Goodnight, Listener — Fexingo Horror

A slow-shift waitress at an all-night diner in Hemlock Falls, Vermont, notices something off about booth seven. The man who sits there every Tuesday at 2:14 AM never leaves a tip, never blinks, and never appears on the security footage. When she finally works up the courage to look under the table, she finds a receipt dated thirty years before she was born, still wet with black coffee. This is a q...

It's late summer in eastern Washington, 2017. The air smells like apples and diesel. A produce clerk named Eddie works the night shift at a highway fruit stand just outside Yakima. He's a quiet guy, mid-forties, divorced, lives alone in a mobile home. One night a woman walks in just before close — barefoot, wearing a hospital gown, says she came from the orchard across the highway. Eddie knows tha...

It's late November 2023 on a dark stretch of Interstate 70 in eastern Colorado, and the truck stop near Flagler has been quiet for hours. Luna works the register when a woman in a soaked white dress walks in from the storm, asking for a bus that never stops there. The woman's skin is cold, her eyes don't blink, and she keeps glancing at the boarded-up door to the back room. Luna calls her boss, bu...

October 2022, just outside Milledgeville, Georgia. Luna's great-uncle worked the night shift at Magnolia Hill Cemetery for thirty years — kept the grounds, opened gates for funerals, locked up at dusk. He told her about the vault that was supposed to be sealed, the one with the rusted handle that turned too easily. About the hole in the wall where there shouldn't have been a hole. About the sound...

Luna recounts a story from a friend who worked the overnight shift at a gas station in Bakersville, Utah, during the winter of 2018. A man in a tan coat walked in at 2:17 AM, bought a pack of gum, and left without a word. Then he came back six minutes later, identical down to the crease in his sleeve, and said something that made the clerk freeze. What followed was a single hour of impossible repe...

In the high desert of eastern Oregon, the town of Pumice Flats has a water tower that hums at night. One summer, the hum became a word — a name. Luna's friend Cora heard it first, and then couldn't stop hearing it. This is the story of a small town's quiet obsession, the summer everything changed, and what happens when a structure built to hold water starts holding something else. No one left Pumi...

It was the summer of 2019 when the motel clerk at the Sandpiper Motel in Bixby, Oklahoma, found a candle burning in the dirt lot behind the property. The lot had been empty for years, just a patch of gravel and weeds between the motel and the highway. But that night, at 3:17 AM, a single white candle stood on the ground, its flame steady in the windless air. The clerk, a woman named Ellie, had wor...

Luna remembers a winter night in 2008, driving through a blizzard on a forgotten stretch of Iowa highway. When her car skids into a ditch, she stumbles to a lone phone booth—its receiver dangling, frozen. A voice on the line tells her the road she needs to take home isn't there anymore. But it's the voice that haunts her: calm, certain, and somehow already waiting for her call. A story about the m...

It was late fall on a stretch of highway east of Nowhere, Kansas. I was filling in for a friend at the Blue Heron Motor Lodge — twelve rooms, a neon vacancy sign that flickered even when there were no guests. Around 2 AM, a car pulled in. Older couple, dressed like they were going to a wedding. He wore a pressed suit, she had a veil pinned to her hair. They checked in without a word. The next morn...

A motel clerk in the Oregon high desert checks in a couple who never speak. They drive a mint-green 1967 Ford Fairlane and pay cash for Room 14. The clerk watches them carry identical suitcases—one heavy, one light—up the outdoor stairs. Over the next three hours, the room stays silent. No voices, no footsteps, no television. But the light stays on, and the curtains never move. When the clerk fina...

Luna found a small map store in the hill town of Marrow, Oregon, run by a man named Ezra who only sold hand-drawn maps of places that no longer existed. He showed her a street that appeared twice — once in the current city directory, once in a 1957 atlas. He said the second street was the one people kept walking down, even though it wasn't on any modern survey. Luna bought a map of that street and...

On a dead-stretch of Route 50 in Kansas, just past midnight in late October, I pulled into a rest stop that wasn't on any map. The building was clean, fluorescent-lit, and utterly silent — no cars, no attendants, no humming soda machines. Inside the men's room, I found a single stall with a door that opened onto a hallway that shouldn't have existed. A hallway lined with doors, all identical, each...

It was October 1987 when Luna took the night shift at the Spitfire Point Lighthouse on the Oregon coast—a favor for a friend's father who needed a night off. The fog was thick, the waves were loud, and the logbook had a single entry from the previous keeper: 'The light is fine. Do not answer the phone if it rings.' She thought it was a joke until the phone rang at 1:13 AM. A woman's voice, calm an...

It's December on a forgotten stretch of Route 17 in upstate New York, and the Pine Creek Motel has kept its Christmas lights up since 1987. Luna's cousin, who works the overnight shift, calls her one morning with a strange confession. He's been noticing that the red bulb on the third string has stopped burning out. Every night at 3:17 AM, it flickers once, and then the room at the far end of the l...

It's August 2003, just past two in the morning, at the Sleep-E-Z Motel off Interstate 81 in Pulaski, Virginia. I was working the front desk when the phone rang — a woman's voice, low and certain, asking for a room I knew we didn't have. She gave me a name I'd never heard and a credit card number I'll never forget. When I told her we were full, she said she'd been driving for eighteen hours and jus...

It was October in Broken Bow, Nebraska, at the Edgewood Motel — a place Luna worked one autumn when the leaves turned and the tourists stopped coming. A woman checks in late, her clothes smelling of wet earth, her voice too soft. She asks for Room 14, the one with the dead bolt that doesn't work. Luna gives her the key and forgets about her until 3 a.m., when the basement door — chained and padloc...

October 2008. A tired night clerk at the Mohawk River Motor Lodge in upstate New York picks up a phone that keeps ringing with no one on the other end—until a woman's voice whispers a room number that doesn't exist. What he finds in the utility closet behind the boiler changes everything he thought he knew about the motel's history, and about the man who owned it before him. A story about a bell t...

In the early spring of 2016, a motel clerk named Ellie starts noticing a door in the basement that appears on the blueprints but not in the building. Each time she descends to check the furnace, the door is somewhere else — a different wall, a different corridor. The night she finally opens it, she finds a staircase going down much farther than the building's foundation allows, and a sound like so...

In the autumn of 2021, a motel clerk in the small town of Ellenton, Colorado, discovers a dusty shoebox in the basement of the Red Mountain Inn. Inside are twelve polaroid photographs — each one a guest standing in front of Room 13, each one taken on the night they disappeared. The clerk, a quiet shift worker named Mara, begins to notice a pattern in the faces: the same smile, the same tilt of the...

In a tiny farming town in eastern Oregon, the annual Harvest Festival has been held for over a century. When Luna’s friend Mara takes a job as grounds keeper, she finds an old iron bell buried behind the main pavilion. The town records mention only two bells, but the third one rings on its own every night at midnight. Mara digs into the town’s history and uncovers a forgotten year when the festiva...

It was the tail end of a wet October in a town called Linefork, Kentucky — a town so small the only place to stay was the Linefork Motor Lodge. I pulled in at 2 AM, windshield wipers stuttering against a rain that had been falling for hours. The lobby smelled of cinnamon and dust, and the clerk — a thin woman with a name tag that read 'Fran' — checked me in without looking up from her crossword. S...

A motel clerk in a small Wyoming town notices footprints in the dust of a long-unused corridor—prints that lead to a room that should be locked, that has been locked for twenty years. The footprints are small, barefoot, and they only go in one direction. The clerk follows them, against every instinct, and finds something waiting in the room that knows her name. A quiet, unnerving story about what...

Episode 45 of Goodnight, Listener. Luna returns to a familiar stretch of highway — Route 50 in Nevada, the so-called 'Loneliest Road in America' — and stops at a motel she's passed before. The clerk is a woman in her sixties named Delia, who keeps a photograph taped to the register. It's a Polaroid of a man standing in front of Room 9, dated August 1987. Delia says he checked in one night and neve...

Luna recalls a July evening in the small town of Manderby, Minnesota, when the head librarian, Mrs. Eleanor Vance, discovered a book on a dusty bottom shelf that had never been checked out — no library card, no stamp, no record of its existence. The book was a field guide to the local cemetery, but the maps inside showed graves that weren't in the official records, and the names matched people sti...

It’s August 2019, just past two in the morning, and I’m pulled over at a motel off Route 50 in Nevada—the kind with a flickering vacancy sign and a clerk who doesn’t look up. The room is fine, the bed is stiff, but what I remember is the way every light in the building went out at exactly 2:17 AM, and how the clerk said it happens every night, and how he told me not to open the door. I didn’t open...