Ten Fathoms — Fexingo Horror

In the winter of 1999, the town of Port Suffering, Maine, had a problem no one wanted to talk about. The fog bell at Half-Moon Inlet had been ringing every night since the dredge boat the Margaret Rose went down in November. Old Mrs. Carmody said it was the souls of the drowned trying to find their way home. The Coast Guard said it was a loose chain. But when Luna's uncle, a retired lobsterman, to...

October 2023, on the coast of Massachusetts. Luna hears about a salvage diver who found a bell on a wreck no one else would touch — the Mermaid's Purse, a charter boat that went down with six people in 1998. The diver brought the bell up, cleaned it, and hung it in his workshop. Then the calls started coming at night. Not a phone ringing — the bell ringing, inside its glass case, without being tou...

A lone fisherman recounts a night on Stillwater Reach where the fog carried a bell that didn't belong. What he found in the shallows beneath an abandoned lighthouse was not a shipwreck—but something that had been waiting for someone to listen. #TenFathoms #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #Lighthouse #Fog #Bell #StillwaterReach #Fisherman #Dawn #Silence #Mist #Water #Solitude #Echo #Lost #Listen #Aban...

In October of '95, Luna's uncle took her to Echo Cove, a narrow inlet off the coast of Maine where the fishing had always been good. But that night, the water was too still, the fog too thick, and the fish they hauled up weren't fish at all. Something in the cove was returning what was thrown in—every lure, every hook, every thing lost to the deep. And when they pulled the anchor, something pulled...

I spent a summer working the night shift at Redbank Marina, on the Stillwater River where it bends past the old paper mill. Nothing ever happened there—just fuel pumps, rental skiffs, the occasional drunk angler. But that July, a woman in a yellow raincoat kept appearing at the end of Pontoon G. She never said a word. She just pointed down. I thought she was a ghost, or a prank. I was wrong. What...

On a still night in early November, Luna follows a stranger to the tide pools below Black Rock Point, a stretch of Maine coast locals avoid after dark. The man claims his daughter drowned there twenty years ago, but he never found her body. Together they walk the wet rocks by flashlight, searching for something he calls 'the pockets' — underwater caves that breathe. What he finds is not a body. An...

December 2023, on the mudflats below Port Townsend. Eleanor Bouchard had tonged the same oyster bed for forty-two years, since her father taught her at twelve. Then the Army Corps dredged the channel, and the water went strange. First the oysters came up empty, shells clean as a whistle. Then the mud itself seemed wrong, sucking at her skiff like something pulling from below. When she found the fi...

It's November on the coast of Maine, and Luna is spending a week at her uncle's fishing camp near the village of Frenchman's Cove. The camp sits at the end of a long gravel road, and at the end of that road is a pier that juts into the fog. On the second night, she hears a sound she can't place: a low, rhythmic drumming, muffled and wet, as if something is being struck far beneath the water. The l...

Winter, 1997. A traveler checks into a crumbling seaside inn on the coast of Maine, drawn by a fog that seems to follow the road. The innkeeper warns him about Room Six — the drowning room, she calls it — where guests hear water where there is none. He stays anyway. What he finds in that room is not a leak, not a ghost, but a presence that remembers the weight of the sea. A story about the rooms w...

In the late autumn of 2019, Luna found herself at the clapboard boat shop of Elias Vane on the Blackberry River in western Massachusetts. Known as the last man who could make a wooden hull hold the dark water, Elias worked by lamplight and trusted no one with his methods. But when Luna knocked on his door seeking a repair for her own skiff, she found something larger and older behind his silence —...

Luna hears about a midnight mooring near Dry Salvages, a cluster of sea-smooth rocks off the coast of a small Maine town. In the winter of 1989, a lobsterman named Ellis Coombs picked up a sound on his hydrophone—a low hum with no source. When he hauled his traps, he found something that shouldn't have been there: a rope, braided from kelp and human hair, tied to a stone carved with a symbol no on...

Luna recounts a night in October 2019 when she anchored her boat near the abandoned dredge 'Catherine M' in Pea Island Channel, North Carolina. The dredge had been moored there for years, a rusting hulk that local fishermen avoided after dark. But on that still, moonless night, Luna heard the sound of its machinery grinding to life. She tells the story of what she saw through the fog and what she...

At a quarter past three on a September morning, Luna moored at a derelict dock on Stillwater Reach, a stagnant arm of the river where the current died and the fog lay thick as cotton. She had come to check on a friend's trapline — old Samuel Croft, who had stopped answering his radio three days before. What she found was a camp abandoned mid-task, a wet sleeping bag, a single boot, and a handwritt...

Luna recounts the night she met the old woman who tended the bell buoy at Blackbird Shoal, a lonely stretch of water off the coast of Miskatonic County. It was late autumn, just before the first freeze, and the fog had settled in thick. The woman had been out there for decades, she said, ringing the bell by hand when the mechanism failed. But the more Luna listened, the clearer it became that the...

In the gray hour before dawn, Luna steers her boat through pea-soup fog toward a shoal she knows she should avoid. The brass bell in her wheelhouse rings on its own, and she finds a woman standing on a half-sunken ledge, ringing her own bell in answer. The woman is waiting for something. Or someone. And she has been waiting a very long time. A quiet, waterlogged horror about obligation, repetition...

An old fisherman on the Gulf Coast teaches a younger woman the secret of a vanished island — Skeleton Key, a place that appears only at the lowest winter tide and is said to hold the remains of every boat it has ever claimed. She follows him there one December morning, and what they find in the tidal pools is not driftwood. A story about the temptation of things that do not want to be found, and t...

In the winter of 1989, a woman named Ellen Shire took a job as the temporary lightkeeper on Edgemoore Island, a bare rock shelf a mile off the coast of Cunningham, Maine. The lighthouse had been automated for a decade, but the Coast Guard needed someone to stay through December for a radio relay experiment. Ellen — a retired marine biologist who had lost her husband to the sea three years prior —...

Luna recalls a foggy night off the coast of Maine, where she stopped at a lighthouse that had been automated for decades—only to find its foghorn still sounding by hand. The keeper she met there had been alone for thirty years, sounding the horn against a danger that had nothing to do with ships. A story about solitude, duty, and the things we hold at bay with sound. #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast...

In the spring of 1997, Luna's uncle lost his boat — a forty-year-old lobster trawler named the Whimbrel — to something that wasn't a storm, wasn't a reef, and wasn't mechanical failure. He never talked about it, not once, until the night he sat her down on the porch of his shack at Goose Cove, Maine, and told her what he saw in the water at half past three in the morning, three miles off Little Du...

In the autumn of 2018, a fisherman named Harlan Croft anchored off Sorrow Island in the middle of Lake Champlain and heard something no one else had heard in forty years — the underwater bells of a drowned church. He came back to town with a story about a woman in a yellow raincoat who counted each ring from a skiff in the fog. This is what she told him before the water took the light. #SorrowIsla...

In the autumn of 1998, Luna's uncle ran a small general store in the dying town of Pender's Reach, Oregon. The store received its stock from a delivery truck that came every Thursday at dusk, rain or shine. But one Thursday in late October, the truck arrived early, and the driver's face was wrong. Luna was thirteen that year, and she remembers the way the canned goods on the shelves seemed to brea...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna received a voicemail from her uncle Elias, a commercial fisherman out of Gray Harbor, Maine. He sounded wrong — hollow, like he was speaking from underwater. He said he'd pulled something up from Halfmoon Shoal, something that wasn't a fish. The next morning she drove six hours to a town that no longer existed on any map. The harbormaster denied that Elias had ever work...

September 1998. A dry summer has dropped the water level in Lost Creek Reservoir by fifteen feet, exposing things that should have stayed submerged. Luna's cousin Eddie takes his johnboat past the No Trespassing buoys to fish the old channel—and finds a navigation beacon still burning, bolted to a rock ledge that hasn't been above water since the valley was flooded in 1953. The light is not electr...

In the winter of 1989, a woman named Cora Voss took the night shift at the Greely Point Coast Guard station, a lonely outpost on a spit of land that juts into Lake Superior. Her job was to keep the navigation beacon burning through the worst of the season's storms. But the beacon had been acting strange — flickering at odd hours, sometimes showing a light where no light should be. One night in Feb...

October 1987. A woman named Carrie rents a cabin on a man-made pond in northern Minnesota, hoping for a quiet weekend alone. The cabin belongs to an old fishing guide named Larsen, who warns her about a crib—a submerged structure built decades ago to attract fish. But the crib wasn't built for fish. It was built for something else. Carrie hears sounds at night. A dull thud against the dock. A chil...