Imaginary — Fexingo Horror

In the fall of 2019, a woman named Ada rents a room at the Morgan Run Motor Lodge in Tucker County, West Virginia. She's there to photograph abandoned buildings along the river, but the motel's handyman keeps leaving her gifts: a jar of creek stones, a bird's skull, a note asking her to meet him at the old outhouse behind the bait shop. She goes—because she's curious, because she's lonely, because...

It was August of 2008, just past midnight on a two-lane highway outside of Abilene, Texas. I pulled into the Rusty Nail Motel because I couldn't keep my eyes open anymore. The clerk gave me room 14 without looking up from his magazine. The photograph was already hanging above the dresser when I walked in—a Polaroid of a woman with her face scratched out, but not by time. The ink was fresh. The scr...

August 1987. A roadside inn in rural West Virginia, just off a stretch of Route 60 that nobody drives at night. Luna arrives late, checks in, and notices a child's swing set in the overgrown backyard—rusty, motionless. But by midnight, the swing is moving. Not creaking, not groaning, but swinging in perfect silence, as if someone is riding it. The innkeeper's wife, a woman named Miriam, tells Luna...

October 2022. A bed-and-breakfast in northern Vermont, just off Route 100, called the Birch Hollow Inn. The place had been operating for a hundred and twenty years — same family, same rules, same guestbook bound in red leather. I was there for four nights, cataloging the property's history for a preservation grant. The first two nights were ordinary. The third night, I found a spare key under a ce...

Luna revisits the summer of 2002 in the small town of Willow Creek, where a low wooden fence appeared overnight at the edge of a playground. It was exactly three feet high, painted white, with a single gate that only opened inward. No one knew who built it, but every child who touched it came home with a story—of a hand reaching through the slats, of a voice that whispered their name. Luna's young...

In the winter of 2018, a night-shift clerk at a remote Amtrak station in upstate New York encounters a passenger who never boards a train. Luna pieces together what happened at Blackwood Station through security footage, a logbook entry, and a voicemail left at 3:17 AM. No one claims to have seen a passenger matching the description. The station was locked and empty by 4 AM. But the ticket stub fo...

A road trip detour leads Luna to the Pines Motel in Ash Creek, Oregon, on a rain-soaked October night in 2019. The motel is nearly empty, the air thick with the smell of wet pine and mildew. In her room, she finds a photograph wedged behind the nightstand—a Polaroid of a young girl in a yellow raincoat, standing alone in the parking lot, head tilted at an unnatural angle. The clerk denies any girl...

In the summer of 2003, I spent a week at the Magnolia Inn outside Elkins, West Virginia. It was a roadside motel with a cracked sign and a swimming pool full of dead leaves. The room had a faint smell of bleach and something floral underneath. There were crayon marks on the wall behind the headboard. Not the kind a child makes. The kind a child leaves behind. The manager was a woman named Doreen w...

A faded inn off Route 9 in Vermont. November 2022. Luna books a room in a place that has stopped trying to be charming—peeling wallpaper, a radiator that knocks, a grandfather clock that doesn't work. The room next door is empty, but at three in the morning, someone winds a music box. The tune is 'Lullaby and Goodnight.' It plays twice, then stops. Luna asks the owner in the morning. He says no on...

Luna recalls a summer night in 1998, parked outside a derelict house on Hemlock Lane in rural Wisconsin. She was nineteen, visiting her cousin in the small town of Balsam Grove. A story had been circulating for years—about a girl named Clara who vanished from that house on her sixth birthday, leaving behind only a single crayon drawing of a smiling family she never had. Luna's cousin dared her to...

Luna recalls a stop at the Traveler's Rest Motel outside a small town called Garnett, Tennessee, on a humid July night in 2019. She finds a cassette tape left in the room's antiquated player — a recording of the previous occupant's final hours. The tape reveals a story of a man named Arthur, who drove through the same stretch of highway and encountered something in the woods that made him lock him...

September 1998, a rainy Tuesday night at the Driftwood Inn on Route 9, just outside a town called Opal. Luna was working the front desk when a woman with no luggage checked in just before midnight. She asked for Room 12, the one at the end of the hall that had been locked for years. Luna gave her the key, and then she stayed up watching the security monitor. The woman never came back down the hall...

On a humid August night in 2003, I stopped at the Lazy Willow Motel outside Baker, Montana — a place that looked like it had been waiting for someone to check in for thirty years. The woman at the desk, Doreen, kept glancing at the door like she expected someone to walk through it. She warned me not to go near the swing set behind the motel, not after dark. I went anyway. And I watched a little gi...

Luna recalls a humid summer night in 1998 at the Sunset Motel outside Clarion, Pennsylvania. A mother and daughter check in to room 8, but the girl keeps drawing the same picture — a stick figure child holding hands with a taller faceless figure. By morning, the mother is alone, and Luna finds the drawing tucked behind the nightstand. The figure now has a face — Luna's face. #SunsetMotel #ClarionP...

In the summer of 2004, I was driving through central Pennsylvania when my car broke down near a motel that shouldn't have existed. The Route 22 Motor Inn was a low-slung building with a flickering vacancy sign and a parking lot half-taken by weeds. The manager, a man named Garrett, gave me Room 8 without making eye contact. That night, I heard the closet door sliding open—not all at once, but inch...

In the summer of 1997, Luna's family stayed at the Pines Motel off Route 9 in upstate New York. It was the kind of place where the wallpaper peeled in flower shapes and the ice machine hummed all night. Her younger sister found a stuffed rabbit under the bed—pink, worn, missing an eye. That night, Luna heard the rabbit whisper her sister's name. She tried to throw it away. It came back. The motel...

In the autumn of 1998, on the outskirts of the tiny town of Lark's Hollow, a girl named Emmy disappeared from her bedroom on Old Mill Road. Her parents found the window locked from inside, her stuffed rabbit still on the pillow. No one ever found a trace. Twenty years later, I'm sitting in that same room—now emptied of everything except a dollhouse that wasn't there before. It's a perfect replica...