Scary Stories- Check In

A traveler driving through rural Kentucky pulls over to investigate a lighthouse standing alone in a meadow, far from any coast. The motel clerk across the street cannot see it. That night, figures with glowing eyes and mouths emerge from the fog to watch the motel. The clerk, who can see them, calls the police in terror. She hears sirens approaching, runs out into the mist, and vanishes. The traveler wakes the next morning to find the clerk unharmed, reading a book called The Sins of Amy Campbell — and she introduces herself as Amy Campbell. He has never been able to find the motel, the lighthouse, or the book again.

The uncanny motel and the invisible lighthouse

The narrator, Tom, is driving through a narrow Kentucky valley when he spots a black-and-white striped lighthouse set back in a meadow, already in shadow from the surrounding mountains. It has no attached house, unlike any lighthouse he has seen. Across the road sits a motel — a single row of rooms with a buzzing neon vacancy sign. He pulls in. The clerk is so ordinary-looking that she crosses into the uncanny valley: "She looked like the rough sketch of a master painter. Like there would be details filled in, wrinkles and smile lines, and moles and imperfections. But the painter just hadn't quite gotten there yet." When Tom asks about the lighthouse, she looks genuinely confused: "I honestly don't know what y