Backwoods and Black Salt — Fexingo Horror

In the summer of 2017, Luna's cousin Ellie bought a foreclosed farmhouse outside Dunmore, West Virginia — a two-story clapboard with a root cellar that had been sealed with a padlock and a prayer. The previous owners left behind a single rocking chair in the parlor and a journal in the cellar written in a hand that grew smaller and tighter with every page. Ellie asked Luna to help clean the place...

I was passing through Wayne County, West Virginia, in the fall of 2017 when a waitress at a diner told me about the scratchin' tree—a massive sycamore in Dunlow Holler where, for generations, people have left offerings of salt and iron to keep something quiet. She said her great-uncle was the one who carved the first cross into its bark back in 1923, after his brother went up the hollow and came b...

In the autumn of 1998, Luna's cousin Ray took a job as the night lock-keeper at the abandoned Gray's Ferry on the Cattahatchie River. The lock hadn't been used in decades, but the county paid him to check the gates once a month. The first night, he found a single muddy footprint on the concrete floor of the lock chamber. The second month, a child's jacket hung on the gate lever. By December, he un...

October 1987, two weeks before Halloween. A backwoods road in Jasper County, a red shed with a tin roof, and a man named Harlan who knew how to keep things out. But some things you invite in without meaning to. Luna recalls a night she spent at Harlan McCaskill's place, the salt lines he drew, the tobacco leaves he hung from the rafters, and what happened when she forgot to close the door all the...

October 1997, a cool evening on the Tombigbee River. Luna's cousin Carter took a seasonal job as lock tender at an abandoned Army Corps of Engineers lock—a concrete ghost. He was supposed to open the gate once a week for a barge that never came. But something else started coming through. A repetitive, mechanical knocking in the lock chamber. A figure in the control shack that was never there when...

In 1937, Luna's great-aunt Hettie took a job at the Trinity County Poor Farm, a place meant to shelter the county's indigent, elderly, and disabled. But the farm had a hidden ward—a locked basement room where they kept the ones who didn't quite fit the story. Hettie never spoke of it, but Luna found her diary in the attic last winter. This episode is the entry from February 7th, 1937. Luna reads i...

It was the summer of '94, and I was tracing my great-uncle's last known steps through the hills of eastern Kentucky. A man named Hollis Pelfrey told me about the still at Three Forks Holler—a place where the corn liquor ran clear and the nights ran longer than they should. He said the man who ran it, old Jessup, hadn't been seen in years, but the still kept working. Something kept working it. I wa...

Summer 1987. A month of drought in Murdock County, Tennessee. The ground cracked, wells went dry, and then the old quarry pit collapsed open like a mouth. My cousin Toby was the one who found it—a hole in the earth where the water should have been, and something moving at the bottom. Not an animal. Not a man. Something that had been waiting down there since before the quarry was dug, since before...

Summer of '97, a dry year in Pike County. When the creek drops low enough to expose the old floodgate at Tiller's Dam, nobody in town can remember who built it or why. Luna's great-uncle Josiah always said to leave it alone — but curiosity and a dry spell have a way of pulling you toward what should stay buried. #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #BackwoodsAndBlackSalt #TillersDam #PikeCounty #Floodgat...

It's August of '95, two in the morning, and Luna is sitting in a rusted-out pickup outside Mavis's Bait & Tackle on the shore of Sugar Lake. Mavis has been running the shack for forty years, selling minnows and nightcrawlers to men who never ask questions. But tonight, a man in a damp overcoat pulls up in a station wagon with no plates, asking for a dozen shiners and a pack of smokes. He pays with...

October 1987. Luna's car dies on a back road outside Hargrove, Tennessee, and she ends up at the only open house for miles — the home of an old woman who calls herself a stitch-wife. The woman offers shelter and a story about a bargain she made with the woods behind her property. As the night deepens, Luna begins to understand that the bargain is not finished, and that the stitch-wife's needlework...

Luna recalls a November night in 2019 when she stopped at a roadside fruit stand in rural Virginia and met an old woman named Hettie who sold her a single apple from a tree that had not borne fruit in forty years. The tree grew in a circle where nothing else would grow, and Hettie spoke of a bargain her grandmother made with something that lived in the roots. Luna took the apple home and placed it...

March 1987. A stretch of county road outside Yarborough Ford, Tennessee, where the gravel turns to dirt and the kudzu swallows fence posts whole. Luna's cousin Eli was a lineman for the power company, working nights to repair a downed line after an ice storm. He found a woman in a white dress standing where no road should be, her feet bare on the frozen ground. She asked for a ride to the old Ford...

In the winter of 1987, a traveling card sharp named Elias Barlow stumbled into the wrong game at a backwoods bar outside Devil's Fork, Tennessee. The stakes were higher than money, and the dealer wore a face that didn't move right. Luna heard the story from a woman who was there that night, peeling the truth from a man who hadn't spoken in thirty years. This is an Appalachian card game where the d...

December 1998, Parson's Ford, West Virginia. Luna recounts the night she picked up a hitchhiker on Route 19—a woman in a black coat who said she was walking home to the old McAllister place. The woman spoke of a bargain her grandmother made with something in the creek, a bargain that came due every generation. By the time Luna reached the gravel turnoff, the passenger seat was empty, but the back...

In the deep autumn of 2021, Luna found herself in the small Kentucky town of Mossy Creek, a place where the trees leaned in close and the creek ran black with tannin. She'd been called there by a woman named Hattie Greaves, whose great-grandfather had been the sexton of the old Mossy Creek Church—a white clapboard building with a bell tower that hadn't rung in seventy years. Hattie said the bell h...

A night in the fall of 1987, down a dirt road off Route 9 in eastern Kentucky. Luna's uncle owned a farm there, and the well on the property had been sealed for thirty years. He never said why. When Luna visited as a kid, she was told to stay away from the oak tree that grew next to it. She didn't listen. What she found that night was a story in a mason jar and a voice from the bottom of the earth...

October 1987. Luna drives a back road in eastern Kentucky after midnight, the fog so thick she nearly misses a hitchhiker—a gaunt old man with muddy boots and eyes that don't blink. He gives her an address in Briarwood and disappears from the truck before she can ask his name. The house is a hollow cinderblock shell, but someone's been living in the crawlspace. The sheriff says it's just a drifter...

In the autumn of 1999, Luna's cousin Delia bought a farmhouse at auction off a dirt lane called Willet's Hollow. The place came with a grain silo the realtor called 'a charming rustic feature,' but Delia never went near it after dark. When Luna visited that November, she found the silo's door wired shut with a rusty chain. She cut it. The sound that came from inside was not grain settling. It was...

In the autumn of 1987, Luna's uncle bought a small herd of cattle from a farm off a dirt road called Blackwater Bend, deep in the Missouri Ozarks. The cows were healthy, the price too low, and the previous owner vanished without a forwarding address. Within a week, the cattle began to change—not in body but in behavior. They stopped eating, then stopped sleeping. They stood in a tight circle at th...

In the autumn of 1987, Luna visits the dying hamlet of Potter's Ford, West Virginia, drawn by rumors of a woman who tends a bridge no one crosses. The town's only remaining resident, an old woman named Hattie, maintains a rusted iron gate on a washed-out road — not to keep people out, but to keep something from following them home. Luna helps Hattie reset the wards after a hard rain, and sees the...

October 1987. A two-room depot outside Proctor, Arkansas. A man named Hollis Pickett has kept the schedule for forty-two years—until the 2:17 a.m. rattler starts running again. Luna sits with him one cold night and learns why he won't look out the window after the last train passes. What comes through Witch Creek Station doesn't need tracks. It just needs someone to hear it coming. #WitchCreekStat...

A quiet September evening in 1998, on the outskirts of Wayland, Tennessee. Luna's uncle Amos kept an old fire watchtower on his property—a rusted iron structure that hadn't been used by the forestry service in decades. He said it was just a relic, a place to go when he needed to think. But Luna remembers the way the boards creaked under her feet, the strange chill that settled in her chest every t...

October 1998. Luna's aunt Edie runs a herb nursery on the Virginia line, mostly drying flowers and mixing tinctures for the ladies who come up from town. But there's a locked greenhouse out past the black walnut grove that Edie never opens, and when Luna pressed her about it, Edie's hands went still on the twine she was tying. 'That's where I keep the things I'm not done with yet,' she said. This...

In the autumn of 1987, Luna visits the derelict Weir's Mill in Pendleton County to document the site for a historical society. The miller's wife, Edna Weir, vanished in 1932, but the local stories never agreed on what happened. Luna finds a hidden room behind the grain chute, walled off with bricks mortared from the inside. Inside, a child's bed, a pile of women's shoes, and a name carved into the...