Goodnight, Sweetheart — Fexingo Horror

In the summer of 2019, on the outskirts of a dying Oklahoma town called Bixby, there was a trailer park called Moonflower. Luna spent three weeks there in a borrowed single-wide, watching the heat shimmer off the asphalt and the moths collect around the porch light. The trailer next door had been empty for months, but every night at exactly 2:47 AM, a light would click on inside it. Not a flicker,...

It was the summer of '97, and Luna took a job as a camp counselor at Silver Lake Campground, a sleepy slice of pine woods and brown water in northern Minnesota. The other counselors warned her about the old caretaker, Mr. Gunderson, who lived in a cabin at the edge of the property and never spoke to anyone. But it wasn't Gunderson that kept the kids from wandering past the treeline after dark. It...

October 1998, just outside of Elko, Nevada. Luna stops at a diner that shouldn't exist—the Miller's Diner her grandmother spoke of, closed since 1973. Inside, the coffee is fresh, the pie warm, and the only other customer is a woman in a blue dress who has been waiting thirty years for her husband to come back from the mine. Luna sits with her, listens, and learns what it means to wait for someone...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna's cousin Emma moved into a rented house on Mulberry Lane in the small town of Chesterfield, New York. The house was old, with a porch light that flickered amber every night at 9:03 PM—except when it stayed on all night, burning like a staring eye. Emma started seeing a man in a gray coat standing at the edge of the yard, just beyond the glow. He never moved, never blink...

Luna’s cousin Grace worked the graveyard shift at the Waffle House off Route 9 in Mosley, Ohio — the kind of town where the only things open after midnight are gas stations and regret. One November night, a girl walked in alone, dressed for a party nobody threw, and ordered a single pancake she never touched. She sang. One song. Gently. A children’s lullaby Luna recognized but couldn’t name. The c...

Winter 2023. The covered bridge on Sparrow Creek Road outside the small town of Jericho, Vermont. Luna's friend Annie spends three nights there after a local legend surfaces online: if you park your car at midnight, kill the engine, and wait, a child's whisper from the back seat will tell you the date of your death. Annie goes for the story, but what she hears isn't a date. It's a name — and the v...

Luna tells the story of a night in October 2019 when she drove out to Cold Spring Pit, a flooded quarry on the edge of Mercy, Kansas. The police had cordoned off the access road after three teenagers drowned there the week before. But that night, Luna heard someone crying from the water. Not a child — a woman's voice, hoarse and desperate, calling for help she never should have needed. Luna follow...

In the winter of 1998, Luna's aunt Mildred worked the night shift at the Dead Letter Office in Harlow, Maine—a vast concrete building where undeliverable mail went to die. One January night, a letter arrived with no postmark, no return address, only a faded crayon drawing of a house with yellow windows. The name on the front was Luna's childhood address. Mildred opened it, and what she found insid...

October 1998. The Ponderosa Pines Motor Lodge in Red Bluff, Montana, had thirty-six rooms, a neon vacancy sign that flickered even when empty, and a reputation that made truckers pay the extra twelve dollars for the Super 8 on the interstate. But nobody stays in Room 32. Not twice. Luna's uncle ran the place for thirty years, and after he sold it and moved to Arizona, he didn't speak for a year. N...

Luna recounts a night she spent at her grandmother's farm in central Illinois, in the autumn of 2009. A rusty dinner bell on the edge of the property began to ring on its own, three nights in a row, always at 2:47 AM. The first night, she ignored it. The second night, she watched it from the window — the clapper swinging, the rope hanging still. The third night, she walked out into the cold to see...

Luna recalls a late-summer night in 2017 when she took the back road through Osterville, Massachusetts, to avoid traffic on Route 6. Just past the salt marsh at Wychmere Creek, she saw a woman in a yellow dress standing at the edge of the reeds, waving steadily—not at her, but at something beyond the road. Over the next six nights, Luna passed the same spot and saw the same woman, always waving, n...

In the autumn of 2009, Luna spent three nights house-sitting a crumbling Victorian on Hemlock Lane in the town of Marrow, Wisconsin. The owner, a retired archivist named Mrs. Corso, had warned her about the old rotary phone in the attic: it wasn't connected to any line. But on the second night, it rang. And the voice on the other end knew Luna's name. What follows is a story about a house that rem...

Luna recalls a summer night in 1997 when she took a wrong turn on a backcountry road in rural Tennessee and found herself at an abandoned house beside an old railroad crossing. Inside, an old woman was still living there, tending a lamp that had burned for decades—waiting for a train that stopped running before Luna was born. As the night deepened, Luna began to understand that the house wasn't ju...

It was the driest October in forty years when my brother Derrick took the contract for the old copper line outside Arlen Falls. A three-mile stretch of rural highway where the phone company's records showed nothing—no poles, no pedestals, no history. But the complaints kept coming. Static. Crossed lines. Voices that didn't belong. Derrick drove out alone at dusk with a shovel and a tone tracer. Th...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna's mother checked into the Glass Hollow Hotel in Larkspur, Vermont, a decaying motor lodge off Route 7 with a cracked neon sign and a pool drained for winter. She went there to sleep, but she never slept alone. Over five nights, Luna watched from the parking lot as the curtains on her mother's second-floor window moved when no one was inside. The front desk clerk, a man...

June 2022, just outside Pine Bluff, Arkansas. I was driving through on a cross-country move when my engine gave out around midnight. The Sundown Motel was the only place with a vacancy sign still buzzing. The clerk was a man named Earl who smelled like burnt coffee and old cigarettes. He handed me room 14 without looking up, said the key sticks but you have to jiggle it just right. The lock was fi...

Luna recounts the summer of 2018 when she housesat for her aunt in the small town of Millbrook, Illinois. The house sat at the dead end of Ridge Road, surrounded by cornfields that whispered at night. Her aunt had left a baby monitor in the nursery, though there was no baby in the house. On the second night, Luna heard a child's voice through the static—soft, distant, calling for its mother. She f...