Things in the Attic — Fexingo Horror

In the autumn of 1998, Luna's aunt bought a vintage dress form from a closed-down department store in Clarion, Ohio, and stored it in the attic. Years later, helping clear the house, Luna found the mannequin again—but it had changed. The pose was wrong, the surface was warm, and behind its glass eyes something was watching. This is the story of a thing that should have been empty, and the mistake...

In the autumn of 2018, Luna met a woman in the hills above Lost Creek, Oregon — a retired cartographer who claimed she could map places that did not exist yet. Her name was Margo Strayer, and her living room was papered in hand-drawn maps of towns that had no post office, no census record, no satellite image. Luna went to interview her for a rural folklore project. She stayed because Margo showed...

In the late autumn of 2018, Luna drove out past the county line to look at an antique kerosene lamp listed in a classified ad. The seller lived at the end of Miracle Road, a dead-end gravel lane in the hills above a town called Prosper. The lamp was beautiful—brass, etched glass, still oily inside. But the woman who sold it wouldn't look Luna in the eye, and she asked a strange question before han...

In the winter of 2017, Luna's cousin bought a decommissioned church in the little town of Harrow, Ohio, and discovered a stained glass window hidden behind drywall in the basement. The window was not in the church's records. It showed a figure that was not a saint. Luna came to look at it in late January, at twilight, and what she saw in the glass kept her awake for three nights. This is the story...

In the summer of 1998, Luna's aunt inherited a condemned farmhouse along Bitter Creek, Oregon—a place the locals called the Cradle House. The previous owner, a reclusive woman named Elara Finch, had vanished two decades earlier, leaving behind a nursery full of cribs, each one holding a single porcelain doll. Luna spent three days helping clear the house, but it was the sound she heard on the seco...

It was the summer of 2009, and I was housesitting for a retired librarian in the hills outside New Cassel, Pennsylvania. The house was a three-story Victorian at the end of Old Mill Road, with a wraparound porch and a cellar that smelled of damp stone. I didn't think much of the man who came to the door on the third night — not until I saw what he was carrying. He had a leather box, a thing of sha...

It was October of 2019, and I was driving through the back roads of Yarrow County, Oregon, when a handwritten sign on a fencepost caught my eye: 'Sewing Machine — $20.' I didn't need one, but I pulled over anyway. The woman who answered the door was thin, pale, and spoke like she hadn't used her voice in years. She led me to a dusty garage, where an old Singer sat on a table. She said it belonged...

October 1998. A stretch of Sycamore Street in Bellamy, Ohio, where the leaves don't fall. Luna's aunt Vera was a dressmaker who never turned a client away, no matter how late they knocked. But when a woman in a veil arrives after midnight, asking for a gown that fits 'just so,' Vera takes measurements that don't match any living body. The dress is finished by dawn, but the woman comes back. Again...

In the summer of 1989, my cousin Eli and I found a row of wooden stilts sunk into the mud of Stillwater Creek, outside our small hometown of Portage, Indiana. They stood in perfect formation, too tall and too straight, rising from the stagnant water like teeth. Local kids said they belonged to a man who drowned there years ago—a man who walked through the marsh on those stilts, hunting something n...

It was the summer of 1998, and I was house-sitting for my aunt in the hills outside of Mercy, Oregon. Her Victorian farmhouse had a piano room I was told to never enter. The piano itself was a Steinway baby grand, locked, with a single key resting on the felt inside the lid. At night, it played—not music, but a single note, B-flat, over and over, like someone testing a microphone. I thought it was...

In the summer of 1998, Luna and her mother moved into a rental house on Elm Street in Grimshaw, Illinois — a dry, tired town two hours south of Chicago. The house had a strange renovation: a bricked-up doorway in the hall closet that led nowhere. Luna's mother said it was just bad workmanship. But Luna noticed things — a child's voice humming after midnight, the smell of wet plaster, a crayon draw...

In the summer of 1997, I spent a week at my grandmother's cabin on Lake Winema, a small man-made reservoir in central Illinois. The cabin was quiet, the lake was low from drought, and I found a photograph tucked behind a loose board in the closet. It showed a woman I didn't recognize, standing on the dock with a man whose face had been scratched out. That night, I heard footsteps on the dock and a...

In October 2004, Luna's cousin Marlene took a job house-sitting the Stoker House, a crumbling Victorian at the dead end of Reservoir Road in Ashland, Ohio. The job had one rule: never open the door to the attic stairs. But the taps ran red, the furnace breathed in the walls, and someone—or something—was counting the hours until midnight. Marlene stopped answering her phone on the third night. When...

October 1998, the old covered bridge outside Dunmore, Pennsylvania. Luna's father used to take her there to skip stones. Years later, she returns alone with a box of his things—and finds a birdhouse nailed to a beam that wasn't there before. Inside it, a stack of letters written in her own handwriting, dated from a week she doesn't remember. But the ink is smudged, the paper is damp, and the last...

October 2023. Ashbrook, Vermont. Luna's cousin Grace calls her at 2:17 AM — frantic, whispering. She's staying at their late grandmother's house, packing it up for sale, and she's found something in the attic. A trunk. Inside: a girl's white dress, still damp, and a lock of hair tied with red ribbon. The dress belonged to Emma Fletcher, who drowned in Ashbrook Pond in 1995. But Grace swears she sa...

In the summer of 1987, a woman named Clara Moreau vanished from her farmhouse outside the small town of Meridian, Nebraska. No one found her for three weeks. When the sheriff finally broke down the door, the house was empty — no body, no struggle, no sign of her. But in the attic, sealed inside a cedar trunk, they found forty-three letters. Each one was addressed to a person Clara had never met. E...

In the summer of 1997, Luna's cousin Eddie disappeared from a gas station on Route 9 outside Poughkeepsie, New York. Twenty years later, a box of his things surfaces in her grandmother's attic—including a cassette tape no one knew existed. Eddie was eleven years old, obsessed with creaks and loose boards, the way kids are afraid of their own houses. But the tape reveals something else: a voice tha...