Things in the Attic — Fexingo Horror

It was the summer of 2007, and I housesat for the old Hargrove place at the end of Cooper Street. The house had stood empty since Mrs. Hargrove died the previous winter, and her nephew needed someone to check on it—turn on lights, water the ferns, keep the pipes from freezing. I didn't mind the quiet; I was barely twenty and grateful for anywhere to sleep that wasn't my parents' couch. The attic d...

In the attic of an abandoned gristmill on Crooked Creek, Oregon, Luna finds a dried bouquet wrapped in waxed paper and tied with a black ribbon. The flowers are not from this valley — they don't grow here, not anymore, not since the summer of 1921. Inside the paper is a single name, written in pencil on a scrap of ledger paper: Rosalind. That night, Luna dreams of a woman in a white dress walking...

In the summer of 1997, Luna's aunt Carol asks her to help clear out the attic of the old Marlowe House on Sycamore Lane in Millbrook, New York — a Victorian that's been in the family for three generations, untouched since Great-Aunt Eleanor died in 1981. Eleanor never married, but in the attic they find a wedding gown preserved in a cedar trunk, never worn, with a note pinned to the bodice that re...

In the attic of a rented farmhouse off Stillwater Road, Luna finds a locked footlocker tucked behind a water heater. The previous tenant, a quiet woman named Margot, left it behind. Inside: a high school yearbook, a prom photo, and a stack of letters tied with blue ribbon. The letters are from a boy named Caleb — who, according to Margot's sister, died the night before prom, seventeen years ago. L...

In the winter of 2019, Luna was hired to clear out the attic of the abandoned Whitcomb House on Old Mill Road in Elkhart, Indiana. A widow had died without heirs, and the house was to be sold. In the attic, beneath a tarp, Luna found a strange structure made of twigs, human hair, and something that looked like dried membrane. The nest was still warm. Over three days, she watched it grow, and she h...

Christmas Eve, 2019. Luna is alone at Lost Lake Cabins, a cluster of rustic rentals frozen into a January-that-never-came. A single ornament left on a bare branch inside Cabin 7 — a glass sphere with a snow scene inside, and a woman's face pressed against the glass from the inside. Not painted. Not reflected. A face that blinks. A face that knows her name. This is the story of what Luna found when...

October 1987. In the attic of a rented house on Cooper Street in Millbrook, Oregon, Luna finds a child's music box that plays a single warped note. The box belonged to a boy named Eli who vanished from the same house forty years earlier. As she winds the key, she begins to hear the bird outside — a bird that doesn't exist, singing a song that doesn't stop. A story about the sound that echoes when...

Luna recalls a late autumn night in 2017 when a friend asked her to help clear out a house at the end of Mink Hollow Road—a narrow gravel lane that dead-ends against state forest. The owner had vanished months earlier, leaving every room untouched. In the attic study, beneath a dormer window that looked out onto nothing but dark trees, Luna found a typewriter still warm, its platen threaded with a...

October 2004, just past midnight on Prosser Road in the town of Millbrook. Luna tells the story of a Craigslist piano that arrived with a sealed bench — and what she found when she pried it open. A quiet, slow-burn episode about the notes we leave behind, the things we inherit, and the spaces that refuse to stay empty. No jump scares. Just the sound of a single key, stuck open, ringing in the dark...

In the spring of 2008, Luna's grandmother left her a house in the hollow south of Whippoorwill, Kentucky — a place where the phone never worked and the road turned to gravel a mile before you reached the front porch. Among the things in the attic: a single beeswax candle in a brass holder, still soft after forty years, and a journal belonging to a woman named Cora who wrote about waiting for somet...

Luna remembers a summer evening in 1997, at the bridge over Drowning Creek outside Millbrook. A girl named Cora dared her to swing out over the water and let go. The rope was old, the creek was low, and something was waiting underneath. By the time Luna climbed back up the bank, Cora wasn't there anymore — but the rope was still swinging. A story about a dare you only take once, and the silence th...

In October of 2021, Luna's car broke down near Midnight Creek, a tiny unincorporated town in eastern Oregon that doesn't appear on most maps. While waiting for a tow, she accepted a ride from an old woman named Esther, who lived alone in a farmhouse at the end of a gravel road. Esther offered her coffee and showed her a music box she had inherited from her mother — a delicate thing of rosewood and...

Luna describes a winter night in 2018 when she stopped at a deserted roadside diner in Dunlow, West Virginia. A single record player sat on the counter, its needle stuck in a groove that played a woman's voice saying something in a language that sounded like English but wasn't. She tried to leave three times but the road kept looping back. By the time she got home, the record was in her coat pocke...

Luna recalls a sweltering July afternoon in 2019 when she helped clear out her great-aunt's farmhouse on Pringle Creek Road. Beneath a loose floorboard in the attic, she found a child's diary dated 1948. The first entry is cheerful. The second is worried. By the third, the handwriting changes. The diary describes a visitor who came at dusk every night that summer — a woman in a white dress who nev...

Summer 1999. Luna's cousin rents a cabin at Lost Lake, a narrow man-made reservoir in eastern Oregon where the water is the colour of weak tea and the trees grow right up to the shore. The cabin is number seven, the last in the row, with a screen door that doesn't quite close and a smell like wet ash. Inside a drawer beneath the telephone, Luna finds a photograph of a woman standing on the dock at...

September 1998, a Friday night on Harlow Road outside of Ellsworth, Maine. Luna's cousin Jesse takes her to see the blinking light that everyone talks about but no one can explain. It flickers red and white from the old water tower above the abandoned gravel pit. Kids say it's a signal, or a ghost, or a cop with a flashlight. But when Luna and Jesse drive out there with a Polaroid camera and a tap...

In the summer of 1998, Luna spent a week as a fire lookout at Black Butte in the Deschutes National Forest. The tower was a relic—a tin box on eight legs with a wraparound window and a propane stove. On the third night, she found a rolled-up map tucked behind a loose board, marked with names and dates that stretched back forty years. The map showed things that weren't on any official survey: a mea...

In the summer of 2008, I spent a week cataloguing the contents of a boarded-up Victorian on Cedar Street in the town of Harwood, Oregon. The house had been sealed since 1972, and the family who owned it wanted everything cleared out before demolition. Most rooms were ordinary—layered wallpaper, mouse nests, a broken piano. But the bedroom on the third floor, the one with the door painted over from...

In the summer of 2007, Luna's cousin Delia bought a farmhouse at auction on Pringle Creek Road, a gravel stretch outside the town of Osage, Iowa. The house had been empty for twenty years, but the realtor said it was 'clean' — which is what they say when they don't want you to look inside the attic. Delia asked Luna to help clean the place out before she moved in. They found a Mason jar in the cra...

In the summer of 2009, a nursing student named Delia took a night shift at the abandoned Cedar Crest Sanatorium outside Salem, New Hampshire. She was cataloguing old medical records for a history thesis. But in a sealed attic room, she found a harp — still strung, still standing — and the song it played when she touched it was not music. It was a memory, a name, a date, a death. This is the story...

Luna tells the story of a pine box she found in her grandmother's attic, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with red string. Inside were objects belonging to a woman named Eliza who vanished from a small Oregon town in 1987. As Luna traces the box's history through a handwritten ledger and a single cassette tape, she uncovers a pattern of promises made and then broken. The final object in the box is a k...

In the summer of 2005, a teenager named Elise moved into a renovated farmhouse outside Millbrook, Iowa. The previous owners had sealed a cistern in the basement with concrete, but Elise found a loose board behind the water heater. What she heard when she pressed her ear to the gap — a wet, rhythmic sound, like something breathing through liquid — pulled her back every night for three weeks. She ne...

In the summer of 2017, Luna helps her aunt clear out an old farmhouse outside of a small town called Bitter Creek, Oregon. In the attic, she finds a handcrafted Victorian dollhouse—exact in every detail down to the wallpaper, the tiny furniture, and a single light left burning in the nursery. As she examines it, she realizes the dollhouse is not a replica. It is a record. Every scratch on the tiny...

In the summer of 2003, a highway rest stop off Interstate 84 in eastern Oregon had a full-length mirror in the women's restroom that didn't quite show what it should. I stopped there on a drive from Boise to Portland, just after midnight. The woman in the mirror wasn't me — not exactly. She wore the same clothes, had the same hair, but her expression was wrong, like she'd been crying for hours and...

In October of 2003, Luna stopped at a defunct gas station outside Wichita Falls to buy a bell jar from a man who kept it on a high shelf in the back room. The jar was filled with a fine grey dust that looked like ash but smelled like wet copper and old bone. The man told her it was just talcum powder from his grandmother's dresser. Luna brought the jar home. That night, she set it on her nightstan...