Imaginary — Fexingo Horror

A woman named Grace moves into a rental house on Willow Creek Road in the autumn of 2021. The backyard has a sandbox the landlady insists she keep covered, but the neighborhood children keep digging it up. Grace meets a girl named Lily who draws the same thing every day—a house, a tree, a stick figure in a window. When Grace finally looks inside the house in the drawing, she sees something that ma...

Luna recalls a summer afternoon in 1999, when she was twelve and living on Magnolia Street in the small town of Stillwater, Oklahoma. A new girl named Alice moved into the yellow house at the end of the block. Alice drew with chalk on the sidewalk every day—elaborate pictures of a woman with no face, a tree with no leaves, a house with no doors. The drawings changed overnight, and the faceless wom...

In the summer of 1997, on a dead-end road outside Red Bluff, Oregon, there was a white wooden fence that ran for nearly a mile along the edge of a fallow cornfield. Every few feet, someone had painted a child's handprint in red—hundreds of them, all the same size, all facing the road. I first saw them from the window of a Greyhound bus, and I got off at the next stop. That night, I met a woman nam...

Luna stops for gas at a derelict station on a long stretch of Route 11 in eastern Oklahoma. The attendant is a young girl named Ivy who lives in the station with her grandfather. Ivy shows Luna a dollhouse in the back room—a perfect replica of the station itself, with tiny figures that move when no one is watching. Luna leaves at dawn, but when she checks her rearview mirror, the station is gone....

Luna finds a child's crayon drawing hidden behind a loose baseboard in room 7 of the Painted Lady Inn—a faded Victorian on a dead-end road in Dunmore, Pennsylvania. The drawing shows a little girl holding the hand of a tall faceless figure, and a row of smaller figures underneath with X's for eyes. That night, she hears the sound of crayon on paper coming from inside the wall. She peels back the w...

Route 19, west of Nowhere, Kansas — a motel with a room that shouldn't exist. Room 11 at the Bluebird Motel: no key, no window, no door from the outside. Luna heard about it from a trucker named Walt, who stayed there once and left something behind. A story about a motel owner who never speaks, a ledger with a single repeated name, and a room that only appears when it wants you. This is not a ghos...

April 1982. The Driftwood Motel on Route 60, just outside Flatwoods, West Virginia. Luna's friend Clara inherits the motel from a great-aunt she never met, and goes to clear it out before the bank takes it. The rooms are stale and ordinary — except for Room 9, where a dress hangs in the open closet, swaying slightly, even though there's no breeze, no fan, no vent. The dress belonged to a girl name...

The Gull's Rest Motel sits on a lonely stretch of Oregon coast where the fog never really lifts. It was November of 2003 when I stopped there, dead tired, and found a snow globe in the nightstand drawer. Inside was a tiny motel, identical to the one I was standing in. And inside that motel's window was a light, dim but steady. I shook it, and the snow fell, and the light in the tiny window went ou...

Luna remembers the summer she spent in the tiny town of Hemlock, West Virginia, working the graveyard shift at the only gas station for thirty miles. Every night around two, a boy would appear on the swing set behind the abandoned white church across the road. He never crossed the street. He never spoke. But he always waved. Luna tells the story of the night she finally walked over, and what she f...

In the summer of 2004, a seven-year-old boy in Elkhorn, West Virginia, built a treehouse in his backyard with his father. By August, he was the only one who could see the woman in the window. His mother blamed grief over the lost dog. His father blamed an overactive imagination. But when the boy started leaving sandwiches on a branch and sleeping in the treehouse every night, they had to look clos...

In October of 1997, Luna spent a night at the Driftwood Motel on the outskirts of Deerton, West Virginia — a damp, peeling place off Route 60 with a flickering vacancy sign and a wall in room 9 that wouldn't stop whispering. This is the story of what she heard through the plaster after midnight, and the woman in the photograph taped to the bathroom mirror. No one else checked in that night. No one...

It's July 1997 in Moonflower, West Virginia, and Luna is visiting her cousin at a trailer park pressed up against the edge of Monongahela National Forest. The park is quiet, the air thick with heat and pine, and at the far end of the gravel road there's a swing set that nobody's children play on. Luna's cousin warns her to stay away from it, but she can't stop watching it at night — the way one sw...

On a cold February night in 1992, Luna stops at the Painted Pony Motel off Route 19 in West Virginia. A place with a faded sign, a cracked swimming pool, and a room that wasn't quite empty. The night clerk gives her a key to Room 12 without looking up from his magazine. Inside, she finds a child’s rocking horse in the corner — paint chipped, mane frayed, and still gently rocking. She thinks it's a...

In late October, I stayed a week at the Painted Lady Inn on Marigold Street in Port Haven, New York, a rambling Victorian with twelve guest rooms and a third-floor window that faced a brick wall. The innkeeper, a silver-haired woman named Mrs. Holloway, warned me on the first night — do not open the curtains in Room 9 after midnight. I thought it was a quirk, a superstition, a story for the guests...

Luna recalls a night in late October, 2016, when she stopped at a roadside inn in Moth Creek, Pennsylvania — the Moth and Lantern. The innkeeper, a weary woman named Margaret, warned her not to use the back staircase after midnight. The stairs, she said, sometimes held onto people. Luna, tired from the road, ignored the warning. What she found on the third floor landing was not a staircase at all...

Luna recounts a night in early autumn at the Sleepy Hollow Motel off Route 22 in West Virginia—a place where every room has a closet door that won't stay shut, and where a boy named Caleb left a message in crayon on the wallpaper. She tells the story of how the motel's owner, Mrs. Hartley, learned to live with the thing that lives in the walls, and why she never turns on the overhead light after m...

In the summer of 2004, Luna stayed at a rundown motel off Route 22 in Pennsylvania. The room had a crayon drawing taped to the wall — a child's scribble of a stick figure holding hands with a tall, faceless shape. The clerk said the previous tenant, a little girl, had vanished from the room three nights before. Luna couldn't stop looking at the drawing. The longer she stared, the more the faceless...

In the summer of 1997, a stretch of Route 9 outside Bedford, Ohio, became known for a single roadside relic: a white wicker cradle that appeared overnight in a field of Queen Anne's lace. No one knew where it came from, but everyone knew not to stop near it. Luna was fourteen that July, riding in the back of her uncle's pickup, when she saw the cradle for the first time. She tells the story of wha...

West Virginia Route 55, three miles south of Hendricks. A Wednesday in late October, just past midnight. I pulled over because my headlights caught something in the ditch — a baby's cradle, upside down, half-buried in dead leaves. The trailer it came from was fifty yards off the road, door hanging open, one window lit. No one answered when I called. The cradle was still rocking when I found it, bu...

On a rain-soaked night in Oct 1997, the Moonflower Motel on the outskirts of Maysville, West Virginia, lost its phones. The manager called a young operator from the town's dying telephone exchange to fix it. She found a switchboard that hadn't been used in decades, still warm. The calls coming through weren't from any line she knew. They were from rooms that had been sealed shut since the 1950s. T...

Luna sits in a child's bedroom, a crayon drawing in her hands, and recalls a night she spent at the Whispering Pines Motel in Linnville, Missouri, during the autumn of 2016. A motel clerk with a knowing sadness, a room that smelled of cedar, and a dollhouse in the corner that wasn't listed on the inventory. The dollhouse had a tiny family inside—a mother, a father, a little girl. But the little gi...

In March of 2019, Luna stayed at the Bluebonnet Inn outside Kerrville, Texas, hoping for a quiet writing retreat. The innkeeper's daughter, a seven-year-old named Clara, kept leaving a worn stuffed rabbit outside Luna's door. Each night the rabbit moved closer to the threshold, and each morning Clara insisted she hadn't placed it there. When Luna finally looked inside the rabbit's seam, she found...

June 1997, Lone Pine Motel, Nevada. A man named David checks in to room 14 after a long drive. He notices a child's kite tangled in the power lines above the parking lot. The motel manager warns him not to touch it. That night, David hears the kite string scraping against the window. When he looks out, the kite is gone, but the string is still there—stretching down from the wires, past the asphalt...

October 2022, two in the morning on a dead-end street in rural Pennsylvania. Luna's friend Nora calls her from a rental house — a cheap Airbnb she booked for a solo writing retreat. The house is old, the photos were inaccurate, and by midnight it's clear she is not alone. But no one breaks in. The disturbance is coming from inside — from a presence that seems to know her name, her childhood nickna...

I spent one night at the Wisteria Inn, a crumbling bed-and-breakfast outside a town called Mercy, West Virginia, in the dead of winter 2019. The innkeeper was an old woman named Mrs. Harlow who warned me not to go into the basement after dark. I found a child's tooth under a loose floorboard in my room, wrapped in a page torn from a Bible. That night, I heard something scratching from inside the w...