Bound in Black — Fexingo Horror

Luna recalls a night in November 1994 when she took a wrong turn onto a dirt road off Route 17 in the pine barrens of western Georgia. The road didn't appear on any map, and the house at its end wasn't supposed to be there. What she found inside—a single room, a single chair, a single photograph—has stayed with her ever since. This is a story about the roads we aren't meant to find, and the things...

August 1987. A quiet street in Corinth, Mississippi. Luna was eleven, sitting on the front porch of a house that belonged to a woman named Elsbeth. She remembers the heat, the cicadas, the way Elsbeth's rocking chair never stopped. She remembers the girl who came to the door at dusk — barefoot, wearing a sundress that was too thin for the season. The girl didn't speak. She pointed down the street,...

An old woman on Procter Road tells Luna about the well behind her house—the one that was sealed in 1987 after three children went missing. She says she still hears them singing at night, their voices rising from underground, asking for a rope. Luna visits the well, and what she finds there makes her understand why the woman never sleeps with the windows open. #BoundInBlack #FexingoHorror #HorrorPo...

In the winter of 1998, the old St. Catherine's Church on the outskirts of Melling, Virginia, was being deconsecrated. The building was sold to a developer who planned to turn it into a boutique hotel, but one thing held up the sale: the stained-glass rose window over the altar. No one could explain why the window showed a figure that didn't match any saint in the church's records. Luna's grandmoth...

In the winter of 1999, Luna's cousin took a caretaker job at a boarded-up mission outside Ellery, Illinois — a place the locals called the Bell Church, because of the sound it made at night. The priest had vanished. The furnace kept cutting out. And every hour, on the hour, the tower bell rang without anyone in the belfry. This is the story of what she found in the basement, and what she heard whe...

Luna recounts a humid summer night in 1996 when her friend Clara found a waterlogged diary bobbing against the reeds of Lost Lake, just outside the sleepy town of Stillwater. The entries were not written by anyone Clara recognized — but they described her childhood home in unsettling detail, including events that had not yet happened. What began as a curious artifact became a nightly compulsion to...

In the summer of 1997, the Galaxy Arcade on Miner Street in Elkhart, Indiana, was the only place where kids could escape the heat and their parents' fights. But for Danny Croft, it became a trap. The arcade had a machine that no one remembered ordering—a cabinet with no logo, no instructions, just a single button and a screen that showed your reflection. When Danny started playing, the game didn't...

In the autumn of 1997, a highway surveyor named Dwayne Kettering found an iron lockbox bolted to the floor of an abandoned gristmill on River Road outside Harlow, Ohio. The mill had been sealed for decades, its waterwheel choked with ivy, but the lockbox was clean — no rust, no dust, as if someone had wiped it that morning. Inside was a single photograph and a child's mitten. Dwayne was not the fi...

In the summer of 1994, a young woman named Ellie took a temporary job at the county assessor's office in Millbrook, Tennessee, filing property cards for a new digital system. One card kept crossing her desk — a quarter-acre parcel on Red Clay Road, tax-exempt since 1945, owner listed only as 'Estate of H. Voss,' no deed on file, no building permit, no survey. The assessor told her not to worry abo...

In the summer of 1999, on a scorching July night, the Grayson County Fairgrounds on Holloway Road became a trap for twelve-year-old Maya Porter. She found a locket in the dirt near the Tilt-A-Whirl, engraved with the name Clara. When she snapped it open, a woman's voice spoke inside her head, whispering a name—Henry—over and over. That night, Maya learned that some lost things do not want to be fo...

In the summer of 1998, a woman named Wren rented the last house on Gifford Lane — a dead-end street in a town called Millford that wasn't on any map. The house had a burial plot in the backyard. Not a pet cemetery. Not a family plot. One single plot, freshly dug, with a headstone that read only 'Wren'. She told herself it was a sick joke. But the soil kept settling. Every morning, the grave was de...

In the autumn of 1998, Luna's aunt inherited a saltbox house on Old State Road in Stilwell, Kansas. The property came with a locked root cellar. Inside: a hand-carved cradle, its wood blackened by time, and a bundle of letters tied with a white ribbon. The letters were addressed to a woman who had not lived in the house for seventy years. The cradle rocked on its own, gently, whenever Luna stood n...

In the summer of 1992, Luna's aunt hired her to strip wallpaper from a vacant Victorian on Elm Street in Red Clay, Tennessee. The house had been empty for years, but the master bedroom's wallpaper was still pristine—pale green with silver vines that seemed to move in peripheral vision. At night, Luna heard scratching from inside the walls, and in the morning, the wallpaper had regrown where she'd...

In the fall of 1992, on a dead-end road outside of Shiloh, Indiana, a woman named Ellen Hartley bought an upright piano at a foreclosure auction for forty dollars. It was out of tune, scratched, and missing three keys... but it played. Every night, at exactly 11:37 PM, it would play a single song on its own — a slow, minor-key waltz that Ellen had never heard before. She tried everything: unpluggi...

April 1992, a Tuesday just before midnight. Luna's cousin Carla took a shortcut over Foster's Crossing Bridge on her bike and never made it home. The railing on that bridge had been loose for years—everyone knew it—but the town never fixed it. They found her bike crumpled against the concrete abutment downstream, but the body they pulled from the river three days later wasn't Carla. Or maybe it wa...

September 1985. A thirty-year-old levee on Dry Creek, three miles outside of Mercer, Ohio. No one had seen water in that creekbed since 1972. But in the ninth month of that year, people started hearing something at night—a low, rhythmic thumping, like a pulse, coming from inside the earth. Luna talks to a retired county surveyor named Harlan Pierce, who was the first to notice the water mark on th...

It was the summer of 1998 when Luna's mother took a temp job at the historic Rutherford County Courthouse in Millbrook, a sleepy town where nothing ever happened. But the courthouse had a basement—a sub-basement, really—that no one talked about. Luna was twelve that year, old enough to wander the hallways after school, young enough to still believe adults knew what they were doing. It started with...

November 1995. A woman in a rented house on Sycamore Street in Harlow, Ohio, begins to notice that her wardrobe is not quite what it seems. It is an old piece, left behind by the previous tenant, and it has a peculiar way of rearranging her clothes. But it is not the clothes that unsettle her—it is the fact that the wardrobe seems to be keeping something for her, something she is not ready to see....

In the autumn of 1998, a woman named Iris moved into a small house on Winding Creek Road, just outside the town of Meridian. She had inherited the property from an uncle she barely remembered, a man who had spent his life as the town's gravedigger. The garden out back was overgrown with roses, their petals the color of dried blood. They bloomed even after the first frost. Iris thought nothing of i...

In October 1991, a county road worker named Ellis Cutter spent his nights repairing a single iron bridge on a dead-end road outside Jasper, Ohio. The bridge had no official name, but locals called it the Counting Bridge because of the sound it made at night — a rhythmic tapping, like someone walking across with a metal-capped cane. Ellis didn't believe the stories until he found a ledger hidden be...

In the summer of 1993, a stretch of Flint Road in the town of Litchfield, Missouri collapsed into a sinkhole. Luna's aunt lived at the end of that road, and she would tell stories about the hole deepening long after the rains stopped. The night Luna's cousin Tommy disappeared, she went looking for him with a flashlight and a rope. What she found in the sinkhole was not a boy, but something that ha...

In the summer of 1987, on a dead-end road outside the small town of Elkhorn, there was a well that had no water. Luna's grandmother told her about it one hot July evening, her voice dry as the dust on the porch. She said the well was dug by a man named Harlan Procter, who built it not for water but for something he found in his field. Every night after that, Luna would lie awake, listening to the...

After her grandmother's death, Luna inherits a set of old wind chimes that seem to hum with a voice not carried by the wind. She brings them to her apartment in a small Ohio town, and soon discovers that they don't just ring—they remember. Every breeze pulls fragments of a life that isn't hers, and every silence feels like someone holding their breath. But the chimes won't stop, and neither will t...

In the winter of 1998, a night-shift orderly at Mercy General Hospital in Millbrook, New York discovers that the abandoned fourth-floor ward isn't as empty as it should be. The door to Room 409 is locked from the inside — has been for years — but every night at 2:47 AM, someone knocks. Three knocks, always three. The orderly learns the name of the last patient kept there, and what she whispered to...

In the autumn of 2017, I spent a week house-sitting for my aunt in the small town of Millington, New York. The property sat at the top of Ashworth Hill, a long gravel drive that curved through a stand of old maples. The house itself was unremarkable—white clapboard, blue shutters, a screened porch that groaned in the wind. But at the peak of the roof, there was a copper weathervane shaped like a r...