November 12, 2025
10:00 PM CST

The Mathisons weren’t looking for land. They were looking to get away.

After the fire in Denver, after the unpaid bills and the headlines, all that mattered was a fresh start. A friend of a cousin of a realtor mentioned the old Wexley place: forty acres, a leaning barn, and soil so black it looked like coffee grounds.

The price was suspiciously low.

They bought it anyway.

The first few nights were peaceful—quiet enough to hear coyotes singing beyond the ridgeline. But then the sound came: metal on stone, dragging through dirt, always just after midnight. The first time, they thought it was wind pulling old tools.

The second time, they saw it.

A rust-gnawed iron plow, unhitched, moving on its own.

The blade turned the earth in perfect, deep furrows, groaning like a man in pain. No tracks. No driver.

The next morning, where the plow had passed, the dirt steamed in the cold. And something small and white poked through—a child’s tooth.

They called the sheriff. He never came. Instead, he mailed them an envelope with one line: “Don’t dig. Don’t plant. Don’t ask.”

But they did.

They dug up buttons. Bones. A pocket Bible with the name Wexley burned off the cover.

The family fought—Carrie wanted to flee, Jack said they’d lose everything. Their daughter, Mia, started sleepwalking toward the barn at night, whispering, “It’s almost done… almost.”

The plow kept going. Furrow after furrow, neat and unending. It never made a full circle. Always a new path. Always a new line.

Until the night Carrie stayed up with her shotgun and shouted, “What do you want?”

The plow stopped.

And turned.

It began to plow toward the house.

That night, they did the only thing left: they finished the furrows. Jack strapped the harness to his own back and pulled, weeping with the strain, completing the final unbroken ring.

When the circle closed, the plow fell still. The air turned sweet. Mia stopped sleepwalking.

They buried the plow deep in the stone field near the property line, under a marker rock—one so heavy it took three men to roll into place.

Years passed. The Mathisons rebuilt the barn. Carrie planted sunflowers in the untouched acres. They never spoke of the plow.

But every spring, the stone shifts.

Just a little.

Just enough.

And someday, someone will wonder what’s beneath it.

And start to dig.