The Night Shift at the Pender County Animal Shelter

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 note: 'No collar, no chip, no aggression—just waits.' When I pulled the oldest file, I found a photograph taped to the inside cover. The dog was sitting in a kennel, staring at the camera with eyes that looked almost human. And in the background, barely visible through the bars of the adjacent run, was a figure—a woman in a white dress, her face blurred, her hand reaching toward the dog through the chain link. I asked the shelter director about it. She said the photograph was taken on June 23rd, 1985. The woman had been found dead in a ditch off Sulphur Well Road three days earlier. The dog was never adopted. It disappeared from the shelter on June 24th, 1991, the morning after its seventh annual visit. No one knows where it went. But last June, I drove past the shelter at midnight. The lights were off. The gate was locked. And in the empty parking lot, something was watching me from the driver's seat of a parked car that hadn't moved in years. #PenderCountyAnimalShelter #OldStageRoad #June23rd #StrayDog #WhiteDressWoman #SulphurWellRoad #AnimalHorror #SouthernGothic #FexingoHorror #HorrorPodcast #StandaloneEpisode #LunaNarrates #BackupDrive #SmallTownHorror #UnresolvedEnding #FoundPhotograph #SevenYearCycle #BasementLogbooks Keep every episode free: buymeacoffee.com/fexingo