Saints of the Salt Flats — Fexingo Horror

Episode 17 of Saints of the Salt Flats. Luna remembers a night in late October 2017, when she found a handwritten sign tacked to a telephone pole outside a diner in Tonopah, Nevada. It read: 'Shrine-keeper wanted. Last one left. Inquire at the old camp on Route 6.' She drove east into the rain, past the turnoff for the hot springs, until the road turned to gravel and the gravel turned to mud. The...

Luna drives out to the old Starlite Drive-In on the edge of Blackwater, Nevada, a place that's been closed since the early 90s. She's there because of a rumor—someone's been leaving offerings at the screen, little things, bottle caps and polished stones. But what she finds isn't a shrine to any saint she knows. The projector is running. The film is silent, black and white, and it shows a woman wal...

Luna arrives at a small-town reservoir in the dead of winter, drawn by a story about a boy who walked onto the ice and never came back. She finds a shrine built from frozen offerings—milk jugs, photographs, a child's shoe—and an old woman who tends it by starlight. The woman tells her about the thing that lives beneath the ice, the one that calls to the lonely, the one that wears the faces of the...

Luna arrives at a dusty gas station outside the ghost town of Saltwash, Nevada, on a November night in 2018. The attendant, a man named Elias, tells her about the shrine that appeared overnight behind the station—a small white figure of a woman holding a lantern. He says people have been leaving offerings: coins, photographs, a child's shoe. Luna waits to see if anyone comes to pray. At midnight,...

Luna pulls off Interstate 10 at three in the morning, somewhere west of Van Horn, Texas, following a handwritten tip about a shrine in a motel room. The Blue Moon Motel is a relic of another decade — faded neon, cracked asphalt, a permanently locked office door. Room 14 is kept lit, always, by a single bare bulb. Inside, the walls are papered with letters. Hundreds of them. All addressed to the sa...

Luna recalls a summer night in 1997, when she was twelve and the new girl in the small desert town of San Patricio, New Mexico. The kids at the edge of the cul-de-sac dared her to touch the shrine at the far end of the abandoned playground—a white wooden box nailed to a dead cottonwood tree, filled with a child's toys and a sealed mason jar. She didn't touch it, but she went back alone the next ni...

October 2023. Luna drives a dead-end county road in northern Nevada, past a sign for a town called Redemption that no longer appears on any map. She finds a woman named Miriam tending a small white shrine at the asphalt's abrupt edge, surrounded by salt crust and rabbitbrush. Miriam speaks of the pilgrims who come at night — not to pray, but to leave something behind. A key. A photograph. A name w...

Luna tells the story of a night in late October 2021, when she took a wrong turn on an unmarked road outside the town of Dry Fork, Nevada, and found a small white shrine at a three-way junction where no junction should have been. Inside the shrine was a single photograph of a woman named Cora Mendez, a leather journal, and a mason jar of water. Luna opened the journal and began to read entries wri...

In the summer of 2007, on a two-lane blacktop outside the dying town of Bitter Springs, New Mexico, Luna stopped at a roadside shrine that should have been abandoned. It wasn't. Someone was maintaining it—laying fresh flowers, leaving cups of water, arranging small stones in patterns she couldn't read. The town's last living resident, an old man named Elias, told her the story of Thomas Vierra, a...

On a freezing November night in 2017, Luna stops at a diner off Route 50 in Nevada—a place called Mile 47, where the coffee is weak and the pie is three days old. The only other customer is a man in a gray coat who sits in the corner booth, nursing a cup that never empties. The waitress, a woman named Delia, warns her not to speak to him. But Luna has questions: about the shrine out back, about th...

At the foot of Shrine Mesa, just outside the dying town of Punto Blanco, New Mexico, there is a staircase carved into the rock. Twelve steps. No more, no less. Locals say they were built by a hermit who died fifty years ago—but the steps don't match any known tool marks. I went there last October, during the dry season, when the wind scrapes the mesa clean. I met a man named Silas who had been cli...

South of the salt flats, off a county road that doesn't appear on any map, there's a town called Soledad Springs. Luna went there last October, following a story about a woman named Elena Voss who walked into the desert with nothing but a handmade flag and a whisper. What Luna found wasn't a shrine or a ruin—it was a motel room that still held the shape of someone who had been erased, a ledger ful...

In the summer of 1992, Luna's grandmother took her to a crumbling clinic outside Hesperia, New Mexico, to see a doctor who prescribed silence. Thirty years later, Luna returns to a building that wasn't there and a waiting room full of moths. A story about an old woman who spoke only in whispers, a doctor who never finished his sentences, and the thing that waited under the examination table. No sc...

In the summer of 2003, Luna's car died on a dirt road outside the town of Salt Creek, Nevada. She walked until she found a gravel lot with a single motel—The Silver Shrine—where a woman named Eva gave her a room for cash. That night, Luna heard the falls. Not water, but voices. The next morning, Eva told her about the shrine upstream, the one nobody builds but everyone visits. Luna hiked to the ba...

Luna drives through a dust storm on New Mexico's Highway 285 and stops at a roadside shrine outside the dead town of Arroyo Negro. A woman in a pink dress has been tending the shrine for forty years, collecting the bones of animals that die on the salt flats and arranging them in patterns at the foot of a wooden cross. She claims her husband is still out there, walking toward her from the day he d...

In the summer of 2019, I drove through the dying town of Coyote Crossing, New Mexico — a place built around a salt flat that was never supposed to be there. I met a woman named Dolores who tended a shrine on the cracked white earth, a shrine that was not for any saint I knew. She told me about the salt that grew in the shape of hands, about the low hum that came from the ground at dusk, and about...

Luna recalls a summer night in 1987 on the outskirts of Iron Springs, Nevada, where the salt flats meet the foothills. A small whitewashed shrine, Saint Barbara's Well, stands alone on a gravel turnout off a dying county road. Locals say the spring never runs dry, but the water tastes like tears. Luna's aunt, who kept the shrine for forty years, told her about the night someone came asking for a d...