Holler Tales — Fexingo Horror

July 1998. Luna stops for gas at a lonely station outside Crenshaw, West Virginia, and meets an old man who tells her about his porch — the one that's been calling out names at night. He's not crazy, he says. It's just that the porch remembers everyone who sat on it, and some of them never left. Luna stays to hear the names. She leaves with a new understanding of what it means to be called home. #...

It was October of 2018, and I was driving back from a funeral in Elkins, West Virginia, when I took the shortcut through Denton's Curve on County Road 7. They say if you slow down to twenty miles an hour at the bend, you'll see a woman in a blue dress standing by the fence, waiting. I'd heard the story my whole life, but I'd never believed it. That night, with the fog sitting low in the hollows an...

On a dead-end gravel road near Cabel Creek, Tennessee, there is a one-lane iron bridge that the county stopped maintaining in 1983. But the bridge doesn't stay empty. Luna's friend Jesse saw it happen: headlights flickering on the other side, a truck that shouldn't exist, and a man who knew his own grave. This is a story about what you can't unsee, about a road that goes only one way, and about th...

September 1987. A man named Eldon Wray takes a shortcut down an unmarked gravel road off Potters Creek Highway in eastern Kentucky. The road isn't on any map—it's just there, waiting between two telephone poles. He drives it once, then again, then a third time, because the road keeps ending in the same place: a white farmhouse with a single lit window. Each time he turns around, the road stretches...

In the late autumn of 1987, the congregation of Kitts Creek Free Will Baptist Church in eastern Kentucky discovered something in the soil beneath the altar. Not bones. Not treasure. Something that grew. Something that whispered through the floorboards on nights when the moon was dark. Luna tells the story of how the old church came to be abandoned, and what the pastor's widow still sees when she p...

It's late October 2023, and Luna's cousin calls her from a truck stop outside of Barker's Ford, West Virginia, with a story about what he found under the old iron bridge. A dry creek bed, a woman's skeleton laid out like she was sleeping, and a name scratched into the stone archway above her. Luna drives out to see it for herself, and what she learns from the town's oldest resident, a man named Ha...

October 1987. Luna sits on her porch and remembers a night she spent with her great-aunt Hattie, who lived alone at the end of a dead-end road past Dunlow Bridge. Hattie had a habit of burning things in her backyard — not trash, but things that mattered. Letters, photographs, a child's shoe. Luna was twelve, and she asked why. Hattie told her about the smoke that used to come up through the floorb...

In the summer of 1997, on a dead-end road in eastern Kentucky, a man named Jesse Gribble dug a well in his backyard. He went down forty feet before he hit a stone he couldn't break. When he finally cracked it open, a sound came up that wasn't water. This is the story of what lived in the hole he made — and the three nights he spent trying to fill it back in. Luna tells it like she heard it from hi...

In the fall of 2018, a woman living alone on a remote West Virginia ridge starts finding padlocks on her gate. Each one is rusted, engraved with a single date. She clips them off. They reappear. The dates on them creep forward. When one finally bears tomorrow's date, she stays up to see who is leaving them. What she finds is not a person. This episode is a slow-burn encounter with something that m...

October 1987. A back road in the tobacco country just south of Danville, Virginia. Luna's great-uncle told her a story one cold night about a pig that kept showing up at a gate it couldn't have opened. A farmer named Hollis Parson lost his wife to the flu in '52 and spent the next thirty years talking to the woods. The pig came after she died. It would stand at the gate at dusk, not moving, just w...

In October of '87, a man named Harlan Cutter built a still deep in a holler where the water ran black. Seventy years later, every bottle that comes out of that copper coil still tastes like something that was never meant to be drunk. Luna tells the story of the Cutter family curse, the night the revenuers came, and the jar of shine that's been sitting untouched in a root cellar since 1952. A story...

Late summer 1997, deep in the hills above Picker's Creek, a bootlegger named June Elrod brewed a batch of corn whiskey from something that wasn't corn. Luna's uncle told her the story one night on his porch, watching the treeline like he expected someone to step out of it. He swore the night he drank from that Mason jar, he saw his own reflection waver and change — and the man in the glass was not...

In the summer of 1997, Luna's great-aunt Alma bought a wedding dress from a trunk sale at the old Hemlock Creek Methodist Church. The dress was beautiful—ivory silk, seed pearls, a hand-stitched lace train that pooled like a secret. But every woman who tried it on, from Alma to her niece to the girl who found it in the back of a closet, woke at 3:33 AM with a name on their lips and a single white...

Late summer 2023, just outside the town of Pinhook, Kentucky. Luna visits an old Appalachian holler where a widow's garden grows everything out of season—tomatoes in November, daffodils before the frost. Every seed she plants blooms within a week, but nothing tastes right, and the soil smells like wet wool and something older. The woman who lives there, Delia, speaks to the plants at night in a la...

September 1987, just outside a town called Mercy — Luna remembers the summer she was fifteen and her best friend Cassie Holloway stopped talking about what was happening in her own house. The Holloway sisters — Cassie and her older sister Rennie — lived in a sagging farmhouse on Muddy Creek Road, a dirt lane that flooded every spring and turned to deep red mud that stuck to your boots like clay. T...

Luna recalls a summer night in 1998 when her uncle took her to see a sycamore in the holler behind his cabin — a tree the old-timers said had stood since before the settlers came. That night, under a sky full of stars, she saw something move inside the bark and heard a voice that knew her name. Years later, back for the funeral of a man who spent his life listening to the land, she learns the tree...

Summer 1987, Gilly's Flat, West Virginia. A twelve-year-old girl named Emory witnesses the last night of a family feud that has nothing to do with blood. Her father's land borders the old Jessup property—a stretch of ridge nobody visits and a fence that keeps getting mended by someone unseen. Emory stops looking at the fence, but the fence never stops looking at her. Luna tells the story of a summ...

My granddaddy used to say there were two kinds of wells in these hills — the ones that gave water and the ones that gave something else. I never thought much of that saying until I met a girl named Ellie at the crossroads near Larkin's Hollow. She was wearing a dress from another decade and asked me for a ride to a well that had been dry for fifty years. I didn't take her, but I saw her again that...

August 1987, just outside of Tazewell, Tennessee. Luna's great-uncle Ezra had a shed behind his farmhouse that he never talked about. When she was twelve, she spent a week there while her parents were away, and that's when she found the key. Inside the shed was a collection of things that didn't belong together—a child's shoe, a rusted compass, a jar of teeth—and a smell like wet earth and old cop...

In 1987, a county auction was held for the abandoned Lonesome Hollow Schoolhouse, a one-room building that had sat quiet since 1953. Luna's aunt Evelyn bought a class photograph from that auction, dated 1948, showing seventeen children and a teacher. But the photograph changed. Children's faces would be in different positions, or missing entirely, and the teacher's expression grew more despairing...

Luna tells the story of a woman from Thistle Creek, Kentucky who inherited her grandmother's farmhouse and found that the old hay barn had a habit of filling itself back up. It started with a single bale of hay where she'd left none. Then the sound of a milking stool being dragged across stone. Then hoofprints in the dust that smelled of earth and rot. This is a slow-burn tale about what happens w...

Deep in the Virginia mountains, the whistle-stop town of Dunmore held one strange ritual: every evening at dusk, the old station bell rang exactly seven times. Nobody remembered who rang it or why. When the railroad shut down in 1997, the bell kept ringing. Luna's uncle was the last stationmaster, and he swore the bell tolled for something that had never left the platform. She visited him one Octo...

In the fall of 1998, a county road crew outside Draper, Ohio found a grain silo that hadn't been opened in forty years. The farmer who owned it had disappeared the same year it was sealed. When the welder cut through the rusted hatch, what came out wasn't grain. I heard this story from a retired highway patrolman named Harlan, who was first on the scene. He told me about the heat that hit them fir...

In the autumn of 2017, a woman named Ella Crane drove home late through the West Virginia hills and took a shortcut over a covered bridge that wasn't on any map. The bridge was old—hand-hewn timbers, a rusted tin roof—but what stopped her was the written message, dozens of them, carved into every inch of wood. 'DON'T LOOK DOWN.' 'THE WATER ISN'T WATER.' 'SHE COUNTS THE CROSSINGS.' Ella tried to le...

In October of 2018, Luna's great-aunt Eulalie passed away in the small town of Mercy, West Virginia, leaving behind a cabin full of heirlooms and one object Luna was forbidden to touch: a hand-carved loom in the root cellar. The loom had been in the family for generations, passed down with a single rule—never weave after midnight, never use black thread. Luna thought it was a superstition, an old...