Yule Wraith — Fexingo Horror

On the fourth night of a record-breaking blizzard, Luna walks the snowed-in road to St. Perpetua's Drive, following a trail of blue lights that should not be there. What she finds at the end of the lane is a memory she never had — a woman in a grey dress, a bell that rings without sound, and a promise that was never meant to be kept. This is the final installment of the St. Perpetua's Drive arc, a...

On a frozen December night in 1987, a woman named Elara waited at the crossroads of Cold Spring Road and the Old Post Road in Shandaken, New York, for something that had promised to meet her there every Yule for seven years. She had kept the bargain her grandmother made — a small bundle of rowan and salt left at the stone cross each Christmas Eve — but this year the offering was taken before she e...

Luna tells the story of a December night in 1987 when she was driven home from a Christmas party by a man named Elias Cole. The detour over St. Hildegard's Bridge was shorter, he said. But the bridge's ironwork was older than anyone remembered, and the sound it made when they crossed — a low, singing hum — stayed with her for weeks. Elias never spoke of it, but Luna saw how his hands shook on the...

Luna returns to St. Perpetua's Drive, a gravel road outside of Eden Falls, Vermont, on Christmas Eve 2023. Three weeks after the second snow, she finds the farmhouse's front door hanging open, the furnace cold, and a single set of footprints leading into the woods. In the attic, a child's rocking chair moves on its own, and a name called from the tree line pulls her toward the frozen river. No nea...

Luna returns to St. Perpetua's Drive, the long gravel road that cuts through the pine barrens south of Milford. It's Christmas Eve, 2017. She's driving home from a late shift at the diner, the snow falling so thick the world is reduced to the cone of her headlights. She picks up a hitchhiker—a girl in a thin coat, no gloves, no hat. The girl says she's been walking from the old church. She says sh...

Luna tells the story of a December night on St. Perpetua's Drive, a winding gravel road outside the small town of Mercy Falls, Vermont. She was driving home late from a holiday gathering when the snow began to fall thick and fast, and her car slid into a ditch near an old stone bridge. A figure appeared out of the blizzard—a woman in a red coat, barefoot, carrying a single candle in a glass jar. L...

On Christmas Eve 2022, Luna's car skids off the unplowed gravel of St. Perpetua's Drive, outside the town of Coldwater, Nebraska. She walks a quarter mile through knee-deep snow toward a single lit window in a farmhouse. Inside, an old woman named Margaret is sitting at a kitchen table set for two—one plate empty, one plate full, both steaming. Margaret says she's been waiting for her daughter to...

December 23rd, 2022. A back road in northern Minnesota, past midnight, snow so thick you couldn't see the hood of the car. A single candle burning on a stone well beside a forgotten church — St. Lucy's, the one they say was deconsecrated in the '70s. The man I picked up on that road wore a black coat with no gloves, no hat, and he told me he'd been walking from the well. He asked me to take him to...

It's Christmas Eve, 1998, on a rural highway outside Elko, Nevada. Luna is driving home from a failed job interview when her car dies on a stretch of road that shouldn't exist. She walks to the only light for miles — an old stone church that isn't on any map. Inside, a single figure waits in the pews, and the bell in the tower rings thirteen times. The story of what she found there, and what she l...

On Christmas Eve 1998, Luna's car skids off a back road near St. Dunstan's Ford, Vermont — a town that hasn't appeared on any map since 1953. She takes shelter in a small white church with a bell that rings without a rope, and meets an old woman named Agnes who is waiting for someone. The candlelight is warm. The snow keeps falling. And the bell rings three times every hour, counting something she...

It's Christmas Eve, 1987, on a back road outside Dunbridge, Vermont. Luna's car skids off the icy shoulder into a ditch, and she walks to the only light she can see: a small white clapboard church with a stone well in the yard. Inside, the service is already over, but one woman remains—an old parishioner named Agnes, who insists Luna wait for the bell. Not the bell in the steeple, she says, but th...

December 1998, Birchwood, Ohio. Luna's grandmother asked her to drive the old parish key out to St. Lucy's Baptist Church, a building that hadn't held a service in forty years. The lock turned too easily. Inside, the pews were still dusted with rice from a wedding that never finished. A piano played three notes, then stopped. And on the altar, a guest book lay open to a page with a single name, wr...

Christmas Eve, 1998. Luna's friend Margie, a postal worker in the tiny town of Millbank, takes the last route of the night—a single red envelope addressed to an abandoned farmhouse on Hemlock Road. The house has been empty for forty years, but there's a kettle boiling on the stove, a fresh set of footprints in the snow, and a woman in the window who wears Margie's own face. What she finds inside t...

It's Christmas Eve, 1997, and Luna is driving home along a back road in upstate New York when her headlights catch a small mitten lying on the snow-covered bridge over Frost Creek. She stops to pick it up—red wool, hand-knitted, with a pattern of white snowflakes. The mitten is warm, as if just taken off. She looks around. No one. The woods are silent. She decides to leave it on the bridge railing...

On Christmas Eve, 2023, I found myself driving the back roads of Cutter's Mill, Maine, chasing a story about a spring that never froze. An old man named Elias lived alone in a cabin at the edge of the woods, and he told me about the wreath he hangs on his door every year—a wreath made of yew and holly, tied with a red ribbon. He said it keeps the wraith away. But when I asked him what wraith, he o...

Luna recalls a December night four years ago on a lonely farm road outside Lost Creek, Vermont. Driving home from a late shift, she spotted a woman in a white coat standing under a gate strung with a single wreath of yew and frozen holly. The woman did not speak, only pointed down the snowed-over lane. The next morning, Luna learned the woman had died in that exact spot twenty years earlier — and...

Christmas Eve, 1987. Luna visits a small Vermont town and hears about a local tradition — leaving a single item on an old covered bridge as an offering to something that walks the frozen river. It started with a little girl's mitten. Then a man's watch. Then a wedding ring. Luna talks to the last person who tried to leave something, and what followed him home. A story about what we give up, and wh...

On Christmas Eve, 1987, Luna's aunt sends her to fetch water from St. Cera's Well — a sulfur spring in the woods behind their Vermont farmhouse. The well has a tradition: leave a coin, speak a wish, and the water will carry it down. But Luna finds the well frozen solid, and a single white mitten on the ice. That night, a woman in a blue coat knocks at the door, asking for the mitten back. Luna's a...

December 1987. A snowed-in farmhouse on Starling Road, just outside of Kalkaska, Michigan. Luna's grandmother used to tell her about the Yule log — the one that must burn all night, from dusk until dawn, without being stoked or turned. If it goes out before sunrise, something comes down the chimney. As a child, Luna thought it was a fairy tale. But on the coldest Christmas Eve of her life, in a ho...

Luna returns to a frozen stretch of road outside the town of Millbrook, New Hampshire, where a woman named Iris has been leaving the same message on the church answering machine every night since Christmas Eve. The message is always the same: a child's counting rhyme, backward, in a language that sounds almost like English but isn't. Luna goes to the church to meet her and finds a woman who hasn't...

December 1987. A stranded driver on a back road in northern Vermont. A farmhouse with a single lit window. An old woman who speaks of a bell that rings only when someone is about to die. Luna listens from the porch as the snow swallows the sound, and the woman asks her to stay until morning. A quiet, lingering story about the weight of waiting, the kindness of strangers, and the things we cannot o...

December 1998, just outside the village of Thornwood Hollow, New Hampshire. I was driving home from a late shift at the diner when the fog rolled in so thick I had to pull over. That's when I saw the old iron bell hanging from a branch over the frozen river. Everyone in town knew the story—the bride who drowned on her wedding night, the bell that tolls for those who've lost their way. But no one t...

On Christmas Eve, 1987, Luna's cousin Rosalind takes a shortcut through the old cemetery gate at St. Jude's Church in Millbrook, New Hampshire. The gate's iron bell rings once as she passes — but no one is there to ring it. That night, her grandmother tells her the story of the Yule Wraith: a figure that follows travelers who hear the bell after dark, leaving a single red ribbon on their doorstep...

December 1987, the last farmhouse on Hollow Road before the woods take over. Luna’s grandmother always said the wreath on the door had to be made fresh each year—yew and holly, bound with red thread—and that it must never be hung after dark. But this year the snow came early, the sun set before she finished, and the thing she saw standing at the edge of the cornfield didn't move until she touched...

Luna recalls a Christmas Eve drive down an unfamiliar county road in upstate New York, where a single wrought-iron gate stood open in the snow. Inside, an old stone church with a bell tower that shouldn't have been there. A man in a dark coat stood at the door, beckoning her inside for a service she couldn't find the next day. The bell rang at midnight — but the clapper never moved. A story about...