Imaginary — Fexingo Horror

A forgotten trailer park on the edge of Green Valley, Ohio, one humid August night in 2017. Luna recounts a drawing slipped under her windshield wiper—a stick-figure child holding hands with a tall, faceless figure. The strokes were uneven, the paper damp with dew. No one claimed it. But the girl who drew it? She was last seen two years earlier, walking into the woods behind Lot 14. This episode p...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna's grandmother moved into Shady Pines Trailer Park just outside of Millbrook, Ohio. Luna visited on a cold October afternoon and met a quiet girl named Ellie who showed her a crayon drawing of a house with too many windows. The drawing had a door that was open, and Ellie insisted it wasn't her house she'd drawn—it was the one behind it, the one nobody talked about. Luna...

In the summer of 2003, Luna stopped at a gas station outside Red Bridge, Ohio, where she found a crayon drawing taped to the bathroom mirror — a child's drawing of a woman with no eyes, holding a pair of scissors. The attendant said a little girl had left it there the night before, but no one in town remembered seeing a girl. That night, Luna drove back past the station and saw the overhead light...

Luna recalls a summer evening in 2007 when her cousin Emily, then seven, insisted she had a friend who lived in the woods behind their grandmother's house. The friend had no face, only a voice that called from the old swing set at dusk. Luna went to see for herself and found the swing moving slowly, back and forth, though no one was on it. The next day, Emily was gone. Luna found her sitting at th...

When Luna was twelve, she spent a summer in the small town of Foxboro, Connecticut. The house her mother rented had a rotting plywood playhouse in the back garden—a place left by the previous family. Luna cleaned it out, finding a stack of crayon drawings and a single name: Alice. Each image showed a child and a tall, faceless figure. At night, Luna began to hear a soft voice calling from the play...

A solitary traveler checks into the Diamond Lake Motel in early winter, hoping for a quiet night. Instead, she finds a crayon drawing left behind in the room—a child's depiction of a faceless family standing in a field. The motel manager warns her not to ask about the drawing, but the longer she looks at it, the more the figures seem to shift. As the snow falls harder outside, the drawing begins t...

Luna tells the story of a late-night stop at the Pines Motel on Route 17, a tired roadside relic outside a town called Marrow, New Hampshire. Behind the faded wallpaper of Room 8, a child has drawn the same thing again and again: a stick-figure family, with one figure erased so hard the paper is worn through. The motel manager, a woman named Etta, claims she never lets children stay there. But the...

Luna checks into the Rosedale Village Motel on a rainy November night in 2019, hoping for nothing more than a cheap room on a long drive. The motel is empty, the manager is uneasy, and the room has a child's crayon drawing taped to the wall — a stick figure of a girl holding hands with a much taller faceless figure in yellow. That night, she hears a child's voice from the room next door, the one t...

Luna recalls a summer evening in 2014 when she volunteered at the Oakwood Community Center in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. A quiet boy named Leo handed her a crayon drawing of himself holding hands with a tall figure with no face. She kept the drawing, and later noticed that the faceless figure's hand had changed position overnight. Then she saw the drawing move on its own—the figure's hand tightening it...

Luna recalls a humid July night in 2019 when a late-night drive along Old Holloway Road led her to a stranded woman with a dollhouse in her backseat. The woman, Margaret, spoke of her daughter Lily who disappeared from the back porch of their farmhouse ten years ago—and how the dollhouse, found in the attic afterward, would sometimes rearrange itself at night. Luna followed Margaret home, where sh...

One evening in early spring of 2019, a woman named Nora pulled into a gas station outside the town of Orbison, Virginia. She was just passing through—on her way to Roanoke for a job interview. Somewhere between the pump and the cash register, she picked up a small cardboard box. Inside was a jigsaw puzzle showing a child's bedroom just like one she remembered from thirty years earlier. The pieces...

In the summer of 1998, Luna's friend Clara inherited her grandmother's old house on Birchwood Lane. The place was full of dusty antiques, but one thing stood out: a vintage record player in the attic, still plugged in, with a single vinyl on the turntable. No one had been up there in years. Clara insisted the house was silent at night, but Luna heard music drifting down the stairs at 2:47 AM. A lu...

It was the autumn of 2019, just before the leaves turned. I was driving through central Vermont, trying to outrun something I didn't want to name, and I stopped at the Maplewood Diner off Route 14. The diner was empty except for a waitress named Cora and a photograph pinned to the corkboard by the register. A polaroid of a man sitting in booth four, smiling. Cora said he came in every Tuesday at t...

In the autumn of 2009, Luna stopped at a crumbling mill on Briar Creek outside the town of Merridale, Vermont. A child's dollhouse sat in the middle of the dusty floor, its rooms arranged with unnatural precision. The family who owned the mill had been gone for decades, but the dollhouse was clean and warm, as if someone still lived inside. Luna found a note tucked into the roof, written in carefu...

Late November 2022, a few miles outside the town of Jasper, Ohio. I was driving home from a funeral when my car started making a noise I couldn't place. I pulled into the Fox Creek Gas Station — a single pump, a convenience store that smelled of old coffee and motor oil. The man behind the counter, Henry, had been working there for thirty-seven years. He told me about the handprint. The one that a...

Luna finds a child's snow globe in a closed-down motel room, its tiny scene shifting and growing night by night. A story about a boy who believed his imaginary friend could bring spring, and what happened when the snow never stopped falling — even inside the glass. Set at the Gull's Rest Motel on the outskirts of Meridian, Connecticut, in late November 2019. Quiet, cold, and unfinished. #FexingoHo...

A cold winter night at a diner on Route 9, where a waitress named Clara leaves a crayon drawing under a napkin dispenser. Luna traces the artwork back to a child named Leo, who disappeared from a neighboring town six years ago. The drawing shows a stick figure with no face standing beside a house with a red door. But the details in the crayon — the way the grass is colored black, the window drawn...

In the summer of 1998, a seven-year-old girl named Alice Voss went missing from the shore of Lake Vanish, a small, stagnant body of water in northern Minnesota. Her mother, Celia, spent the next two decades searching the woods and the water, refusing to believe her daughter drowned. In 2019, a real estate developer drained the lake to build a luxury subdivision, and at the bottom, in the silt and...

October 1987. Luna's cousin Margie takes a summer job cleaning out the abandoned canning factory on Elm Street in Bellflower, Indiana. The factory has been closed for twenty years, but the smell of peaches never left. Margie finds a row of ovens still warm, a ledger with names and dates, and a locked door at the end of the basement hallway that hums. She stops calling after the third week. Luna dr...

In the attic of the Bluebell Inn, Luna finds an antique toy chest that once belonged to a girl named Abigail. Inside are crayon drawings of a faceless family, a half-finished dollhouse, and a child's diary that grows more disturbing with each page. As Luna reads, the room grows cold and she hears footsteps—small, deliberate, circling the attic floor. The chest closes on its own. The diary's final...

It was the summer of 2003, and I was house-sitting the Bluebell Inn, a faded Victorian B&B on the edge of Lost Creek, Vermont. The inn had been closed for years, but the owner—a woman named Mrs. Ellison—asked me to stay there, just to keep an eye on things. Every night, I found a fresh crayon drawing on the floor of the child's bedroom, left by no one I could see. A stick figure of a child holding...

Luna returns to the Bluebell Inn in Oakwood, Vermont, during the fall of 2019. A guest named Margaret has been leaving notes about a dollhouse in room 208 — a dollhouse she claims is not a toy but a record of something she cannot remember. Luna visits the room after Margaret checks out and finds the dollhouse arranged exactly as Margaret described: a miniature version of the inn, with tiny figures...

Luna returns to the Moonflower Trailer Park on a humid August evening in 2009. A single-wide at the end of a cul-de-sac, a child's dollhouse in the yard with lights that flicker on at dusk. The woman inside, Mrs. Marlene, insists her daughter still plays with it — even though her daughter disappeared three years ago. Luna stays to watch. The dollhouse windows glow. A small hand waves from the upst...

In the autumn of 2022, Luna spent a week at the Bluebell Inn, a nineteenth-century bed-and-breakfast in the fading town of Larkspur, Vermont. The innkeeper's daughter, a seven-year-old named Alice, slept with a nightlight shaped like a crescent moon and insisted the attic was crying. Luna volunteered to check the attic and found a child's cradle, hand-carved from oak, rocking on its own. From the...

On a hot July night in 2007, a playground in the small town of Lost Creek, West Virginia, became the center of something that none of the parents would talk about. Luna recounts the story of a young girl named Ellie who found a chalk drawing on the blacktop — a perfect outline of a child, filled in with careful detail. The drawing wasn't there the day before. And it wasn't rain that washed it away...