Side B — Fexingo Horror

Luna recalls a winter evening in Pawhuska, Oklahoma, when she helped a friend clear out an abandoned church. In the basement, they found an old upright piano with a single yellowed key that played a faint B-flat whenever the wind blew. But as they worked, the piano began to play on its own—a slow, halting version of a hymn Luna's grandmother used to hum. They tried to leave, but the door had locke...

Luna pulls a cracked 45 from a thrift store bin in Marfa, Texas. The label says 'Side B: The Warden's Waltz' but the grooves hold a sound no one pressed. She drives into the empty desert of Route 54 to find the source of that sound — a gas station that shouldn't exist, a radio tower that never stopped broadcasting, and a man who has been waiting for someone to hear him for thirty years. This episo...

In the winter of 2019, I found myself in Cottonwood, Texas, a town so small it doesn't appear on most maps. I was there to catalog the contents of an abandoned Methodist church before it was demolished. The building had been locked up since 1973, sealed not by law but by something the locals wouldn't talk about. I expected dust, pews, maybe a forgotten hymnbook. What I didn't expect was the organ....

October 1997. Three in the morning at the Lone Star Truck Stop outside Needles, California. Luna was two weeks into a drive from Tucson to Portland when she pulled off the highway to sleep in the cab of her pickup. But the jukebox in the all-night diner kept playing the same song — a Patsy Cline B-side she hadn't heard since her grandmother played it on a crackling 45. The waitress said nobody had...

June 1997. Luna is driving through the Oklahoma Panhandle when her car radio dies just outside a tiny town called Forgan. She pulls into a gas station that shouldn't exist—a single pump under a flickering orange light, a cashier who looks like he hasn't moved in forty years. He tells her about the night in 1962 when the town's radio tower stopped broadcasting. Not a technical failure. Something el...

A slow-burn encounter at a dying gas station in the Texas panhandle, where a night shift clerk discovers a customer who has been pumping gas for hours, his car long empty, the hose not even in the tank. The closer she watches, the more she realizes the pump is not measuring fuel but something else entirely, and the man at the nozzle is not really there. Set in Cactus, Texas, in the dead of winter,...

On a hot Friday night in August 1997, Luna's cousin Della called from the feed store in Lusk, Wyoming, saying something was wrong with the birds. The heat had driven them restless, but it was the quiet after sundown that worried her — a stillness on the gravel lot where nothing moved. Luna drove out to find Della standing in the open bay door with a pale face and a story about a truck that had pul...

Luna finds a crate of unlabeled reel-to-reel tapes at a thrift store in Marfa, Texas, on a hot July night in 2019. Each tape contains a single voice—different people, different eras—all saying the same thing: 'I'm still here.' She takes one home. It plays on a loop, even after she unplugs the machine. The voice on that tape is her own, recorded before she was born. A quiet meditation on time, inhe...

A burnt-out short-order cook at a truck stop in Lordsburg, New Mexico, takes the graveyard shift during a record-breaking heatwave. At 3 AM, a dust-caked man in a soiled wedding suit walks in and orders a single slice of apple pie—and a side of ice. The pie is untouched. The ice melts. The man sits in the far booth every night, never speaking, never leaving until the cook finally looks away. Over...

Luna recalls a winter night in 1992 at the Carnegie Library in Elmdale, Kansas, where she worked the closing shift. A regular patron, Mrs. Helen Corrigan, stayed past midnight every Tuesday, always returning the same book — a 1909 field guide to the birds of the Great Plains — untouched. When Luna finally asked why, Helen told her about the bird that landed on her windowsill the night her husband...

October 1997. A traveling piano tuner arrives in Paradox, New York, a town that doesn't appear on any map. He is hired to tune the old upright at the First Baptist Church, but the piano doesn't need tuning — it needs someone to listen. The man stays for three days, sleeping in the sanctuary, and the townspeople begin to recall a musician who vanished from the same church in 1937. The episode is ab...

Luna recalls a night in September 1997 when she stopped for gas at a Conoco station on the edge of Tularosa, New Mexico. The attendant was a woman named Ellen who hadn't spoken in three years. Luna sat with her in the quiet booth as the neon hummed and the desert pressed in. Ellen pointed at a photograph pinned to the cash register — a man with no face. Luna doesn't know what happened after she le...

Summer of 1987. A solo gas station attendant on the night shift at the Texaco on County Road 9 outside Culpepper, Ohio. A woman pulls in at 2 a.m. in a dust-caked sedan. She doesn't need gas. She doesn't need directions. She needs the attendant to hear her out—about the thing she found in her basement three nights ago, the thing that followed her up the stairs, out the door, and onto the highway....

Luna recalls a September night in 2017, driving through Parshall, North Dakota, when a detour led her past an old cemetery where a chain-link fence was slowly being consumed by wild rose vines. She stopped to photograph it and met an old man named Harlan who told her about the fence's history—and the thing that started growing through it after the last burial in 1923. Luna went back the next morni...

Luna recounts a night in November 1998 when she pulled into a Conoco station on the edge of Tularosa, New Mexico, just after midnight. The air smelled of creosote and burnt sugar. The attendant—a man named Clyde who wore a name tag upside down—filled her tank without speaking. Then he pointed toward the restroom hallway and said: 'Don't go past the soda machine.' She went anyway. What she found be...

On the last night of August, driving south through the California desert, I stopped at the Wayfarer Motel in Rosarita—a faded pink U-shaped building with a neon sign missing half its letters. The clerk, a woman named Miriam, handed me a key to Room 8 but warned me not to turn off the bathroom light. She said the previous guest had checked out three weeks ago and never came back for his things. Tha...

It was the summer of '94 in a town called Mulvane, Kansas, and the only place open past midnight was the Hand-Wash Only Laundromat on Amity Street. I was there because my apartment's water had been shut off — again — and I needed to wash the sheets. That's where I met the weeping woman. She didn't look like much at first: a thin woman in a gray coat, bent over a machine that wasn't running, her sh...

November 1987. A one-room schoolhouse on Mink Creek Road, outside a town called Prosper, Texas. Luna's great-aunt taught there in the 1940s—eight grades, one room, a cast-iron stove. The school closed in '51, but the bell still rings some nights. This is the story of how Luna went to find out why, and what she found in the dirt under the floorboards. A story about what children hear when no one is...

It was late October, 1997, when Luna stopped for gas at a place called Blue Spur, Texas — a town so small it didn't even have a stoplight, just a bar called the Blue Spur Lounge and a motel that rented by the hour. She met a man named Everett who said he used to be a guitarist, before his hand got crushed in a press at the grain mill. He showed her the jukebox — a Wurlitzer from 1954 that still ha...

December 1987. A 24-hour pharmacy on the edge of Moline, Illinois, where the fluorescent lights hum and the aisles stretch empty past midnight. Luna's cousin took the graveyard shift for extra money, and for three weeks she learned the rhythms of the place—the crackle of the police scanner, the shuffle of insomniacs, the rattle of the drive-through window. But there was a customer who came every n...

It’s late October on Farm Road 1870 in Dorsey, Illinois, and the only place still lit is the Spin Cycle laundromat. A woman named Elaine shows up every Thursday at 2 a.m. to wash her dead husband’s shirts. The attendant, a kid named Marcus, has started saving her a machine. But one night, the shirts come back with something in the pockets. Not lint. Not a receipt. Something that shouldn’t have bee...

In the summer of 1997, Luna spent a week at the Starlite Trailer Court outside of Nowhere, New Mexico, where the manager's son kept a collection of cassette tapes under his bed. Each tape held a different voice — but they all ended the same way. A story about the last sound you hear before the line goes dead. #StarliteTrailerCourt #NowhereNewMexico #cassettetapes #thelastcheckin #Luna #FexingoHorr...

Luna remembers a night in late October of 1997, when she worked the front desk at a run-down motel on County Line Road, somewhere between nowhere and the state line. A man in a gray coat checked in around two in the morning, paid cash for room 14, and asked if there was a phone in the room. There wasn't. Then he asked if she could transfer a call to his room once it came in. He gave a number—a lon...

Luna recalls a winter shift at a truck-stop grill on the Hi-Line of Montana, where a regular named Doyle came in every night at 2:47 AM and ordered the same thing: black coffee, slice of apple pie, no ice water. But one night, something changed. The pie was still warm. The coffee still black. But the silence in the booth was wrong. This is the story of the night the grill stayed open for one last...

July 1987, just west of Adrian, Texas, on the old alignment of Route 66. The Sunburst Motor Court has been closed for eleven years, but Luna's uncle used to manage it, and when she was clearing out his storage unit she found a key ring with a single brass key tagged ROOM 9. She drove out there on a Tuesday afternoon, the asphalt soft under her tires, the sign still reading VACANCY in letters that...