Streetlight Burials — Fexingo Horror

In the autumn of 2005, a woman on Wainwright Lane in the small town of Whitethorn noticed a keyhole carved into the trunk of an old oak tree at the dead end of the lane. She began leaving notes inside the hollow beneath it, and receiving replies — handwritten, in a hand she did not recognize, describing things no one else could know. When she tried to find the person on the other side, the tree of...

Luna remembers a hot August night in 2002, when a wrong turn on a back road led her to a dead-end lane where a girl in a white dress stood waiting. The girl didn't speak—she pointed. At a house with no windows. At a door that Luna opened. What she found inside wasn't a home. It was a room with a single chair, a bare bulb, and a story someone had tried to bury. Luna never told anyone what she saw....

On a cold November night in the town of Fairhaven, I found myself driving down Old Mill Road—a gravel strip that peters out into a dead end where the old mill used to stand. The mill burned down in 1987, and they say the fire never really went out. That night, I saw a light flickering through the trees, and I followed it to a clearing where a woman sat alone before a small fire. She wore a heavy w...

In the summer of 2018, on a stretch of road that didn't exist on any map, Luna met a girl named Wren who was mending wires. Not telephone wires or power lines—something older, something that hummed beneath the asphalt. The girl had been at it for years, she said, threading copper from one broken streetlight to the next. She didn't remember starting. She only knew that when the lights went dark, so...

In the fall of 2019, a cartographer named Elara Vance moved to the small town of Millbrook, Vermont, to finish her atlas of the region. She became obsessed with a dead-end road called Frost Road—a cul-de-sac that appeared on every map but seemed to lead nowhere. When she walked it, she found a row of mailboxes, each with a name she recognized from the town's old cemetery. The last mailbox bore her...

A beat-up sedan parked every night at the dead end of Pineridge Road, engine running, headlights off. No one ever saw the driver get in or out. Luna walks past it after her shift at the gas station, telling herself it's just some kid smoking or a couple talking. But the windows are always fogged from the inside, and on the seventh night she leaves a note under the wiper blade. What she finds the n...

A late October night in 2019. A two-lane road outside of Bakersville. Luna pulls over because her headlights catch something strange: a boy, maybe twelve years old, standing under a flickering streetlight, counting aloud. He is methodical, precise, and he has been doing this every night for weeks. When she asks him why, he says he is looking for the one that doesn't belong — the extra light that a...

It's late October 1997, and I'm sitting in the parking lot of the Lovett Motel on Route 9, just outside of Hadley, Ohio. The neon sign flickers — VACANCY, then V CANCY, then nothing. The manager, a man named Earl, tells me about the room they never rent out. Room 14. He says it's because the lock is broken. But that's not the real reason. The real reason is what happens when someone stays there an...

In the summer of 1998, I worked the graveyard shift at Lockwood's Gas Station, a single-pump relic on the edge of a dying town. The last bus came through at midnight, and after that the highway was empty. But the light above the pump had a habit of flickering at exactly 3:41 AM, casting shadows that didn't match the world. One night, a man in a charcoal suit stepped out of the dark and asked for d...

A faded motel off Route 17 in upstate New York, a string of vanished guests, and the one who stayed long enough to find the trapdoor under Room 9. Luna pieces together what happened to a man named Harlan Cross, who checked in one winter night and never checked out — but was never found inside. The motel owner's daughter remembers the smell of wet dirt. The logs show a reservation made in 1987 that...

Summer of 1991, early evening on the Bryant Mill Bridge in Cutter's Hollow. A man named Edwin Parrish finds a rusted lockbox tucked under the bridge's eastern span. Inside: a single key, a photograph of a girl who looks like someone he knew in high school, and a note that reads 'She was the first. Don't open the root cellar at the old Pruitt place.' Edwin can't let it go. He drives out to the Prui...

In the autumn of 2011, Luna took a wrong turn near the town of Wisp Hollow, Ohio, and found herself parked under the derelict overpass on Route 9. A girl in a yellow raincoat was standing on the gravel shoulder, holding a stack of newspapers that looked decades old. Luna stopped to ask for directions, but the girl kept offering her a paper—a paper that carried a headline from a date that hadn't co...

Luna recounts a summer night in 1998 in the small town of Ashburton, Ohio. She and her friend Leo break into an abandoned house at 117 Sycamore Street, lured by rumors of a secret attic room. Inside, they find hundreds of handmade dolls, each one a perfect replica of a missing child from the town's history. The dolls are arranged in a circle, facing a small wooden chair. As they try to leave, they...

In the summer of 2019, on a dead-end stretch of Route 11 in upstate New York, a neon diner sign kept falling, night after night. Just before three in the morning. Always pointing east. The owner, a man named Harlan, swore it wasn't wind or wear. He called me after the third night, voice cracked, saying the bolts weren't loose—the metal was warm to the touch. I drove out that August, past fields go...

In the summer of 2003, on a two-lane blacktop called Old County Road just outside of Bakersville, the streetlights started dying one by one. Not flickering — just going dark, like someone pulled a plug. The county sent a repairman named Harold, a quiet man who lived alone with his tools. He fixed them, and they stayed fixed. But after a few nights, the lights on that road began to shift — casting...

One summer, a man named Eli Peltier moves into a dying town in Kansas called Fetter Grove. He doesn't talk much, but every night he sits by the water tower with a stethoscope and listens. Luna pieces together what he heard, what it wanted, and why the tower was finally torn down. A story about loneliness, sound, and the things that listen back from inside the ground. #FetterGrove #Kansas #WaterTow...

In the autumn of 2003, I found myself in Red Bluff, South Dakota — a town that seemed to exist only as a rumor between truck stops. I was tracing the origin of a set of hand-carved wooden figures that kept appearing in antique shops along a two-hundred-mile stretch of highway. Every one of them was a bird. Every one of them had its wings folded tight against its body. The last one led me to an old...