Bound in Black — Fexingo Horror

September 1987. A dirt road outside the small town of Marrow, Ohio. Luna's cousin Jenna moves into a farmhouse she inherited from a grandmother she never knew. The house is clean, quiet, and wrong. The first night, Jenna hears footsteps in the attic at exactly 3:17 AM. She finds nothing. The second night, she wakes to find the kitchen faucet running—hot water, though she never turned it on. By the...

In the autumn of 1987, Luna's cousin Ellie moved to the small town of Raven's Fall, Vermont, chasing a fresh start. But the house she rented came with a secret: a massive old oak tree in the backyard, its branches scarred with rope burns and its roots tangled with rusted shackles. Local legend said it was the Hangman's Tree, a relic from the town's grim past, but Ellie dismissed it as superstition...

Stillwater Crossing is a narrow iron bridge on a back road outside Vermillion Falls, Iowa, that no one uses after dark. But in the autumn of 2019, a woman named Ellen drove across it at three in the morning and met the bridge keeper. He was tall and thin, dressed in a dark suit, and he stood in the middle of the road holding a lantern that burned blue. He didn't move. He just watched her. She told...

In the autumn of 1997, on a quiet street in the town of Merridale, an old man named Elias Croft kept a ledger in his basement. Every month, he wrote down the name of someone in the neighborhood, and within a week, that person would die. Luna remembers the year she lived across from him, the way the light stayed on in his basement window, and the night she found the ledger open to a page with her o...

In the winter of 2018, a church bell in the abandoned St. Agnes Chapel on Old County Road began to ring at exactly 3:37 AM every night. No one lived within five miles. No wind strong enough. The mechanism had been removed decades ago. I drove out there one Tuesday in February, not to investigate—I don't do that anymore—but because my grandmother used to tell me stories about St. Agnes, and I wante...

In the autumn of 2019, a man named Arthur appeared on my front porch in Wisteria Falls, Oregon, wearing a gray suit and carrying a leather briefcase. He had no memory of who he was or where he came from—only the address of an empty lot on Magnolia Avenue. As I helped him retrace his steps, we encountered a town that had collectively forgotten him, a shopkeeper who sold him a watch he never picked...

September 1987. A dry summer in the small town of Stillwater, Ohio. The wells are running low, and the town council has started rationing water. Luna remembers the summer her friend Sarah’s grandmother started talking about the well at the end of Tabor Lane — the one that had been capped and sealed for forty years. No one in town could remember why. That summer, Sarah’s grandmother started leaving...

September 1987. On a rain-soaked stretch of State Route 17 in eastern Ohio, just past the faded sign for Grissom's Bend, the last gas station before fifty miles of dark highway sat empty for a decade. But every night at 1:47 AM, the fluorescents flicker on. A man in a green oil-stained jacket pumps fuel that smells like wet copper. He doesn't speak. He doesn't blink. Luna heard about this place fr...

In the autumn of 2008, Luna drove through the dying town of Meridian, Nebraska, where the grain elevators had stood silent for years. But that night, they began to hum. She met an old farmer named Harlan who told her about the contract his grandfather signed in 1933—a deal with something that lived in the deep silos. Now it wanted payment, and it had found a voice. Luna stayed at the Meridian Moto...

In the autumn of 2019, a woman named Cora arrives in the small town of Sparrow Creek, Pennsylvania, after her husband's sudden death. She rents a cabin at the edge of a dried-up creek bed, hoping for solitude. But the cabin's previous occupant left something behind—a leather journal filled with precise, unsettling drawings of mourners. Each drawing is dated, and each date corresponds to a death in...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna's aunt sends her to a sleepy Virginia town to appraise an antique dollhouse found in an attic. The house on Mulberry Lane is quiet, the client a grieving widow named Mrs. Herron. But the dollhouse is not what it seems — it is a perfect replica of the real house, down to the dust on the banister. As Luna inspects the tiny rooms, she finds details that shouldn't be there:...

In the summer of 2008, my cousin Lena drove home alone from her waitressing shift at 2 a.m. on a straight stretch of Route 9 outside Clarion, Ohio. She saw a woman in a white dress standing by a broken-down car, and she stopped. That was her first mistake. The woman didn't speak, just pointed down the road. Every time Lena looked back in the rearview, the woman was closer. But the road kept curvin...

In the summer of 2017, a young couple named Beth and Caleb rented a farmhouse on Old Plank Road outside the dying town of Meridian, Kansas. The property was cheap for a reason — the realtor warned them about the well in the backyard, sealed with concrete and iron, and the strange, sweet smell that came from it on humid nights. But they needed a fresh start, and they didn't listen. Luna tells the s...

In the autumn of 1998, a man named Carl Sutter checked into the Aster Motel on Route 9 outside Millbrook, New York. He was a traveling salesman, nothing remarkable, but he stayed in Room 12 for three nights and never complained about the damp. The motel had a reputation for mildew, for a smell that clung to your clothes, but Carl didn't seem to mind. When the maid found him on the fourth morning,...

Luna recalls a night in October 2019, when a detour on a dirt road in Canaan, New Hampshire, led her to a wrought-iron gate that shouldn't have been there. The gate stood alone in a field of dead grass, no fence attached, but someone had been visiting it regularly. A plastic bag of salt, a rusted key left in the lock, and a name spoken into the dark — Eleanor Vance, died 1932. Luna turned the key....

In the autumn of 2008, Luna worked a short-lived night shift at Lakeview Rest, a nursing home in the fading mill town of Northpoint, New Hampshire. The job was meant to be quiet—check vitals, dispense meds, sit with the ones who couldn't sleep. But one patient, a woman named Edith, never slept. She sat upright every night at 2:47 AM, staring at a blank wall where a window had been painted over dec...

When Luna was a child in the summer of 1996, she found a music box buried in the dirt under an old elm tree on Elm Street in Barrow, Maine. It played a song no one could place, and after she dug it up, strange things began happening in her house. Doors opened by themselves, her mother's voice called her from empty rooms, and her father started forgetting things. When she finally tried to return th...