Game Trail — Fexingo Horror

November 2002, Voss Creek, North Carolina. Luna was eighteen, still learning to track the hard way. A hunter named Cal Weatherby went missing on opening day, and the sheriff's department was short on volunteers. Luna's father sent her out along the creek bed because the dogs had picked up something strange. She found Cal's stand empty, his rifle untouched, and a brass bell rigged to a branch above...

In the late autumn of 2009, Luna's uncle disappeared while hunting a wounded buck in the woods around Lost Creek, a small town in northeastern Pennsylvania. Days later, search teams found nothing but his orange vest and a half-eaten apple. But Luna's cousin, a game warden, noticed something strange at the edge of the tree line: a wooden sign, freshly hammered into the frozen ground, that had not b...

Luna recounts a winter night in 2017 on a remote stretch of Vermont highway known as Dead Man's Curve, where a stranded driver's desperate knock on a stranger's door led to an encounter with something that wore a familiar face but had no memory of its own body. A story about hunger, forgetting, and the unbearable lightness of being almost human. #DeadMansCurve #Vermont #Highway13 #HorrorPodcast #F...

Luna tracks a deer through the high desert of Nye County, Nevada, on the morning after a heavy snow. The blood trail leads her deeper into a canyon she's never seen on any map. She finds a cabin — old, rock, door open — and inside, a man who has been waiting for someone to ask what he saw up on the mesa. He tells her about the figure that walked out of a lightning strike, about the hole in the sky...

It's deer season in the Monongahela National Forest, and Luna is tracking a wounded doe along Henshaw Grade when she finds a trap that shouldn't be there — an old rusted leg-hold, tagged with a number that leads to a man who went missing in 1987. She follows the chain deeper into the woods, past a collapsed cabin, past a pile of deer skulls arranged in a spiral, until she realizes the trap was nev...

It was November, just after first light, and Luna was tracking a wounded doe along Leakey Grade — a gravel road that cuts through the Sam Houston National Forest. The blood trail led her off the road, into the cedars, and down into a dry creek bed where she found something that should not have been there. A hunting dog, a blue tick coonhound, sitting perfectly still on a flat rock. No collar. No t...

In the winter of 2019, a fire lookout named June vanished from the Colby Grade tower in the Monongahela National Forest. She left behind a logbook, a half-drunk thermos of coffee, and a single entry that read: 'They're not bears.' I found the tower six months later, boarded up but not sealed. The stairs groaned under my boots. The window glass was cracked from the inside. The logbook still sat on...

November 2021. Sutter Grade, Montana. A two-lane blacktop that cuts through the Lolo National Forest, barely a line on the map. I drove it because the detour around a washed-out bridge added ninety minutes, and I had a freezer full of elk meat that needed to reach Missoula by morning. The cold that night was the kind that gets inside your bones and stays there. I saw a man standing next to a picku...

Luna recalls a winter night in 1996, when she was nineteen and working the register at a gas station outside Dunmore, West Virginia. A man in a brown coat came in just before midnight, bought a cup of coffee, and left footprints in the linoleum that never dried. Over the next hour, she watched him walk the same loop outside the station—around the pumps, past the payphone, back into the dark—each t...

October 1998. Luna is called to a stretch of dirt track called Marrowbone Ridge, outside the town of Alder Creek, where a hunter named Tom Grady has been missing for three days. His truck is found idling at the dead end, door open, rifle still on the seat, and a drag mark leading into the woods that stops dead at a split-rail fence—where the snow on the other side is completely undisturbed. Luna w...

Luna recalls a November evening in 2019, just outside the town of Balsam Springs, where a man named Roy Darden claimed his cattle were being taken one by one—not by wolves, not by rustlers, but by something that moved through the flooded timber without leaving tracks. She drove out to his property at dusk, rifle across her lap, and waited where the fence line met the black water. What she saw that...

On a frozen November morning in 2009, Luna follows a blood trail into the woods near the abandoned railroad crossing outside Winder, New York. She expects a wounded deer. Instead she finds a man in a blue wool coat who asks her for directions to a town that was dismantled forty years ago — and then asks if she heard the train that morning, even though the tracks were pulled up in '73. What she hea...

Late October 2019. Luna drives the back way into Pearsall, New Hampshire, on a rumor from a taxidermist she used to know. The man had been finding deer carcasses along Crooked Mile Road — not shot, not hit by a car, but skinned with a precision that made her old friend sell his shop and leave town. Luna walks the grade at dusk, following a scent that isn't quite blood, and finds a barn where the f...

Hunting season, 2019. Luna follows a blood trail into the woods outside Kestrel Hollow, a dying town in the Allegheny foothills. The deer she'd wounded leads her not to a carcass but to a door — a wooden door set into the side of a hill, half-buried under frost and leaf litter. She opens it. What she finds inside is not a cave, not a storm cellar, but something that feels like a room left behind b...

November 2019, on a dirt road called Mossy Run that dead-ends at the county line. Luna is tracking a deer when she finds an abandoned camper with a kerosene lamp still burning inside. The owner is gone, but the lamp never goes out. Over three nights she returns, watching the light flicker through the trees, until she finally understands what it means to leave a fire burning for someone who can't f...

December 1998. A warm snap melts the snow on Potters Mill Road, and a hunter named Emmett discovers something moving under the ice of the old millrace. Luna pieces together what happened to the family who owned the mill, the summer they tried to dam the creek, and the shape that watched from the spillway. A story about what freezes, what thaws, and what waits for the right temperature to crawl bac...

November 2019, just outside the ghost town of Shiloh, Missouri. Luna accompanies a deer hunter named Ray Garman into the Ozark backwoods, where a blood trail leads them not to a wounded buck but to something that has been waiting in the dark a long time. A story about what happens when the thing you're hunting starts hunting back — and the terrible debt that can pass between generations. This epis...

November 2009. Luna's uncle Clem, a retired game warden, tells her about the last deer he ever tracked—a buck that left no prints in the snow, just a strange fence line that shouldn't have been there, three miles deep in Ponderosa Pines National Forest. Clem was sixty-three, sober four years, and not prone to stories. But that morning he found a trail of blood that smelled like ozone and led to a...

West Texas, January 1999. A dry winter, a two-lane road that doesn't make it onto most maps, and a house on stilts that someone built for reasons nobody in town would talk about. Luna was twenty-two, working nights at a gas station outside Lamesa, when the man with the broken watch pulled in for gas he didn't need. He told her about the woman in the window, the one who only showed herself at three...

It was the winter of 2018, just past midnight on a Tuesday, and I was parked at the end of Millbrook Grade — a gravel turnoff that dead-ends into the old logging road above Henshaw's Meadow. I was tracking a buck I'd hit earlier, a messy shot that I knew I'd regret if I didn't find it. The blood trail was sparse, just specks on the frost, and it led me up the grade, past the broken gate, into a pa...

Luna recalls a February night twelve years ago, when she was nineteen and hunting alone on a ridgeline above Stony Hollow, West Virginia. Fresh snow had fallen, and she picked up a blood trail that led not to a deer but to something else entirely — something that had been walking on its hind legs and dragging a broken trap. What she found in the hollow was not an animal, and it was not a person. T...

Luna remembers a December morning in 2019, standing at the edge of Henshaw's Meadow in upstate New York, tracking a deer with an impossible blood trail. The snow was deep, the air still. She followed the tracks into the pines and found a hollow where something had been waiting. This episode is about the thing that watches from just beyond the tree line, the smell of wet fur and copper, and the way...

Luna recounts a November morning on Hargrove Grade, a gravel road in northern Maine where she found fresh deer tracks leading to a broken bell set on a stone. The bell rang without wind. She followed the sound deeper into the woods and found a man kneeling in the snow, his hands cupped around nothing. He spoke without moving his lips. She left the road that day with a ringing in her ears that stil...

Luna remembers a December night in 2019, when she was deer hunting alone on a ridge above the town of Pender, Missouri. Snow had been falling since dusk, and by midnight the trail was buried. She found an old bunkhouse—a single room with a wood stove, a cot, and a telephone on the wall that should not have been there. The phone rang at 3:13 a.m. She answered. The voice on the other end was her own...

Deep in the woods of Linder's Trail, a blood trail from a wounded doe leads Luna to an old house no one has lived in for decades. Inside, the floors are clean and the stove is warm. A child's shoe sits by the fireplace. A rocking chair moves in the corner. Luna follows the blood trail into the basement, where she finds a root cellar door standing open. The blood leads down — and a woman's voice ca...