Above the Snowline — Fexingo Horror

November 2019. A snowstorm strands Luna at a remote gas station on Wolf Creek Pass in southern Colorado. The attendant, a man named Silas, tells her about a hermit who lives in an abandoned mine shaft higher up the mountain—a man who never comes down, never speaks, but leaves offerings in the snow. Luna listens, half-frozen, as the storm rages outside. Then she sees a figure standing at the edge o...

Luna recounts a night in February 2019 when she stopped at the Lost Creek Hotel, a crumbling three-story inn on the edge of a dying Colorado mining town. The owner, a hollow-eyed woman named Mrs. Hargrave, warned her never to go down to the basement. But at two in the morning, Luna heard a child's voice calling from below the floorboards. The voice was not asking for help—it was asking for her nam...

Mount Shasta, winter of 2019. Luna takes a last-minute contract to monitor a remote weather station at 9,000 feet. The previous monitor left early without explanation. The station is a single room with a wood stove, a satellite phone, and a logbook that stops on December 15th. On the third night, she hears someone moving outside in the dark. The snow is too deep for any hiker. The footsteps circle...

On a moonless December night in 2017, I drove the old highway over Devil's Slide Summit in Washington County, Iowa. The pass had been closed for decades, but locals still used it after dark when they wanted to be alone. I was chasing a story about a man who had driven off the cliff in 1953 and whose ghost, they said, still walked the road on winter solstice. What I found instead was a woman standi...

In the summer of 2018, Luna took a guiding job on Mount Whitney's Mountaineer's Route. Her first client was an older man named Harold who had summited Whitney forty-seven times. He knew the mountain better than anyone. But on the night before their summit bid, Harold told her about something he had found above the snowline—a crack in the rock that was not a crack, and a sound that was not the wind...

September 2019. Luna is post-holing up the Muir Snowfield on Mount Rainier when she sees a woman in a red parka standing on the Nisqually Icefall — a place no climber should be. The woman waves. Luna waves back. Four hours later, at Camp Muir, the ranger pulls her aside and shows her a photo: a woman in a red parka who went missing on this same route in 1987. The ranger says they get reports of he...

January 1987. A two-lane road through the Uinta Mountains. The Snowbird Motel had twelve rooms and a vacancy sign that buzzed all winter. I stayed there one night because the pass was closed, and I met the woman in Room 9 who had been checking in for thirty years. She never left, and she never stopped waiting for someone who was never going to arrive. This is a story about the kind of cold that ge...

Luna recounts a February night in 2019 at a remote fire lookout in the Sierra Nevada, where a veteran watcher named Del disappeared for three days. When he returned, he was changed—hollow-eyed, silent, and clutching a piece of ice that never melted. Del's logbook recorded something in the snow beyond the tree line, something that moved against the wind. This is the story of what he saw, what he wr...

In the dead of winter, 1998, a solo climber on Frostbite Ridge near Silverton, Colorado meets an old man living alone in a snowbound cabin. He offers her tea, warnings, and a story about the thing that walks the ridge when the wind dies. She stays the night. By morning, the cabin is gone — and so is any trace of the man. But the footprints leading away from where it stood... they don't look human....

In the winter of 2019, I spent four nights alone at the Last Switchback, a remote supply hut on the Icefield Parkway in Alberta, Canada. It was meant to be a routine resupply check for the mountaineering route. But on the second night, a man in a faded red parka knocked on the door, asking to come in. He didn't have a car, didn't have a tent, and his boots were wrong for the season. Over the next...

In the winter of 2023, Luna took a seasonal fire lookout post on Little Moose Hill in Maine's North Woods, a place that had been decommissioned for decades. The tower was a rusted skeleton with a plywood cab. No one else was supposed to be there. But on the third night, she saw a light moving through the trees below, a lantern swinging at a steady pace, carried by someone who should not have been...

Luna recounts a winter she spent in a remote fire lookout in Montana's Bitterroot Range, where a local trapper named Emmett had built a weather shelter on Blacktail Pass. After a snowstorm forced her to take shelter there, she found a journal detailing Emmett's final season — how he started hearing footsteps that stopped exactly at the shelter's door each night, and how, on the last night, the foo...

In the summer of 2017, I spent a week as a volunteer at the Echo Mountain Fire Lookout in the Lolo National Forest of Montana. The tower sat at 7,482 feet, and my job was to watch for smoke. But on the third night, I started seeing lights that weren't fire. A woman named Margot had staffed the lookout thirty years earlier, and the logbook hinted at something she never reported. I found her old bin...

In July of 2019, I spent three nights alone at the third hut on the Teton Crest Trail—a wooden platform with a tin roof and a stove that smoked. The first night, I found the logbook from the previous season. Every entry after September 12th was written in the same hand. Same pen. Same slant. The entries stopped on October 24th, but they didn't describe a hiker anymore. They described something tha...

In this episode, Luna recounts a winter night she spent in a dilapidated shack near the summit of Mount Arvon, Michigan's highest point. It was February, well below zero, and the wind screamed like something alive. She had come to escape—a bad breakup, a stalled life—but the shack held older grief. A previous occupant, a man named Hollis, had left behind journals filled with increasingly frantic o...

Luna recounts a winter she spent as a trail volunteer on Kearsarge Pass in the Sierra Nevada, where an elderly ranger named Harlan warned her never to acknowledge the figures that appear in the snow at dusk. At first she dismissed it as old-man superstition, but after finding a child's boot print leading into a crevasse—and hearing Harlan's story about a missing boy named Elias—she began watching...

In January of 2019, a solo climber named Elise paused to check her transceiver at the 9,400-foot level of Mount Hood's south side route. She found a signal pulsing from beneath a scree field — a frequency that matched no known victim of any recorded avalanche on that mountain. By the time Luna met her, Elise had spent two months digging alone in the snow, following a beacon that never stopped tran...