Side B — Fexingo Horror

In the winter of 2008, a photo booth at the abandoned Danforth Mall in upstate New York began printing pictures that no one took. Luna recounts the story of her friend Ezra, who worked the graveyard security shift and found the booth's footage folder corrupted with images of a woman standing in a room that didn't exist — until he recognized the wallpaper from the mall's old arcade, sealed off for...

Luna tells the story of Edwin Holister, a retired sound archivist who moved into a rented house on the edge of Packsaddle, Texas, and began recording the silence of the high desert at night. He thought he was capturing wind and coyotes. But on playback, he heard something else — a voice, buried beneath the static, speaking a language that had no known origin. When he tried to find the source, the...

A short drive off Highway 9 in Millbrook County sits the Rusty Nail, a bar that's been dying slowly since the paper mill closed in '94. The jukebox in the back corner never worked right — people put quarters in just to watch the mechanism jam. Then a regular named Walt claimed he heard something: a song playing backwards, slow and warped, with words that weren't English. Luna heard the story from...

In the autumn of 1997, a woman named Eleanor checked into Room 8 of the Blue Heron Motel on the outskirts of Port Angeles, Washington. She was the only guest. For three nights, the night clerk heard her pacing, heard the television click on and off at odd hours, heard her talking in a voice that wasn't hers. On the fourth morning, her room was empty except for a single cassette tape on the nightst...

September 1987. A backroad in Blackwood County, Ohio. A country church with a single bell tower that never rings. Luna found it on a detour during a thunderstorm, pulled in by the smell of wet stone and something else — burned cedar, maybe, or dried blood. An old man named Amos keeps the grounds, and he tells her about the bell: how it was forged in 1912, how it rang once and everyone who heard it...

October 1992, just outside the town of Darden, Ohio. Luna's old high school friend Claire called her late one night with a story she couldn't keep to herself. Claire had moved into a house at the end of a gravel lane on Redmond Ridge, a low wooded hill that locals avoided after dark. At first it was just the dogs—neighbors' hounds baying at something in the treeline every night around 2 AM. Then C...

October 1994, just outside Pella, Iowa. Luna's uncle owned a roadside repair shop that doubled as a graveyard for broken CB radios. After closing time, he would sit in the dark waiting for a signal that never came from his wife who died in a crash on Harvest Moon Road. When Luna visited that autumn, she found him listening to static on a radio he'd rebuilt twelve times. She also found a recording...

In the autumn of 1997, Luna drove through the town of Whitefish Bend, Montana, and stopped at a bridge that wasn't on any map. An old man named Elias tended the lamps there, changing bulbs and wiping glass, even though the bridge led to nothing but a gravel patch and a stand of pines. He told her about the light that used to shine from the other side, and the people who crossed over when the fog r...

In the autumn of 1999, I drove through a stretch of western Kansas that the maps had forgotten to update. The town was called Prophet — a name I later learned the residents had tried twice to have changed. I went there because of a voicemail left on my machine by a man named Harlan Cross, who said he had something to show me in the bell tower of Saint Anne's Catholic Church. What I found was a man...

In the summer of 1987, on a parched stretch of Route 66 in Arizona, Luna spent a single night at the Loma Vista Motor Inn — a motel whose walls seemed to remember every guest who had ever passed through. The room was cool, the pool was empty, and the air conditioner hummed a low, constant note. But it was the room next door that drew her attention: a door that stayed closed, a window that stayed d...

In the summer of 1997, a fire gutted The Spindle, a vinyl record store in the small town of Dutton, Oregon. Luna knew the owner, an older man named Cal who kept a locked back room no one ever entered. After the fire, the building was condemned, but Luna went back one last time to see what survived. What she found in the ashes — a single vinyl record, intact, with no label — pulled her into a story...

In the autumn of 1987, a small-town night dispatcher named Carol Anne took the graveyard shift at the old Bell exchange in Granite Falls, Wisconsin. The switchboard was about to be decommissioned, and she was the last operator to sit alone in that basement room with its rows of blinking lights and humming cords. That night, the board lit up with a single incoming call from a number that had been d...

In the fall of 2009, a late-night DJ at a rural Oklahoma AM station named KRVL began receiving requests for a song he didn't recognize. The caller insisted it was the B-side of a 45 he'd played the night before. But the station had no such record. Over the next three nights, the same request came from different voices, at exactly 3:17 AM. The DJ started recording the calls. By the fourth night, he...

A dark February night in 1998. Luna pulls into the empty gravel lot behind a shuttered movie theater in Pella, Iowa, to wait out a storm. She's not alone. A woman in a green coat is sitting on the hood of a rusted Cutlass, watching the theater's back door as if expecting someone who hasn't walked through it in twenty-two years. Luna stays longer than she should, and the woman tells her about the l...

In the summer of 1993, a man walks into a diner in the dying town of Meridian, Wyoming, and plays the same song on the jukebox every night for twelve nights. The waitress who serves him remembers his quiet voice, his neat coat, the way he never finished his coffee. On the thirteenth night, she follows him home. What she finds in his rented room — a turntable, a single record, a stack of letters ad...

A lonely stretch of Oklahoma highway. A gas station that shouldn't exist. A 45 RPM single with no label. In 2019, on a humid July night, Luna pulled off the interstate to clear her head and found a record that plays something that was never recorded — a song from a singer who died in 1967, singing words she never wrote. The attendant who sold it to her didn't seem surprised. The car that drove awa...

In the summer of 2008, I found a vinyl record in a thrift store outside Creston, Ohio—a town so small the main street ends in a cornfield. The label said 'Side B' in someone's handwriting. I bought it for a dollar. I didn't own a turntable then. But the record followed me. Through three moves, a breakup, a cross-country drive. It was always in the last box I unpacked, always facedown. When I final...