Lighthouse Logs — Fexingo Horror

Two years ago, I pulled into a derelict fast-food drive-thru outside Deming, New Mexico, at a quarter past two in the morning. The menu board was dark, the windows boarded, the parking lot cracked and empty. But the speaker crackled to life — a teenage girl's voice, tinny and worn, asking for my order. I was tired and lonely, so I played along. She knew my name. She knew things she had no right to...

Outside Elko, Nevada, on a frozen February night in 1998, the flickering vacancy sign of the Silver Sage Motel called Luna inside. The clerk, a woman named Marlene, held out a key without being asked. Luna took it. The room was clean, ordinary, and waiting. But at three in the morning, the vacuum hummed alive in the hall. It stopped outside her door. Then it whispered her name in a voice she almos...

Luna recalls a summer night in 2017 when she took a detour off Route 9 in Vermont and climbed the old fire tower on Mount Horeb. At the top, she found a logbook with entries that didn't just record fires—they recorded her. The last entry, in her own handwriting, was dated three days before her arrival. She stayed until dawn, watching the tower's shadow lengthen across the valley. Some things are b...

It was late October, 2019, on a two-lane county road just outside of Marfa, Texas, when Luna's headlights picked out a single railroad crossing signal blinking in the middle of nowhere. The arms were down. The red light pulsed. But no train came. She sat there for forty-seven minutes, watching that light, until she noticed the arm wasn't attached to anything—just a piece of wood wedged into a post...

In October of 1998, a back road in the Okefenokee swamp swallowed a man whole—and then gave him back wrong. Luna recounts the story of her cousin Ellis, who took a shortcut home one foggy night and found a stretch of corduroy road that hadn't been there in eighty years. The logs beneath his tires were old-growth cypress, laid by convicts before the first world war. But the road didn't just appear....

A routine drive home on a late summer night in 2019. A road Luna has taken a hundred times, winding through Kansas farmland. But this time the sunflowers are different — taller, denser, closing in on both sides. The GPS reroutes her onto a gravel track that isn't on any map. A farmhouse with a single lit window. A woman on the porch who offers tea but never blinks. The field doesn't whisper; it li...

In the autumn of 2019, I found myself in the reading room of the Daughton Public Library in Millhaven, Ohio, chasing a ghost that only appeared in card catalogues. A patron named Ellen Cole had returned a book in 1974, and the log said she never spoke again. I spent three nights in that library, watching the Dewey decimal cards rearrange themselves, feeling the silence thicken around me as if it w...

February 1987. A stalled car on a back road outside Sistersville, West Virginia. I walked through the blizzard toward a light I should not have followed — the old Saint Agatha's Convent, closed since the spring of '63. The door was unlocked. The chapel was warm. And the bell in the tower, which had no rope and no mechanism, began to toll as the clock struck three in the morning. I met Sister Marga...

It was late October, just before the clocks fell back, when I found myself on the shoulder of a county highway in eastern Oregon, a few miles south of a town called Fossil. My car had overheated on the long stretch between Bend and nowhere, and the only light for miles came from a small clapboard house with a porch lamp burning amber. The man who answered the door introduced himself as the river k...

It's 2:47 AM at the Shell station off Route 9, just outside Blackwood, Ohio. The snow is coming down sideways, the diesel pumps are frozen, and the only other soul in sight is a woman in a green coat who keeps asking for a ride to a town that doesn't exist. Luna pulls in to thaw her hands on a cup of burnt coffee, but the radio in the corner won't stop playing her name between songs. Static, then...

It's December 1998, two days before Christmas, and I'm driving through the Oklahoma panhandle when the interstate goes dark. No exit lights, no headlights, nothing. I pull off at a truck stop that shouldn't be there—a place called the Dust Devil Diner, with a gas pump that reads empty but a single bulb still burning over the door. Inside, one waitress who knows my order before I speak, a jukebox t...

A woman driving through the Oklahoma panhandle in late October stops at a faded drive-in movie screen glowing in the middle of nowhere. The projector runs an old black-and-white film she's never seen, but the figures on screen seem to know her. The ticket booth is empty. The concession stand lights are off. But someone—or something—is in the projection booth, and the film keeps repeating the same...

Luna pulls off Highway 95 near a dried-up town called Goodsprings at 3 a.m. The Desert Star Motel has no cars in the lot, no clerk at the desk, but a key waiting on the counter with her name on it. Room 11's light is already on. The mirror in the bathroom reflects something that doesn't move when she does. The man in the photograph above the bed wears her grandfather's face, but the picture is dat...

Luna recalls a summer in the late 90s when she worked the graveyard shift at Sparkle Wash, a rundown laundromat on the edge of a dying mill town in upstate New York. One humid August night, a woman in a damp coat brought in a single black trash bag. She never spoke. Luna helped her load a machine, and the clothes inside—wool sweaters, child's pajamas, a man's flannel—were still wet with river wate...

February 2023. A cold rain on Interstate 10 outside Deming, New Mexico. Luna's car broke down at the base of the old Overland Park overpass — a concrete span known locally for the white crosses bolted to the railing. Thirteen crosses, one for each year a driver had died at that exact curve. But the crosses were gone the night she stopped. The railing was clean. And yet she heard the tires. Heard t...

October 1998. The week I house-sat for my aunt in Iron Forge, Pennsylvania. A small town folded into the Allegheny foothills where every house has a root cellar older than the town itself. I was twenty-two and grateful for the quiet. The house sat on Ridge Road at the edge of state forest, a two-story clapboard with a porch that listed east and a furnace that clicked all night. The crawlspace was...

In the autumn of 1978, a traveling clock repairman named Elias Coombs vanished from his motel room in Balsam, Ohio. All that remained was a single pocket watch — its radium-painted dial glowing green in the dark, its second hand ticking backward. Luna heard the story from a woman named Margaret, who claimed Elias had tried to fix a clock that wasn't broken. A clock that had been counting something...

October 2008. A dry autumn in the Missouri River hills. Luna's cousin Carly calls her to say she's been seeing something in the water tower outside Gilead, Missouri—a reflection that doesn't match the world. Luna drives out to find Carly living in a borrowed truck camper, watching the tower every night. The reflection shows a woman who looks like Carly but older, wearing clothes from decades befor...

In the autumn of 1987, Luna's cousin Rose disappeared from the Harvest Moon Carnival in Elkhart, Indiana. Found weeks later wandering a county road with no memory of the night she vanished—except for one image burned into her mind: a Ferris wheel turning in the dark, its lights flickering in a pattern that spelled her name. Years later, Luna visits the abandoned carnival grounds on the anniversary...

Luna recalls a stretch of old highway in eastern Kentucky where the tollbooth at mile marker 47 stayed lit and staffed long after the turnpike was decommissioned. It was October 2019, just past midnight, when she took the exit out of habit and found a booth that shouldn't have been there. The woman inside wore a uniform from a company that went bankrupt in 1983. She took Luna's dollar, printed a t...

In June of 1997, Luna spent a week at the Sulfur Springs Hotel in western Virginia — a grand old resort built over a mineral spring, long past its prime. The place had a single permanent resident: an elderly woman named Mrs. Hollis who kept the lobby lights on 24 hours a day. Luna learned why on the third night, when she woke to the sound of water dripping in the hallway and followed it to a door...

In the winter of 1987, Luna drove out to the old Cape Hatteras light to deliver a logbook to the keeper. The keeper wasn't there. The light was on, the coffee pot was warm, and the last entry in the log was dated two years before. She found the keeper's coat hanging by the door. She found his reading glasses on the desk. And she found something else in the lantern room — something that had been wa...

February 1967, the dead of winter on Lake Champlain. Luna's grandfather was the last keeper of the Isle La Motte ferry, a man who knew every current and every rock. But on the night of the worst freeze in forty years, he heard something out on the ice that made him break his own rule: never go out when the fog settles. What he found was a figure standing on the ice, a man in a gray coat who spoke...

In the autumn of 2019, I drove a rental car through the Nebraska Sandhills at two in the morning, chasing a story I'd heard from an old railroad man in a bar in North Platte. He told me about a whistle that blows at Red Bluff Crossing long after the last train stopped running in 1972. I didn't believe him. But I drove out anyway, following a dirt road that dead-ended at a crossing with no gates, n...

Luna recalls a November night in 2003 when she waited for the 11:13 pm train at the Meriwether Depot, a small station on a line that had been all but abandoned. The platform was empty, the ticket booth dark, and the only other person was an old woman who seemed to know more than she should. As the hours stretched past midnight, Luna began to realize the train might never come—and that the woman ha...