Ten Fathoms — Fexingo Horror

In October 1987, drought drained Grayson Lake to its mud-caked floor, revealing a house that had been submerged for thirty years. No one remembered it being there. Luna's uncle, a diver for the county, was sent to check the foundation before the rains came back. He came home pale, smelling of silt and something else. He told Luna what he saw through a window: a kitchen table set for two, a child's...

I spent the summer of 2019 working the night shift at the Lost Lake Overlook, a scenic pull-off on an old logging road in the Oregon Coast Range. It was a lonely job—just me, a folding chair, and a wooden gate I had to close at midnight. But the third week, I started noticing a woman standing at the edge of the cliff. She wore a blue dress, no jacket, no shoes. She was always there just after elev...

On a fog-shrouded dawn in November 1987, Luna motored into the slack water above Blackwater Dam, a structure that had stood abandoned since the Corps decommissioned it in '72. She had been hired by a retired engineer named Hollis Webb to record the dam's sounds before it was slated for demolition — a strange request, but the money was good. Over three days, she learned that the dam had been built...

October 1987, outside the town of Potter's Hollow, Nebraska. A farmer's son goes missing for three days and returns with a story about the grain silo behind his father's barn—a silo that had stood empty for years, its door rusted shut. He tells of a voice that spoke from the dark, a voice that knew his name, and a pact he made to get out. But when the father goes to investigate, he finds the silo...

A woman named Claire stops at an all-night diner outside Frost Hollow, Vermont, during a January blizzard. The waitress warns her about a ferry that still crosses the frozen river at midnight, even though the bridge has been closed for decades. Claire dismisses it as small-town superstition — until her car stalls on the deserted road and she sees a lantern swinging in the dark. The ferryman doesn'...

September 2019, just outside the town of Cedar Flats, Oregon. I went there to look at a gate. A cattle guard on a dirt road that someone had rebuilt out of human bones. Not a display, not a warning — it was built like a bridge, like a threshold you were meant to cross. I talked to the old man who found it, a retired logger named Harlan Goss. He showed me the tire tracks that led up to it and stopp...

It's late October in the town of Meridian Falls, and the rains have been unseasonably heavy. The river that runs under Old Mill Bridge has risen to a level no one in living memory has seen. Luna drives out there just after midnight, not sure why, not sure what she's looking for. She finds an old man standing at the center of the bridge, staring down into the dark water. He doesn't seem surprised t...

In the autumn of 2002, a state trooper named Harlan Dane drove the same stretch of Oklahoma backroad every night for twenty-three years. He knew every curve, every mailbox, every dog that barked from a porch. But on a night in late October, the road began to change—not the pavement, but the feeling behind it. A woman’s voice on the radio, an abandoned sedan with the engine still warm, and a bridge...

Luna recalls a story she heard in the winter of 2017, in the small town of Kettle Falls, Washington. A woman named Elara claimed she had been dragging the Colville River every night for weeks, pulling something heavy from the bottom. The townsfolk thought she was grieving her missing daughter, but the riverkeeper knew different. One December midnight, Luna stood on the frozen bank and watched Elar...

Luna remembers a winter night in the small Vermont town of Coldbrook, where she and her father tended the historic Parson's Stair — a covered wooden bridge with eighty-seven steps, each one dated with a town death. On the night of December 22nd, 1998, the sixth step creaked with a sound that was not wood, and the date carved into it — October 17th, 1987 — began to bleed. What she found at the bott...

Luna tells the story of a night she spent anchored above the lost town of Port Mercy, a village swallowed by the reservoir in 1959. She was tasked with documenting the bell of the old St. Anne's Church, still rumored to ring underwater. But when she dove down to the steeple, she found the bell was not alone — and something inside the sunken church had learned to answer. #TenFathoms #DrownedChurch...

Luna remembers a cold October night in 2019, when she pulled into the empty lot beside Skelton Crossing's old grain elevator — a place the locals whisper about. She met an old woman named Etta Mae who was tying strips of cloth to the branches of a twisted oak tree. The woman claimed the tree could carry prayers to the drowned. Luna listened as Etta Mae told her about the night in 1972 when a schoo...

In the autumn of 2019, Luna hears a story from an old lobsterman named Elias about a fog bell that vanished from Barrow Island fifty years ago. The bell was said to warn ships away from the rocks, but one night it stopped ringing. When Elias found it washed ashore, the clapper was gone and something had been carved into the brass. Now, every time the fog rolls in, he hears a single, clear note fro...

Luna recalls a bitter February on the Wisconsin border, where a retired lineman named Caleb Rourke drilled through eighteen inches of ice every morning. Not for fishing — he was listening. The locals said he'd lost his wife the winter before, that grief had softened his mind. But Luna had heard the recordings he played on his old cassette deck: a low, rhythmic pulse from beneath the frozen lake, s...

Luna hears a story from a retired lighthouse keeper on the Maine coast — about a girl who drowned in Stillwater Bay in 1987, and the strange phosphorescent light that has appeared on the water every anniversary since. The keeper spent twenty years watching that light through his lens, trying not to see what it was doing. Luna listens in a fogbound diner at 2 AM, and by the time she leaves, she is...

In the winter of 2019, the town of Gray's Harbor, Maine, began hearing a sound from the bay. Not a foghorn, not a bell. A voice. Luna tells the story of a buoy that washed ashore after a nor'easter, its clapper replaced with something that looked like a human heart. She speaks of the night she and her uncle towed it back out, of the words it whispered through the hull, and of the man who kept watc...

A lone fisherwoman named Luna rows out into the fog-choked waters of Maine's Merrymeeting Bay in the autumn of 1987, chasing a strange bell that rings without a boat. She finds a boy named Caleb standing on a half-sunken dock, who speaks of a drowned town and a debt that must be paid. As the tide falls, the truth of the sunken church steeple and the bell's curse reveals itself. This is a story of...