Backwoods and Black Salt — Fexingo Horror

In October of 2019, Luna spent a week at a rented farmhouse off Gallows Hollow Road in eastern Kentucky, hoping to finish a manuscript before winter set in. The house came with a neglected apiary and a handwritten note from the previous tenant: 'Do not take honey after the first hard frost.' She ignored it. By the third night, the bees began to gather at her windows after dark, pressing against th...

October 1987. A man named Cobbett inherits a farmhouse on Orrin's Ridge, a road so crooked the mail truck won't run it. The root cellar under the kitchen holds jars of things his great-aunt put up—mason jars with labels in a language he doesn't read and contents that don't rot, don't freeze, don't change. He opens one. Then another. Then he starts to hear her humming at night, coming from under th...

In October of 2003, Luna's cousin Molly took a seasonal job at Hargrave's Corn Maze outside Shiloh, Indiana. It was supposed to be easy money, guiding lost tourists out of the stalks before closing time. But some nights, the people who went in didn't come out the same way they went in. Some nights, the maze felt... bigger than the field it sat on. Molly started keeping a tally of guests who entere...

In the fall of 2017, on the outskirts of Harristown, Indiana, a retired schoolteacher named Margaret Pringle began growing lettuce in her greenhouse. Not just any lettuce — the flavor was wrong, and the soil never froze. Her neighbor, a woman named June, brought me a sample in a mason jar because she couldn't sleep. The leaves were dark, veined like a hand, and they wilted as if they knew they wer...

In the autumn of 1987, a dry season in the foothills of the Ozarks, Luna's uncle Nat found a stray dog with a three-clawed scar on its flank. That was the week the chickens started dying — not eaten, but marked. Then the cows. Then Nat himself. The scar appeared on his arm one morning, and the pattern of the scratch matched the bark of a tree he'd cut down the previous spring. Luna tells the story...

In the autumn of 2023, Luna drives through the dying town of Mercy, West Virginia, and stops at a gravel lot behind a boarded-up church. A man named Elias is digging beside a low stone wall. He isn't a groundskeeper. He isn't a priest. He's been hired by someone who never shows their face, to exhume what was buried before the church was deconsecrated. What he pulls from the earth isn't a coffin. I...

October of '98 in the hill town of Elkins Creek, West Virginia. The old general store stood boarded up for ten years after old man Pruitt died, but folks still talked about the penny bin by the register—a wooden box of loose change no one ever touched. When I was seventeen, I took a penny from that bin on a dare. That night, something started scratching at my bedroom window. Not branches. Not an a...

In October of 1998, on a back road outside Picket Post, there was a farm that had been dry for thirty years. The well had a lid bolted shut with six railroad spikes. Luna's uncle told her never to touch it. But after the last frost, she walked the fence line alone at dusk. She found a bucket beside the well, the spikes pried loose. Inside the bucket was a single brown egg, still warm. This is the...

Late autumn, 1998. Luna's cousin calls from a payphone outside a convenience store in Gifford, Tennessee. She says there's a gate in the back pasture that keeps opening by itself. Luna drives four hours to find her cousin's family living in a strange new silence — the dogs won't bark, the neighbor's horses refuse to cross the road, and every morning the gate stands wide open, even though it's chai...

In the summer of 2018, a small road crew working on a rural bridge in eastern Kentucky started hearing things. First it was a sound like stone grinding on stone, coming from deep under the creek bed. Then the foreman's dog started scratching at a patch of dirt that hadn't been disturbed in fifty years. And then one of the men found something in the mud that didn't belong there—a bone that was too...

August 1994, a dry summer on the edge of the Monongahela. A woman named Cora Peele watches her neighbor's baby for a weekend and notices the child won't stop staring at the far wall of the spare room. The staring is constant. The smile is wrong. And the marks on the wallpaper — they weren't there when she painted the room in June. Luna tells the story of something that nested behind the plaster of...

October 2021. Cold Creek, West Virginia. A traveling artist named Mariel rents the abandoned chapel at the edge of town for a month-long residency. She paints what she sees — the bent iron fence, the stained-glass rose window, the hollow where the altar used to stand. But by the third week, she starts painting something else. Something that watches from the corner of the canvas. Something that mov...

In the late autumn of 1997, on a dead-end road in Hickory Ridge, West Virginia, a woman named Eloise Flagg called the county about the smell coming from her cistern. By the time Luna arrived with a flashlight and a crowbar, the water had already started whispering. This is a story about what lives in the dark when the dark has nowhere else to go. About a concrete tank sunk into the bedrock behind...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna visited Newell's Nursery outside of Harlow, Kentucky, to buy mums for her porch. The old man who ran the place, Ezra Newell, kept a row of cold frames behind the greenhouse that he never opened. He said they were for a special order from a customer in the hollows. The price was too good to ask questions. But when Luna came back at dusk to pick up her order, she saw the...

In the autumn of 1997, Luna's aunt bought a secondhand wedding dress from Lacey's Dry Goods in Riddle, Ohio. The dress was beautiful—ivory silk, seed pearls, a train that pooled like cream. But something had been sewn into the hem. A name. A date. A lock of hair. The woman who donated it had died in that dress, and the dress remembered. Luna tells the story of what she found when she looked too cl...

October 1998, just outside the town of Coldwater, Tennessee. Luna's neighbor Royce Barlow was a quiet man who kept to himself, but everyone knew about the windbreak he built along the eastern edge of his property — a dense wall of osage orange and cedar that blocked the view of Crabtree Meadow. After Royce disappeared, Luna walked the fence line one November evening and found what the trees were h...

In the summer of 2009, Luna's cousin Caleb bought a failed farmstead outside Yarrow, Missouri, sight unseen. The silo was the only structure still standing — a concrete monolith sealed with a rusted hatch that took three men and a crowbar to open. Inside, the silage had not rotted. It had grown. Not mold, not fungus, but something that moved when you watched it, something that whispered in voices...

On a damp September night in 2003, Luna drives past a roadside cross on a curve of Old Gospel Road in Milledge, Georgia. The cross is new—white pine, no plaque. But the flowers at its base are wrong: not silk, not fresh, but something that looks like it's been growing there for years. She stops. She shouldn't have. Because the cross isn't for the dead. It's for the living who hear the singing from...

In the summer of 1987, along a forgotten stretch of county road in Potters Hollow, West Virginia, Luna's great-uncle Earl kept a well that was never used for water. The family knew not to ask about it. When Luna visited as a girl, she heard the sound it made at night — a wet, rhythmic pulse, like something breathing from deep underground. Years later, after Earl's death, she returned to find the w...

Autumn 1998. A hundred-year-old bell lies at the bottom of Dyer's Millpond in southern Indiana. Everyone in Copper Creek knows the story—the 1906 mill collapse, the nine men who drowned, the bell that sank with them. But nobody talks about what happens when the pond runs low. I met a man named Hollis Pratt that October, a retired waterman with a johnboat and a story he'd kept forty years. He took...

September 1987, Dyer's Millpond, Tennessee. Luna's great-uncle Jessup kept a bell rope hanging from a live oak limb over the water—a warning, he said, for when the pond pulled someone down. After he died, Luna found his logbook: every drowning back to 1902, names and dates, all with the same cause written in the margin—'Bell not rung.' She spent one night at the pond to see if the bell was real. S...

October of '92. A night so dry the leaves sounded like breaking glass underfoot. I'd driven out past Picket Post, a dead-end road in the low country where the pines grow so thick they swallow the sky. A woman named Della Hardison lived in a house at the end of that road, and she called me because she couldn't sleep. A tapping at her window every night, she said, and when she looked out, nothing bu...

In the autumn of 1994, Luna's uncle found work repairing the bell tower of a forgotten mission church outside Poca, West Virginia. The building had been closed for decades, but someone—or something—had been ringing the bells every night at 3:33 AM. When Luna visited to help, she discovered a hand-lettered list of names nailed to the sacristy door, each crossed out in dried rust-colored ink except...

October 1998. A rusted railroad trestle spanning a dry creek bed outside the town of Bitterwood, Missouri. Three nights before Halloween, a seventeen-year-old girl named Emmaline Dorny takes a dare from her friends: walk the full length of the trestle, touch the far side, and come back. The bridge is said to be haunted by a crew of men who died in a wreck there in 1923. She makes it across. But wh...

In the late summer of 2008, Luna's Uncle Hoyt disappeared for three days on the Blackwater River, drifting in a borrowed johnboat with a broken trolling motor. When they found him—miles past Salt Lick Landing, past where the river turns to swamp—he was sitting perfectly still, facing a cypress stump, and he wouldn't tell anyone what he'd seen. But he told Luna, years later, on a porch in the rain....