Holler Tales — Fexingo Horror

October 1987. A rusted mill on the edge of Mercer County, Kentucky. Luna's uncle used to tell her about the sound it made when the wind hit the gears just right—a low moan that carried up the holler for miles. But the summer she turned seventeen, she heard something else. A voice, maybe, or a song. She went up there with a flashlight and a tape recorder, thinking she'd prove it was just the wind....

In November of 2021, I drove out to the far end of Old Fork Road, past the last cell tower, past the gravel turning to dirt, to buy a candle from a woman named Eliza. Her house had no electricity, no propane, no generator — nothing but wax and wick and the smell of tallow. She told me she'd been making candles for forty years, ever since the night a man in a black coat knocked on her door and aske...

A long stretch of two-lane blacktop through the Tennessee hills, a place where the map goes fuzzy and the radio turns to static. I met a man there, a traveler who warned me about the road. He said it forgets things—cars, people, even time itself. But I thought he was just a local telling tall tales until I saw the headlights coming from the wrong direction. This is a story about a night I spent on...

October 1987, just past midnight on a two-lane road called Thorne's Crossing in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. A woman driving home from a late shift picks up a teenage hitchhiker in a thin dress and no jacket. The girl says she's from a holler that burned down twenty years ago. Every detail she gives is wrong — wrong names, wrong landmarks, wrong color of the sky the night of the fire. The driv...

Deep in the summer of 1987, on a dirt road outside the town of Hempstead, Tennessee, there was a wedding nobody attended. Luna found the invitation tucked into a library book — a hand-painted card with a date and a map, no names, no church. She went anyway, because the map led to a place she knew: the old Brannock gristmill, abandoned since the war. What she found there was not a bride or groom, b...

October 1999. A woman waits for the 2:17 AM bus at a closed-down depot outside Roper's Cross, West Virginia — a town that's not on any map she's seen. The bus is late. The station clock ticks backward. And when the driver finally arrives, he doesn't seem surprised to see her. He just says her name. This episode is a quiet, creeping account of a midnight transit, of sleeping towns and passengers wh...

On a humid August night in 1997, Luna's truck breaks down on a dirt road outside the dead-end town of Pender's Gap, West Virginia. A reclusive old woman named Cora takes her in, and over weak coffee in a kerosene-lit kitchen, she tells Luna about the well in her backyard — a well that has been whispering her name for sixty years. Cora insists the water is not water, and that the thing beneath the...

In the autumn of 1998, I spent a week cataloging the estate of a reclusive photographer named Elara Vance in the hollows of Dusty Fork, West Virginia. Her house was a museum of frozen moments—hundreds of portraits of people I didn't recognize, all with the same hollow expression. The last roll of film I found in her darkroom held twenty-three exposures of the same empty rocking chair. On the twent...

In October of 2019, Luna's cousin Jesse disappeared for three days in the woods behind his grandmother's house on Starlight Ridge, Tennessee. When he came back, he couldn't remember where he'd been—but he remembered a woman who spoke in rhymes and a path that didn't lead anywhere. This is the story of what Luna found when she went looking for that path a year later, and what she heard in the dark...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna drove a borrowed pickup truck up an unmarked gravel road outside the tiny town of Harpers Mill, Tennessee, to help an old friend clear out a deceased uncle's workshop. The workshop sat beside a long-abandoned grist mill, and from the moment she arrived, Luna felt the weight of something watching from the dry creek bed. The uncle had left behind hundreds of hand-carved w...

In the autumn of 1998, a traveling folklorist stops in the fading coal town of Blackwood, West Virginia, chasing a rumor about a house where the walls hum a lullaby at sunset. The song is old—older than the town, older than the settlers—and the people who remember it don't talk about it, not to outsiders. But one old woman, Miss Cora, agrees to take her to the house before the light goes. What she...

Luna recalls a summer night in 2017 when she stopped at a gas station outside Little Spruce, North Carolina, and met an old woman who warned her about a haint on Granny's Creek Road. The woman's daughter had seen it years ago—a pale figure that stood motionless at the edge of the woods, never moving, never blinking, just watching. Luna drove that road herself that same night, and what she saw ther...

Luna remembers the summer of 2017, when she stayed with her great-aunt in the tiny town of Treadwell, Virginia, at the foot of Blackwood Mountain. Every night, from the porch of the old farmhouse, she heard a woman's voice calling from the creek below—a name, over and over. The neighbors said it was just the water over stones, but Luna knew better. She followed the sound one moonless August night...

October 2019. A narrow two-lane bridge outside Dunmore, West Virginia. One night in late autumn, a woman named Ellie Mercer drives home from her shift at the Piggly Wiggly and hears something new in the sound the wind makes passing through the old sycamore at the dead center of the bridge. She stops. She shouldn't. What she finds in the branches is not an animal. It is not a person, either — not a...

Luna recounts a night in late October 2019 when she stopped at a roadside fruit stand outside the tiny town of Moss Hollow, West Virginia. The woman running it, Vera, had eyes that seemed to look through her and a smile that didn't touch them. Luna bought a jar of honey she never opened, and Vera told her about the things that crept down from the ridge when the fog settled. Luna thought she was hu...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna spent three nights at a friend's cabin near the ghost town of Pinedale, West Virginia. The first night was uneventful. The second night, she saw a figure standing motionless at the tree line—a tall, thin man in a wide-brimmed hat, watching her cabin. The third night, the figure was closer, and she heard a voice that wasn't her own. This is a story about the kind of atte...

Late autumn in the hamlet of Goldengrove, West Virginia — a place that doesn't appear on most maps but has a church that's been standing since 1832. Luna recounts what happened to Caleb Mowbray, a man who fixed things, when a stranger asked him to repair the bell in the church tower. The bell had been silent for forty years, ever since a girl named Ada vanished on her wedding day. Caleb found the...