Heirloom — Fexingo Horror

Luna recounts a visit to the small town of Lost Creek, Oklahoma, in the autumn of 2015. She met an elderly woman named Edna who had inherited a family tree—a hand-painted parchment hanging in her farmhouse. The tree showed generations of her family, but one branch was marked with a single date: the day Luna's own mother disappeared. Edna spoke of whispers in the walls and a figure that would appea...

A story about a family heirloom that should never have been kept. Luna recounts the summer of 2017, when her cousin Sarah inherited a heavy brass signet ring from their great-aunt—a ring that had belonged to a man who went missing in the woods near Flat Rock Creek, Ohio, in 1898. Sarah, hoping to sell it, instead found herself followed by something that smelled of wet earth and old iron. The ring...

In the autumn of 1998, Luna's grandmother left her a single white glove in a hatbox, with a note saying it belonged to a girl named Sylvia who vanished from Sand Creek, Ohio in 1952. Drawn by unfinished business, Luna drives to Sand Creek, a town that seems to exist in a perpetual gray twilight. She finds the old high school, now a boarded-up ruin, and learns from a local historian that Sylvia dis...

In the autumn of 1987, Luna's cousin Eleanor inherits a Victorian button hook from her great-aunt's estate in Birchwood, New York. The tool, meant for fastening gloves and boots, seems harmless—until Eleanor notices that it leaves a faint, cold pressure on her skin each time she uses it. The pressure grows into a bruise, then a pattern of bruises that spells out a name: Adelaide. Luna helps Eleano...

In the summer of 2015, Luna's cousin Margot moved into a crumbling Victorian house on the edge of Balsam Flats, a dying town in the Oregon foothills. The house came furnished, including a mahogany sewing box in the parlor. Inside, a single antique needle, still threaded with black silk. Margot thought nothing of it until she started finding the needle in different rooms. Then she began waking with...

Luna's great-grandmother's hand mirror, silver-backed and impossibly clear, has hung on the vanity for as long as she can remember. One autumn evening, dusting the lace doily beneath it, she notices the glass does not reflect the room behind her—it shows a different room, dim and papered in roses, with a single figure seated at a writing desk. The woman in the mirror is young, wearing a high-colla...

In the autumn of 2021, Luna drives out to Dry Creek Road, a winding two-lane highway through the Ozark foothills, to help an old friend's widow clear out a farmhouse. Among the clutter of a lifetime, she finds a single cameo brooch pinned to a faded dress in a cedar wardrobe. The woman who owned it has been dead for seventy years, but the brooch still holds a whisper of her final hours. Luna learn...

Luna tells the story of a summer night in 1987 in the tiny village of Mulberry Lane, Ohio, where a teenager named Emily borrowed an antique reading glass from her grandmother's closet. The magnifying lens was ordinary during the day, but under moonlight it revealed something in the family photo albums—faces that should not have been there, hands resting on shoulders of people who died decades befo...

A story about a silver pocket watch that Luna found among her great-grandmother's things. The watch was engraved with initials not belonging to any known family member. Luna traced the initials to a man named Elias Vane, who vanished from Iron Bridge, Pennsylvania in 1923. She visited the town, now nearly abandoned, and spoke to the last remaining resident—an old woman named Mrs. Holloway who reme...

In the late summer of 2003, Luna's cousin Marie brought home an antique cradle from an estate sale in Willow Creek, Ohio. It was beautiful—hand-carved oak with a delicate rocking motion—but from the first night, something was wrong. Marie's newborn wouldn't stop screaming at the nursery door. Luna visited one sweltering September afternoon to help, and found a room that felt watched, a cradle that...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna followed a lead to a farmhouse on Red Cedar Lane outside of Shiloh, Tennessee—a place where an old music box had been found in the walls during a renovation. The box was said to play a lullaby no one recognized, and the family who owned the house claimed it brought their baby daughter comfort. But the lullaby wasn't the only sound the box could make. Luna sat with the b...

In the autumn of 2019, I drove through Union Grove, Wisconsin, to settle my great-aunt Edie's estate. She was a recluse who made wedding dresses by hand, and her farmhouse attic held a single dress form — a black-lacquered, faceless mannequin with no maker's mark. I learned it was not a tool but a passenger that had followed her from a 1972 commission in a town called Stillwater. The dress form mo...

Some things you inherit aren't meant to be kept. In the summer of 2009, Luna's cousin Elara bought a vintage brooch at a flea market near Moth Creek Road, a dead-end lane outside the town of Innis, South Carolina. The brooch was beautiful: a cluster of dark garnets set in tarnished silver, shaped like a flower with too many petals. Elara wore it once. Then came the moth. Then the smell. Then the s...

In the autumn of 2007, Luna's cousin Vera inherited their grandmother's wedding ring — a simple gold band with a tiny chip of diamond that seemed to hold a shadow inside it. Vera was never the same after she put it on. She started talking to the air, setting a place at dinner for someone no one else could see, and wandering the old railroad trestle at the edge of town at three in the morning. When...

In the winter of 2019, Luna stops for gas at a rest stop on Route 9 in upstate New York, a stretch she's driven a hundred times. But this night is different. The diner is too quiet, the attendant too still, and a Polaroid taped to the register shows a family she almost recognizes. When she pulls the photo free, the faces shift—and one of them looks back at her through the glass. A story about the...

In the winter of 1998, Luna’s cousin Vera moved into an inherited farmhouse outside Cold Spring Hollow, New York—a town of three hundred people and a single blinking traffic light. The house came with a locked cedar chest in the attic, and inside it, a hairbrush that still smelled of lilac and sweat. Vera said the brush belonged to a woman named Elara, who had vanished from the same house in 1921....

In the autumn of 1998, Luna's mother inherits a mysterious locket from her own grandmother, along with a crumbling house in the small town of Aspen Hill, Pennsylvania. The locket contains a miniature portrait of a young woman with hollow eyes, and a lock of hair as black as a starless night. Luna's mother becomes obsessed with uncovering the woman's identity, but each clue leads deeper into a forg...