The Backup Drive — Fexingo Horror

December 2021. The phone rings at 2:13 AM. A woman named Annette from the old Drowning Creek fire tower says the drive you gave her last spring just showed her something she can't unsee — a keyhole in a photograph of a burned-down house, and through it, a room that hasn't existed since 1987. You drive out to the tower with a flashlight and a full tank of gas, telling yourself you're just going to...

Luna finds a single photograph buried in a folder on an old backup drive—a Polaroid of a woman she doesn't recognize, standing in front of a gas station that closed down before she was born. The timestamp on the file says it was taken last Tuesday. The woman in the picture is wearing a name tag that reads 'Molly.' Luna starts asking around town, and no one named Molly has lived in Wainwright Count...

August 2017. Two in the morning on Old Hollow Road, outside a town called Misenheimer. A friend of a friend named Cora asks me to recover photos from a melted laptop she pulled out of a house fire. The drive itself is fine, but inside the fire-damaged chassis I find a single file — a video recorded the night of the fire, from inside the house, by a camera that should have been destroyed. Cora says...

Luna finds a folder on a thrift-store hard drive labeled 'Motel 421' — security footage from a small roadside motel in Cumberland County, autumn of 2019. The grainy black-and-white footage shows a man checking in alone, then re-emerging hours later covered in something dark. But it's what the camera doesn't show — the room door opening on its own, the light flickering under the gap, the sound from...

October 2019. A Tuesday night, just past midnight. Luna is scrolling through folders on the backup drive when she finds a single, unnamed file from a town called Jakes Creek, up in the Ozarks. The file contains a voice memo—a woman's voice, recorded on the night the ground opened under a gas station convenience store. But the memo doesn't end when the sinkhole collapses. It keeps recording, beneat...

Luna recalls the summer of 2019, when she found a forgotten backup drive in a box of junk and plugged it in. The drive contained a single file: a year's worth of security footage from a dry cleaner in Three Rivers, Kentucky. The footage showed the same woman coming in every Tuesday night at 11:47 PM, never picking up anything, never dropping anything off, just standing by the pressing machine for...

It was late November, just after Thanksgiving, when I drove out to Willow Creek to clear out my aunt's old farmhouse. She'd died in the spring, and her house had sat untouched through summer, the mail piling up, the grass growing wild. I found the backup drive in a shoebox under her bed, labeled in her handwriting: FOR LATER. What was on that drive—a series of photographs she'd taken over the last...

In the summer of 2017, I found an old USB drive in a box of junk at an estate sale on Long Creek Road, just outside of Lumberton. The drive was labeled 'Ring 1998' in faded marker. I plugged it in that night, expecting home videos. Instead, I found a single file: a grainy, twelve-minute recording of a wedding reception. The bride never looks at the camera. The groom keeps checking his watch. And i...

A late September evening on Trestle Road, just outside Lumberton. Luna takes a detour past a boarded-up farmhouse and finds a man in a veil of bees, standing in a field of dead hives. He speaks in a language she almost understands. The air hums with something between a prayer and a warning. She leaves with a jar of honey that should not exist, and a string of questions she cannot unask: who keeps...

Luna finds a single folder on her backup drive labeled 'Lumberton Trestle – October 16'. She doesn't recognize the name. Inside are 23 photographs, each timestamped 3:47 AM. The first few show an abandoned railroad bridge over the Lumber River — rusted tracks, missing ties, kudzu vines. But as she scrolls, the train appears. It's not in the first photo. It's in the second, just a smudge at the cur...

When Luna finds a single unlabeled folder on the backup drive from an estate sale in Wainwright County, she opens it expecting old tax records. Instead, she finds a series of photographs taken at three in the morning — each one from the passenger seat of a county assessor's car, showing the same empty stretch of road, the same mailbox, the same house with a light in the upstairs window. The dates...

Luna finds a forgotten backup drive in a box of old cables and plugs it in one rainy November night on Pigeon Creek Road. The drive contains a single video file from 2016 — security footage from the gas station where she used to work the night shift. She watches herself close the store early, get into a customer's car, and drive away. She has no memory of that night. The footage doesn't stop there...

In early October 2023, Luna borrowed an old external hard drive from a friend. The drive had a single folder labeled 'CINDER FORK ROAD — 1999' and inside, a set of audio files recorded by a woman named Delia Marsh. Delia had been documenting the nightly sounds from her trailer home on Cinder Fork Road—cicadas, distant traffic, the wind. But over eight nights, the recordings began to pick up someth...

It was late October 2021, and the old Gutter Road bridge replacement project in Dunmore County had been stalled for weeks by rain. The crew had already dug three test pits along the creek bed when the backhoe's bucket hit something that wasn't rock. Foreman Dale Whitfield ordered the operator to stop, but the damage was done — a curved piece of bone, still damp, had rolled into the mud. What follo...

Luna finds an old external hard drive at a flea market in Pigeon Creek, Arkansas. The seller—a gaunt man in a raincoat—presses it into her hands without a word. At home, she plugs it in. The drive contains a single folder labeled 'Ella Mae', filled with voice recordings. The first one: a woman whispering that someone is in her attic. The recordings span weeks, each one more desperate. As Luna list...

A used external hard drive bought at a pawn shop in Valdosta, Georgia, in the summer of 2019. A single folder named 'OCTOBER'. Inside, one audio file: a woman's voice, asking for help. But the file is dated from before the drive was ever manufactured. Luna tries to copy it off, but the drive won't let her. She keeps coming back to the desk, night after night, listening to the same seven words. The...

Luna stops at a twenty-four-hour gravel pit on a dead-end road outside Pender County at three in the morning. The place has no name, just a blinking security light and a portable toilet. The man running the scale house has been there for thirty years and has never seen a customer after midnight. But tonight the scale keeps ticking, and the road keeps looking different every time she checks the rea...

In the summer of 2017, I took a temp job at the Pender County Animal Shelter on Old Stage Road. It was supposed to be just data entry—logging intake records from the past decade into a new state system. But the shelter's basement held boxes of old logbooks, and one name kept appearing: a stray dog brought in repeatedly between 1985 and 1991, always on the night of June 23rd, always with the same n...

Luna recalls a November night in 2017 when she took a wrong turn onto Old Wire Road, a gravel lane outside Aiken, South Carolina, that wasn't on any map. Her car died near a boarded-up gas station with a single pump still lit. Inside, a deputy in a high-collared coat sat writing by kerosene lamp—a man who hadn't seen another living soul in eleven years. He offered her coffee from a thermos that ne...

In the fall of 2019, Luna spent a week cataloging the contents of a dead letter office in Pender County — a storage shed packed with undelivered mail dating back to 1952. Most of it was junk, but one letter kept surfacing, always the same pale blue envelope with the same return address: a woman named Edie, writing to someone who had died thirty years before. Each time Luna tried to file it away, s...

In the fall of 2019, a man named Everett Poole drove his tow truck out to Graveyard Road in Pender County after midnight to retrieve a stalled sedan. The road had no radio reception—not even static. A woman in a blue dress stood by the car, her hands clasped, her face lit by a single working headlight. She told him her name was Celia and that she'd been waiting a long time for someone to stop. Eve...

In October 2009, the landlines in a four-block stretch of Burkitt Road, outside Demopolis, Alabama, started ringing at exactly 3:17 a.m. — and never stopped. Luna had a cousin who lived there, a woman named Cora who kept a landline 'for emergencies.' When Luna stayed over one sleepless weekend, she learned that the calls weren't from the phone company. They weren't from anyone living. The voice on...

It was late October in the town of Marlow, Oklahoma, a place so small the gas station closes at nine. I was driving home from a funeral, taking Sulphur Well Road like I always did, when the rain just... stopped. Not tapered off. Not faded. Stopped, like someone turned off a faucet. The road ahead was bone-dry, but behind me the asphalt was still wet. My headlights caught something up ahead: a woma...

A surveyor mapping a forgotten dirt road in Pender County keeps finding dead animals arranged in a straight line across the pavement. Each night the line grows longer. When she follows it into the woods, she finds a house that shouldn't be there, with a light in the window and something waiting on the porch. No one in town will talk about Old Stage Road. The county map doesn't show it. But the sur...

Summer 1998. A forgotten church key found in an abandoned farmhouse leads Luna to the Shiloh Baptist Church outside of Millbrook, North Carolina — a building that has been locked since 1983. The deacons who held the keys have all died in accidents, and the last surviving member of the congregation warns her not to open the door. But the key fits. And the door opens. Inside, the pews are arranged i...