Yule Wraith — Fexingo Horror

On the night before Christmas Eve, Luna stops at a solitary farmhouse on St. Sylvan's Road to deliver a wreath for an old order. The woman who answers the door is not the one who placed it. She invites Luna inside to wait out the snow, and shows her a bell hanging in the kitchen window — one that rings by itself whenever someone is about to die in the valley. They talk through the evening about th...

At the old Hargrave Crossing bridge in northern Vermont, on a December night in 1993, I saw a woman in a red coat standing at the center of the bridge, holding a single unlit candle. She wasn't there when I crossed. But when I looked back in the rearview mirror, she was standing exactly where I had been. I didn't stop. But the next morning, I learned that a girl named Emily Hargrave had died on th...

Christmas Eve, 1998. A lone mitten on the guardrail of Frost Creek Bridge. Luna stops to pick it up and finds herself caught in a loop of footsteps in the snow, a child's voice calling from the frozen creek below, and a warmth that doesn't belong to the living. This is a story about the things we leave behind and the things that wait for us to come back. A quiet, unhurried ghost story set in a sma...

A short drive east of Millbrook, just past the old quarry turnoff, there's a stretch of road called Yule Hollow Lane. It doesn't appear on most maps, and the county stopped maintaining it sometime in the seventies. But every Christmas Eve, for the past eleven years, June Harwick has driven that lane at dusk. She brings a thermos of spiced tea and an old wool blanket, and she sits at the dead end w...

Luna recalls a December night in the small town of Candlewood, Vermont, where a string of porch lights along a country lane began to go out one by one — not flickering, not burning out, but simply vanishing, leaving only darkness behind. She drove the lane at dusk, counting the dark houses, and met an old woman on a porch who told her about the 'bell ringer' — a figure who comes at Yule to claim t...

Christmas Eve, 1987. A woman named Ida Corrigan lives alone in a farmhouse on Bell Hill Road in Burkittsville, Maryland. Every year she hangs a bell on the gate. Every year it rings once at midnight. This year, the bell keeps ringing. Luna tells the story of a neighbor who tried to help Ida, and what she found in the snow between the gate and the house. The bells are not supposed to ring more than...

Luna recalls the night she took shelter in a tiny rural chapel after her car slid off a back road near the town of Treddin, Maine. The chapel was dark, the door unlocked, and someone had left a single candle burning on the altar. She wasn't alone. The old iron bell in the tower had been ringing for a hundred years without a rope. She met Elara, a woman who had been waiting there for something she...

On Christmas Eve, 1993, Luna's grandmother sent her to ring the old bell at St. Dunstan's gate at midnight—a tradition meant to keep the Yule Wraith at bay. But the bell hadn't been rung in decades, and something had been waiting for the sound. In a small Vermont town called Harlow's Rest, Luna learned that some traditions aren't just superstition. They're warnings. And when you break the silence,...

On the night after Christmas, Luna drives a back road in northwestern Massachusetts and finds a stone well she's never noticed before, hung with a single iron bell. The well is dry, but the bell rings on its own in the still air. A local woman named Ada tells her the well was sealed in 1892, after a child followed the sound of bells into the woods and never came back. But that was only the first d...

A December night in 1987, on a back road outside of Millbrook, New York. A man named Arthur stops his car after hitting something on the icy road. He finds a set of footprints leading into the woods. They are not human. They lead him to an old church that hasn't held services in fifty years. Inside, a bell is ringing at midnight. No one is pulling the rope. The sound is coming from the bell itself...

Luna returns to the frozen well at St. Stephen's, where the bell has been ringing every Christmas Eve at midnight for sixty years—but this year, something answers from beneath the ice. A quiet, unhurried visit to the town of Millbrook, Vermont, on a night so cold the stars sound like breaking glass. The story of a woman named Esther who tended the well until the winter she disappeared, and the sin...

Luna returns to the well at St. Stephen's Church on Christmas Eve, a year after the first incident. The bell she tied to the yew tree has been replaced with a child's shoe. The water in the well is warm, and beneath the ice she sees something moving. A story about the things we offer to the dark, and what the dark offers back. #StStephensWell #ChristmasEve #Bell #YewTree #Well #Shoe #Ice #Offering...

In the winter of 1998, Luna's aunt lived alone on a failing farm at the edge of St. Stephen's Well, a dried-up spring surrounded by bare oaks. She kept a brass bell on the porch, said to ring when someone lost was coming home. That December, the bell began to ring at odd hours — three times, then silence. Luna spent two weeks there, listening, as the ringing grew more insistent and the cold seeped...

Christmas Eve, 1987. A girl named Celeste disappears from the town of Millbrook, Vermont, after following the sound of a bell nobody else can hear. Her sister, Iris, spends the next thirty years tracing that sound to St. Stephen's Well, a forgotten stone spring on the edge of the national forest. What she finds there isn't a body, or a ghost, or a message. It's something that was always waiting fo...

December 1998, the night before Christmas Eve. Luna’s aunt sends her to Shadow Creek Church to retrieve a forgotten casserole dish from the parish hall potluck. The church is dark, the parking lot empty, but someone has strung a fresh garland of pine and red berries across the front doors — even though the building has been locked since sunset. Inside, the lights flicker on as she enters. A single...

Christmas Eve, 1998. A young woman driving home from her shift at the all-night diner in Halford, Vermont, takes a shortcut she's taken a hundred times—Halford Crossing, the old covered bridge that connects the county road to the hollow. But tonight the bridge is different. There's a sprig of holly nailed to the beam, and a man standing in the middle, waiting. He doesn't move. He doesn't speak. Bu...

December 1987, just outside the tiny town of Mirkwood, Vermont. A woman named Clara picks up a hitchhiker on Frost Creek Trail—a young man with no coat, no gloves, and a strange bell tied to his wrist with red ribbon. He speaks of a house at the end of the trail, a Christmas Eve tradition, and a debt that must be paid before midnight. Clara drives him home, but what she finds there isn't a house a...

On Christmas Eve 1997, Luna visited Merriweather House, a crumbling Victorian on the outskirts of Morrow Falls, to collect a donation for the town's holiday food drive. The elderly owner, Mrs. Harlow, insisted she stay for tea and a slice of fruitcake. As the clock struck midnight, Mrs. Harlow told Luna about the chimney — sealed for forty years after a fire that took her husband. She claimed some...

December 2023 on a back road in Prosper, Maine. Luna's car slides off Route 9 near the old Proctor place and she walks up the hill to the only house with a light on—a farmhouse where a solitary old man named Ellis Proctor sits in a rocker, watching a snowman in his yard. The snowman is wrong. It has been there for two years, since his wife died. It doesn't melt. Luna stays for a cup of tea and lea...

On a frozen December night in 2019, Luna visits Gable End Farm—a half-abandoned property on the outskirts of Millbrook—to deliver a Christmas wreath to an elderly woman who hasn't left her house in years. What begins as a quiet act of neighborly kindness turns into something else when Luna notices the wreath she hung on the front door keeps vanishing and reappearing in the same spot, each time sli...

In December of 2019, a woman named Clara inherited her grandmother's empty farmhouse on Snowberry Crossing Road, a dead-end lane off Route 9 in central Vermont. She went alone on the winter solstice to pack a few belongings, planning to list the place in January. But the house had other plans. From the moment she stepped onto the porch, a brass sleigh bell, tied with a red ribbon, began ringing on...

A quiet Christmas Eve on Starling Lane in the town of Millbrook, 1963. Luna remembers the year the snow came early and a man in a brown coat knocked on every door at dusk, asking for a girl who had been dead for twenty years. No one answered. No one opened. But the knock kept coming, from house to house, until it reached the last porch at the end of the lane — where a candle still burned in the wi...

Christmas Eve, 1987. A boy named Peter watches from his bedroom window as a figure in a red coat and hood walks from the dark woods toward Lambert's Barn—the abandoned hayloft that burned down three years ago, killing a man inside. The barn has no roof, no walls, just a stone foundation and a charred crossbeam. But the figure walks through the snow as if it knows exactly where it's going. Peter fo...

In the small town of Millbrook, Vermont, on a frozen December night in 1983, a woman named Cora watched a light appear in the abandoned St. Agnes Orphanage—a building that had been dark for forty years. She saw it from her kitchen window, just a single flicker in the third-floor window where the nursery used to be. She told herself it was a reflection, a branch, a trick of the snow. But the light...

It was the last night of the year, and Luna found herself on Old Mill Road, a gravel lane that dead-ends at the ruins of a grist mill burned down in 1919. She had gone there to see the bonfire the town kids built every New Year's Eve, but the fire was out when she arrived. Instead, a single candle burned on the mill's remaining stone wall, its flame unnaturally still. Beside it sat a woman in a co...