Side B — Fexingo Horror

On a humid August night in 1987, Luna drives through Lometa, Texas, and stops at a boarded-up recording studio called K-Bar. A sign in the window says 'Free Tapes — Take One.' Inside, she finds a single reel-to-reel tape labeled 'Side B' sitting on a dusty mixing board. She plays it. The recording is a woman's voice — low, deliberate — telling a story about a man who came to the studio to record a...

In the autumn of 1989, a stranded traveler on a lonely stretch of Vermont's Route 22 finds a payphone that still works—and a voice on the other end that knows his name, his route, and the exact mile marker where his engine died. The call keeps him on the line for hours, weaving a story that sounds like a confession, a warning, and a farewell all at once. When he finally hangs up and walks to the n...

Luna pulls a battered vinyl from the shelf — the B-side of a forgotten country gospel LP — and tells the story of the Echo Motel in Dust Falls, Nevada, where in October 1987 a night clerk named Vern kept a logbook of the strange requests guests made through the keyhole of Room 9. Luna found the logbook in a thrift store in Tonopah, its last entry dated the day the motel owner vanished. She reads s...

August 1997, just outside the town of Canaan, Vermont. Luna tells the story of a man named Eli Sutter who spent sixty autumns running a cider press on his family's orchard — and the hollow he carved between two gnarled trees where he went to sit alone every evening after the work was done. When a developer bought the land after Eli's death, the bulldozer operator found something in that hollow tha...

June 1987, just outside of Hargrove, Tennessee. A highway motel with a flickering vacancy sign and a jukebox that played songs no one had ever heard. I was passing through that night, around two in the morning, when I stopped at the Elms Motor Lodge because the rain was coming down hard and I needed a place to lie low. The clerk at the desk was a woman named Cora—tired, mid-fifties, a name tag wor...

It's August 1998, past midnight at the Greyhound station in Winesburg, Ohio. Luna's bus is delayed four hours. She shares the empty waiting room with an old man who tells her about a woman who's been waiting for a bus every night for forty years. She never buys a ticket. She never boards. She just sits in the third row of plastic chairs and watches the door. The old man talks about her like she's...

In the summer of 1997, on a dead-end road outside a town called Meridian, a girl named Ella discovered a swing that didn't creak. It hung from a black walnut tree at the far edge of a field, and every evening she sat there until her mother called her in. But the swing didn't just sit still—it moved when there was no wind, and the imprint on the seat was always damp, even after a week of drought. W...

In the summer of 1987, a traveling salesman checked into Room 14 at the El Rancho Motor Lodge outside Bernalillo, New Mexico. The room was ice-cold. The sheets were changed every day. But no one had slept in that bed since 1962. A story about a motel that never stopped honoring a reservation, the woman who kept the register, and what happens when you break a promise made to someone who was never t...

A night clerk's solitary shift at a roadside motel in eastern Oregon unravels when a late check-in leaves behind a handwritten note that shouldn't exist. Luna reads from the logbook of a place that isn't on any map anymore — a single room, a single key, and a knock that came three times after midnight. This is the story of what the clerk found in the drawer of the nightstand, and what he wrote dow...

August 1987. A handwritten ledger at the Lilac Motor Court, a twelve-room motel off Old Highway 17 in eastern Tennessee. Luna's aunt ran the place for thirty years, and the night before the auction, Luna helped her sort through the office. They found a registration card from 1973 — a man who checked in alone and never checked out. The room was sealed. The management never spoke of it. But that nig...

In the summer of 1988, a cartographer checking into a run-down motel in Pine Valley, Oregon, found a map room behind a locked door—a room filled with hand-drawn maps of towns that didn't exist, roads that led nowhere, and one map that seemed to know where she had been before she arrived. Luna recounts the story of Ellen Marsh, who spent three nights in that room, tracing lines that moved under her...

It's late summer, 1998, on a two-lane highway in western Missouri. The Grease Pit is a garage that used to be a gas station—concrete floor, a vending machine that hums, a payphone nobody uses. Luna's cousin Danny worked the night shift alone. He said he didn't mind the quiet. Then the calls started coming in after midnight. Not from a phone line. From the cars themselves—the ones waiting on the li...

In the gray hours before dawn on a frozen January morning in 1983, a waitress named Darla worked her final shift at the Starlite Diner on Route 17 outside Elko, Nevada. For three years she'd served coffee and pie to truckers and insomniacs, but that night a regular customer sat alone in booth seven and didn't order. He said something to her that she couldn't shake, and by the time the sun crept ov...

In 1987, on a cold November night somewhere outside Jericho Falls, a twelve-year-old boy named Caleb Weaver followed a sound through the trees. It was not an animal. It was not the wind. It was a low, pulsing hum, like a cello string being drawn across a rusted saw blade, coming from the far end of Parson's Auto Salvage. He went because he wanted to prove he wasn't afraid. He found a 1967 Ford Gal...

In the winter of 1987, a woman named Claire inherits a box of cassette tapes from her uncle, a failed salesman who spent his last years enrolled in the Wilkes School of Correspondence — a mail-order course in 'practical psychology.' The lessons are read by a woman with a voice that sounds like it's coming from a room much older than the tape. As Claire listens, she notices the instructions growing...

Luna recalls a late October night in 1998, when the payphone outside the abandoned Texaco station on Route 41 kept ringing. She stopped. She answered. And the voice on the other end knew her mother's maiden name, the color of her childhood bedroom, and the exact date of a fire she'd never told anyone about. Then it asked her to hold. This is the story of the call that lasted seven minutes and thir...

Luna recalls a night in August 1987 at the Paramount Drive-In outside Millbrook, Ohio, where the final reel of a forgotten horror film played something that wasn't on the print. The projectionist, a quiet man named Frank, had been running the same double feature for three weeks, and the regulars noticed the flicker at the edge of the frame. By the third night, the apparition in the background of t...

In the late autumn of 1992, a woman named Elara started driving the empty stretch of Old Route 6 in western Pennsylvania, stopping at a defunct gas station with a pay phone that rang every night at the same time. No one was on the other end — just static and, sometimes, the sound of someone breathing. She didn't tell anyone until the night she answered and heard her own voice. A quiet, unsettling...

On a freezing December night in 1987, Luna steps into the empty waiting room of the Corinth, Ohio depot, drawn by a story she heard from a retired station agent. The last train left ten years ago, but someone still shows up to sweep the platform, polish the brass, and set the departure board to a destination that doesn't exist. In the basement, she finds a locked door with a timetable taped to it,...

In the fall of 1998, a volunteer archivist at the Blue Ridge Public Library in Wilkesboro, North Carolina, discovered a reel-to-reel tape in a donation box from the estate of a woman named Eleanor Parnell. The tape was unlabeled. When she played it, she heard a man's voice—calm, precise—describing what he called 'the procedure' for a process that sounded like surgery but wasn't. The recording cut...

Winter 1987. A small-town coat check girl begins to notice that the items left with her never seem to be reclaimed. Night after night, the same coat hangs untouched. The same gloves. The same hat. When she finally looks inside the coat pocket, she finds something that changes how she sees the entire inn—and the man who left it there. This episode is a slow-burn ghost story about a gift that cannot...

On a humid August night in 1996, Luna bought a sealed vinyl copy of a long-forgotten folk album at a yard sale in Harlow, Kentucky. The record looked pristine, but when she finally played it, she found that Side B's final track was not the song listed on the label — it was something else. Something recorded live, somewhere underground, by someone who was not supposed to be there. Between the last...

In the winter of 1989, a disused cable station in the Illinois bottomlands received a single transmission on a line that had been dead for three years. Luna's uncle, a retired lineman, went to trace it. He found a room still warm, a chair still turned, and a reel-to-reel that had been recording silence for seventy-two hours. But the silence, he said later, had shape. This is the story of what he h...

December 1998. The All-Nite Grocery on Route 9 outside Millbrook, New York — a fluorescent-lit box of a store where nothing much ever happened. Until the night the woman in the long coat came through the automatic doors at 2:47 AM and asked for a pack of cigarettes she didn't smoke. Luna worked the register that winter. She remembers the cold air that followed the woman inside, remember how the wo...

June 1987. A stretch of Route 22 through eastern Oregon, past the turnoff for a town called Lost Creek that isn't on most maps anymore. I was driving back from a recording session in Pendleton when I saw the station wagon pulled over on the shoulder, hazards blinking. An older man stood beside it, waving me down. He needed a jump. I had cables. That's the part that stays in your head afterward — h...