Lost Broadcast — Fexingo Horror

In the winter of 1978, in the small town of Red Hook, New York, a sixteen-year-old named Elise Mays stayed up late to watch a rerun on channel sixteen. But the broadcast that came through that night wasn't the late show. It was something else—a test pattern that seemed to hold a figure inside it, a voice that spoke not to the air but directly to her. Over the next few weeks, Elise began to see thi...

In the autumn of 1983, a woman in the small town of Milford, Ohio, begins seeing something in her television after midnight—something that shouldn't be there. It starts as a flicker in the static, a shape that moves when she moves. But the more she watches, the more it seems to watch back. Luna tells the story of Eleanor Crane, a retired librarian who spends her nights in front of a black-and-whit...

On a humid August night in 1978, Luna's cousin Danny checked into the White Hart Motel off Route 9 in upstate New York. The motel was old, the kind that smelled of stale smoke and Pine-Sol, and the television in his room had a problem: it only showed a test pattern, but something moved inside it. Danny called the front desk, and a maintenance man named Arthur came to fix it. Arthur wasn't a normal...

March 1978. A dead-end road outside Dansville, New York. Luna tells the story of Evelyn Marsh, a woman who called a local TV station to report that her television had stopped receiving all channels — not static, not snow, but a perfect, silent black. When a repairman arrived, he found the set working fine, but Evelyn insisted something was wrong with the picture itself. Over three nights, Luna sat...

Luna recalls a cold November night in 1978 when her car died on a back road in Ashburne County, Iowa. She took shelter in an old farmhouse where a woman named Margaret still lived, watching a television that hadn't been turned off since 1968. The set showed only static, but Margaret insisted her husband Walter was still broadcasting from somewhere beyond the grave. As the night deepened, Luna bega...

In the fall of 1979, in the small town of Carthage, New York, a boy named Tommy Gillis began hearing a voice coming from his television set after sign-off. The voice claimed to be a woman named Margaret, trapped somewhere inside the station's dead air. Tommy recorded her with his cassette player — and the tape he made still exists. This is the story of what Margaret said, what she showed him, and...

It's the summer of 1978, and Luna's uncle rents a cabin on Lake Wonomo, a deep green kettle lake in northern Wisconsin. The cabin has an old black-and-white television that only shows static — except between 2:33 and 2:47 AM, when the static resolves into a single clear image. The image never changes: a woman's face, young, her hair wet and dark, her mouth slightly open, her eyes fixed on somethin...

A cold January night in 1978. Luna, driving alone on a back road in western Ohio, picks up a faint signal on her car radio—a voice she recognizes from a long-dead college radio station. The voice is reading a list of names, addresses, and dates. She follows the signal to an abandoned grain elevator outside the town of Tucker's Mill. What she finds inside is not a person, not a broadcast—but someth...

In the fall of 1978, on a dead-end road outside the small town of Northvale, Luna’s uncle Frank picked up a signal that shouldn’t have existed—a local broadcast airing at 3:17 AM, with no station, no call letters, and a single figure standing in the static. The show had no title, no credits, just a woman in a blue dress repeating the same phrase every night: ‘Don’t turn the dial.’ Frank watched fo...

Luna recalls a night in the autumn of 1996 when her car broke down outside Midvale, Ohio—a town that seemed to exist only in the static between stations. She checked into the Midvale Motel, where the TV in her room played a test pattern no matter which channel she turned to. At first she thought it was a broadcast loop, a forgotten signal from the motel’s closed-circuit system. But the pattern was...

In October of 1979, Luna spent a week in the small town of Wolf Creek, Ohio, cataloging old broadcast equipment for a local historical society. The job was quiet, the town was quiet — too quiet. Then she found a reel-to-reel tape labeled simply "Wolf Creek Road, 3:14 AM." The audio on that tape changed everything she thought she knew about the town's silence. This is the story of what she heard, w...

In the autumn of 1978, a college radio station in rural Pennsylvania picked up a strange signal during dead air—a woman's voice, calm and precise, reading coordinates into the static. The DJ on duty, a quiet kid named Paul, recorded it on a spare reel and forgot about it. Weeks later, he played it back after midnight. That's when the voice started talking directly to him, describing his apartment,...

In the winter of 1979, Luna's uncle Art drove a repair truck for Blue Ridge Cable in the hollows of West Virginia. One December night, he got a call from a house on Blue Ridge Road that didn't exist—at least not on any map or service record. The old man who answered the door led him to a television in a room with no windows, tuned to a single static channel broadcasting a number that kept counting...

In the summer of 1978, in the dead-end town of Marlow, Oklahoma, a boy named Danny Haines started watching a test pattern that shouldn't have existed. It appeared on channel five after midnight, a simple circle and crosshairs with a single flicker in the lower right quadrant. At first it was just something to stare at. But then the flicker started moving. Danny began to sleep with the TV on, convi...

September 1987. A dusty antique shop off Route 11 in Marion, Virginia. Luna stops for a coffee and walks out with a photograph in a brass frame — a small boy in church clothes, printed on heavy paper, his eyes following her from the shelf. The owner says the boy has been waiting. That night, in a motel room with a dying air conditioner, Luna sets the frame on the nightstand and learns what it mean...

In the winter of 1979, I spent a week in the small railroad town of Millbrook, Ohio, helping my great-aunt clear out her late husband's radio repair shop. Among the boxes of vacuum tubes and tangled wires, I found a reel-to-reel tape labeled 'KXQZ 12/17 10PM - FINAL' and a note from my uncle: 'Do not play this alone.' Of course I played it alone. What I heard was the last broadcast of a local AM s...

In the winter of 1978, in the small Oklahoma town of Cushing, a man named Harlan Riggs became obsessed with a dead channel. Every night after midnight, he would sit in his dark living room waiting for something to happen on static. This is what I saw when I finally agreed to sit with him. What he was watching was not snow. And what came through the screen did not forget that we had seen it. #Fexin...