The Backup Drive — Fexingo Horror

Luna recalls a cold November night in 2019 when a stranger's hard drive, salvaged from a pawn shop in River Bend, Tennessee, refused to let her look away. Inside, a single video file — dated 1997 — showed a man standing alone in an empty parking lot, speaking into the dark about something he'd buried. The man's name was Paul. The parking lot was behind a Piggly Wiggly. And the longer Luna watched,...

November 2023, Possum Trot Road, just outside Bell Buckle, Tennessee. I was cataloging folders from a drive a retired sheriff's deputy had dropped off — old case files, mostly, from the mid-nineties. Most of it was what you'd expect: juvenile records, traffic citations, a few missing-person reports that never went anywhere. But one folder had no name, just a string of numbers — a date. I opened it...

Winter, 2021. Luna drives out to a decommissioned boat ramp on Wolf Creek in western Kentucky. A local named Ezra has been seeing headlights at the water's edge every night at 3:11 a.m.—lights that shouldn't be there since the ramp was closed and chained off years ago. What Luna finds is not a truck or a car, but a submerged vehicle that never came back up. Ezra's own pickup, missing since October...

It was the second week of November, 2017, and I was cataloging a set of archived files from the Fentress County historical society. Most folders were traffic citations, tax ledgers, old church pamphlets. But one folder was labeled in a way that made me pause — no date, no extension, just a single name I didn't recognize. Inside was a single video file. The thumbnail showed what looked like a doorw...

Route 17 cuts through eastern Tennessee like a scar. On a humid July night in 2019, I found myself parked at the dead end of a service road that didn't appear on any map. A man stood beside a truck with a cracked windshield, holding a cassette recorder. He said he'd been driving for six hours, trying to get home, but the road kept looping back to this same stretch of pavement. He showed me the tap...

It was the last week of October, and I was driving home through the foothills when the fog closed in hard around a place called Whitaker's Rest. A motel sign flickered through the white — Vacancy — and I took the exit because my eyes were burning. The clerk at the front desk was a woman named Della who didn't seem surprised to see me. She handed me key 9 and said, 'Don't open the connecting door t...

October 2021, just past midnight on a two-lane road outside a town called Corbin. I was following a set of coordinates I'd found buried in a folder labeled 'maintenance logs' — a folder that shouldn't have existed on a drive that had been wiped seven years ago. The road dead-ended at a railroad trestle over Lick Creek. The rails were rusted through. The ties were splintered. But the light under th...

On a humid November night in 2019, Luna finds a single folder on the backup drive labeled 'St. Dymphna's Seminary, Mount Horeb Road.' Inside are 187 photos of an abandoned Catholic seminary in rural Tennessee, each more wrong than the last. A chapel with pews facing the wrong direction. A dormitory where every bed is made. A basement hallway with wet footprints leading into a wall. And then a phot...

Luna recalls a night in late October when a file titled 'Possum Creek Road — 2007' opened a grainy video of a rural railroad crossing. A blue Ford Bronco idles on the tracks as a woman's voice whispers a name. The video ends before the train. But when Luna drives to that crossing the next afternoon, she finds a rusted medallion in the gravel, engraved with the same name. A slow-burn story about th...

In the summer of 2014, a string of missing-person cases along the Stonewall Jackson Highway in western Virginia led me to a gravel lot behind a shuttered gas station. The lot was empty except for a single picnic table and a payphone that rang whenever I approached. No one ever answered, but the ringing followed me home—first in my ears, then from the backup drive itself, that same two-tone pulse,...

In the summer of 2021, Luna's uncle sends her a dusty external drive from his hunting cabin on Pine Mountain, Tennessee. He says it's full of old family photos, but when Luna opens it late one July night, she finds one folder — unlabeled — containing a single image file. The photo shows a stone foundation deep in the woods, and carved into the stones are symbols that look like honeycomb. Over the...

It was late October, three years ago, when I found the folder labeled 'Mud Creek Road' on a drive I'd never seen before. Inside were photographs of a white barn at dusk, each one taken from the same window of a house across the field—until the last photo, where the barn door is open and a man in coveralls is looking up, directly at the camera, as if he knew I'd be watching. I drove out to Mud Cree...

Luna returns to a memory she's tried to bury: the summer of 2017, the abandoned field at the end of Cold Springs Pike, and the woman who stood motionless among the weeds every night at exactly 2:17 AM. She was thin, dark-haired, and she never blinked. Luna tells what she saw when she finally walked out to meet her — and what followed her home. A slow-burn encounter about grief, repetition, and the...

Luna plugs in the drive and finds a folder labeled 'Gander Creek — 1987' — inside, three photographs of a wooden footbridge at dawn, each with a man standing at the center. The man wears a dark suit. The first photo: he is looking at the bridge. The second: he is looking at the camera, smiling, holding a Bible. The third: he is gone, but the Bible is still there, lying open on the planks. Luna dri...

Luna recounts the night she stumbled upon a folder labeled '1993' on the backup drive. Inside were photographs of a single-wide trailer at the dead end of Old County Line Road in Bledsoe County, Tennessee — a place she knew well. The images showed a woman she recognized, frozen in time, and a series of details that did not match the story she had always been told. As she clicked through the files,...

Luna discovers a folder on her backup drive labeled 'Reynolds County — Vital Records, Pre-1957.' Inside are scanned pages from a ledger kept by a man named Emmett Hargrave, who served as the county's sole registrar from 1921 until his disappearance in 1956. The entries start mundane — births, deaths, marriages — but shift into something else: records of people who were never born, never died, and...

It was late autumn in Smithton, Virginia, 2019. A small gray mailbox on a dirt road, nothing special. But the letter inside wasn't mail—it was a summons, written in pencil on yellowed notebook paper, dated 1973. The dead letter office had been forwarding messages from the missing for decades, and this one was addressed to a woman named Nora Hartley, who vanished from her farmhouse on Holloway Lane...

Luna recounts the night she found a folder labeled 'Buckhorn Ridge Estates' on an old hard drive. Inside were dozens of photographs of a half-built subdivision in rural Tennessee, taken at dusk in late October 2019. Each image showed the same six houses, identical except for the number nailed beside each front door. But the numbers didn't match any logical order. And in every photo, the light was...

Luna returns to a story she heard years ago from a man named Cal Harwood, who lived on Harpers Creek Road in Yadkin County. Cal told her about a well on his property that was never dry, even in the worst drought of 2007. He said it was deeper than the county records showed, and that sometimes when he leaned over the stone lip, he could hear someone breathing back. Luna never believed him until she...

It was late October, the kind of cold that settles into a house and stays. I was going through an old hard drive from a storage unit auction—just photos, mostly, from the early 2000s. One folder was labeled 'Big Lick Road.' The pictures showed a white farmhouse with a wraparound porch, a tire swing, a woman in a floral dress. But every photo had the same thing: a man standing in the background, ha...

October 2021, just past midnight on Miller's Creek Road in eastern Kentucky. A retired music teacher named Cora Bellamy calls Luna about a cello she found in a storage unit auction — a beautiful, unstrung instrument with a single inscription inside: 'Play me once, and I will remember.' Luna drives out to meet her, expecting a ghost story about an old musician. Instead, she finds a woman who has be...

It was late autumn, around eleven at night, and I was parked at the dead end of Possum Creek Road in a town called Smithfield. I'd been hired by a retired sheriff's deputy to salvage photos off a corrupted drive he'd kept since the summer of 1997. The images were from a playground dedication ceremony—a small metal sign bolted to a swing set, a ribbon cutting, kids running. But some of the files di...

Luna pulls a drive from a cardboard box labeled 'Drainage Ditch Road — 2006' and finds footage shot by a woman named Eleanor Phelps. The files show a dry, overgrown drainage ditch in August — a place Eleanor was documenting because her dog kept running there at dusk. The first few clips are boring: grass, a rusted pipe, the dog panting. But by the third clip, the dog is staring at something the ca...

October 2021. Bethany Church Road, a dead-end gravel lane off Route 58 in rural Pittsylvania County, Virginia. Luna is hired to recover photos from a water-damaged laptop belonging to a woman named Cora Bell, whose husband disappeared four years ago. The drive yields ordinary snapshots — a birthday party, a tire swing, a garden — except for one recurring detail: in the background of every picture,...

Luna drives to the end of Heron Road in late October, following a tip about an abandoned property. She finds a well in the backyard, covered with a rusted grate. The grate is heavy, and when she peers into the darkness below, she hears something breathing. Not water dripping, not wind. A slow, wet, rhythmic sound, like something large and tired waiting beneath. The owner's son, a quiet man named C...