cashier reading a paperback and a long-haul driver nursing coffee in the back. At 3:17 AM, the payphone near the restrooms started ringing. I watched it ring twelve times before the cashier said, 'It's been ringing at 3:17 every night for a week. Nobody ever answer...

It's October 1998, just past midnight, on a stretch of Route 17 in northern Minnesota. Luna pulls into an all-night diner called The Copper Skillet—a place she'd stopped at a dozen times before. But tonight the jukebox is playing a song she's never heard, and the waitress knows her order before she speaks. The pie is still warm. The coffee is still black. But the clock on the wall ticks backward,...

Somewhere just east of Bakersfield, off the I-5 at the Cactus Springs Travel Plaza, there's a chapel that never locks its doors. I stopped there at 2:47 AM on a Thursday in mid-December, six years ago. The air inside smelled like dust and candle wax, and the pew cushions were worn smooth by hands I never saw. A woman in a blue coat was kneeling at the front, her lips moving without sound. She didn...

Tucked off a country highway in central Ohio, the Wash & Fold on Sandusky Pike stayed open all night for the truckers and the night-shift nurses. I stopped there just past two in the morning, November of 2009, because I needed a few quarters and a half-hour of fluorescent light. The place was empty except for the machines and a folded sweater on bench three. The sweater didn't move. It was still t...

In the small Michigan town of St. Ignace, the municipal parking garage on State Street has a reputation for swallowing cars and spitting them back hours later with the odometer rolled forward. Luna's cousin Nate worked the night shift there one winter, and what he saw in the security monitors—and what he found in the elevator shaft—made him quit without collecting his last paycheck. This is a stor...

A moonless August night on Route 17 in eastern Kentucky. Luna pulls off at a faded motor court called the Sleepy Hollow Inn, drawn by a single working light: the swimming pool, glowing turquoise through chain-link. The clerk is a woman in a beige cardigan who says the motel has been closed for three years. She says the pool filter hums on its own. She says there's something at the bottom that wasn...

On a sticky August night in 2017, Luna pulled over at a small-town drawbridge on the Blackwater River in Millhaven, Virginia—just to watch it rise. The bridge-keeper was a gaunt woman named Vera who hadn't had a boat request in hours. But she said the bridge opened anyway, every night at exactly 2:17 a.m., for something only she could see. Luna stayed to watch, and what she saw between the lifted...

I drove County Road 7 on a Tuesday in October, just after midnight, to clear my head. The road was straight for miles through flat farmland, and I remember thinking how strange it was that the white line seemed to drift toward the shoulder as I watched. Then I noticed the asphalt stretching ahead had a faint ripple, like a sheet being pulled taut. I pulled over at an abandoned grain elevator and g...

December 14th, 2:47 AM. The U-Store-It off Route 9 in Hadley, New York. I was there to clear out my aunt's unit after she passed — the one she'd been paying for forty years but never once mentioned. The lock was rusted through. The air inside was wrong — too warm, too damp, smelling of soil and something I want to call salt but that wasn't right either. What I found in that eight-by-ten room chang...

Luna drives through a late October fog into the tiny town of Cold Spring, Minnesota, looking for a shortcut home. She finds instead an old cemetery with a freshly dug grave and a sexton who has been waiting for her. The man knows her name. He knows her grandmother's maiden name. He knows the date she will die — and he shows her the headstone already carved. A quiet, bone-deep encounter about being...

Somewhere outside Ely, Minnesota, on a frozen February night in 2019, Luna stopped at a diner called the Northern Star. The waitress was too cheerful, the coffee too hot, and the jukebox played a song she hadn't heard since childhood. When she went to pay, the receipt was dated seven years before. The waitress said the diner had been closed since 2012. Luna drove away with the receipt still in her...

An old stone church in Winslow, Vermont, one valley over from a town that burned in 1987, holds a bell that rings on its own. Luna climbed the tower one November dusk to see why the rope still moved. The door clicked shut behind her. What she heard in the dark between the bells was not a mechanism. And the voice that answered when she spoke into the black—it knew her name, and said she had been ex...

A solitary night at a dying drive-in theater in Dunmore, Ohio, where Luna goes hoping for an old film but finds the screen showing something else entirely. Summer 2019, just past midnight. The projector runs without film, the speaker poles whisper static with voices underneath, and a man in the third row watches a loop of his own last moments. A story about the places that remember what happened t...

In the spring of 2017, I pulled into a roadside motel off Route 50 in Nevada, somewhere between Ely and nothing. The clerk at the front desk had my sister's face—the same birthmark under her left eye, the same way she tucked her hair behind her ear. My sister had been dead for six years. The clerk didn't know her name, didn't know mine, but she smiled like she was waiting for me. The room was exac...

It's late October, just past midnight, and I'm driving through the high desert of New Mexico on a stretch of road that hasn't seen a new tire track in hours. The exit for Coyote Springs appears out of nowhere — a town that stopped being a town when the interstate bypassed it in the 1980s. But there's a gas station still open, a single bulb over the pump, and a woman inside who knows my name before...

November 1997. The Greyhound depot in Meridian, Mississippi, where I waited for a bus that never came. The ticket agent knew my name before I spoke it. The vending machine hummed a song I recognized from a year before. And the woman in the plastic chair — she had been waiting longer than anyone should. This is a story about bus stations that never let you leave, about schedules that list only arri...

October 2023. A two-lane blacktop in eastern Colorado, between the towns of Arapahoe and Punkin Center. Luna's car had been the only set of headlights for thirty miles when she noticed the mile marker. Not the number itself — that was normal, 188, same as always — but the way it stood. The post had been painted fresh. The reflective sheen was wrong. And the shadow it cast under her high beams didn...

On a humid August night in 2017, Luna pulled off a two-lane highway into the parking lot of a gas station in Moweaqua, Illinois—a town that felt like it was holding its breath. The clerk behind the bulletproof glass didn't blink. His name tag read 'James', but the way he moved, the way his gaze tracked her without ever settling... he wasn't wrong, exactly. He was just off. And the longer she stood...

February 2023, just outside Ely, Minnesota. I took a job cataloguing ice-fishing shacks on White Iron Lake — counting the shacks, noting which were abandoned, reporting back to the county. It was meant to be a quiet week of solitude. But on the third night, I found a shack that wasn't on any map. Inside: a kerosene lamp still burning, a hole cut in the ice, and a single photograph face-down on the...

Outside a Waffle House off Interstate 55 in Mississippi, the parking lot was empty but the fluorescent lights were on. I stopped for coffee at 3 a.m. and found a waitress named Della who had been working the same shift for forty-three years. She poured my cup without asking what I wanted. She knew. The cook behind the window never turned around. The grill sizzled but nothing was on it. I sat in Bo...

In the summer of 2019, Luna pulled off Interstate 55 at Exit 73, somewhere between Missouri and nowhere. A twenty-four-hour burger joint called 'The Hub' sat alone under a buzzing sign. She ordered at 2:13 a.m. — a number forty-three combo with a chocolate shake. The cashier, a girl named Beth with tired eyes and a name tag that didn't fit right, took her money and said, 'You might want to sit nea...

In the summer of 2007, I drove through a stretch of Texas farmland where a single billboard stood by an empty field. The woman on it was advertising a diner that had been closed for years. But every time I passed, her dress was a different color. Her smile had shifted. Her eyes followed the car. I started stopping. I started taking photos. The last time I saw her, she was wearing a dress I had wor...