❄️ December 14, 2025

Coldwater Pass was no stranger to snow, but the winter of ’54 had been different. Heavier. Quieter. And crueler. Snow fell in thick, muffling waves that year, blanketing the forest and town in a silence so deep it smothered every laugh, every footstep, every whispered fear.

It began when young Marnie Delacroix wandered behind the old girls’ school, now long condemned and shut tight as a coffin. She had gone chasing a fox she swore was made of light and wind, and when they found her at dusk, she was shivering beside a partially unearthed sleigh—small, red, and rimmed with tarnished silver trim. The snow had protected it like a cradle. Or a grave.

“No one touch it,” Headmistress Llewellyn warned the children, though no one had gone near it but Marnie. Still, the sleigh was dragged into the cellar beneath the old chapel, locked away. That night, the bells began to ring.

Faint at first. High and mournful. Like sleigh bells heard underwater or across a frozen plain. The children began having dreams of a tall man in a fur-lined coat with eyes like cracked ice. He stood at the foot of their beds, tapping the sleigh’s bell against his gloved hand.

One child, Elias Brandt, woke screaming with frostbite on both hands.

Within days, no one would speak aloud. A silence settled over the school, heavier than the snowfall, deeper than the chill. The children became listless. Blank-eyed. One drew the sleigh over and over on her slate, until her fingers bled through the chalk.

It was then the headmistress turned to her journal.

Journal Entry – Headmistress Llewellyn

December 14, 1954

The sleigh is not what it seems.

I should have burned it. Buried it. But something in the air… it won’t let me. Every time I descend into the cellar, I feel him. The man with the sleigh. August, the children whisper his name now, though I never taught it to them. Neither did their mothers.

I have seen his shadow pass behind the cellar door. I have heard the bells at night, though no hands ring them.

This sleigh once belonged to a child—but it is no child’s toy. It is a reliquary. A coffin on runners. A memory of vengeance that waits for frost and fear to ride again.

August comes for the lonely. The unloved. The forgotten.

God help us all if it snows again tonight.

The entry ends there. No final note. No signature. No explanation of what became of the children, the headmistress, or the school.

And yet—

On December 14, 2025, a young local historian named Paige discovers a narrow staircase beneath the chapel ruins, following a cracked foundation to a root cellar long buried by time and frost. Inside, she finds the sleigh. Dusty. Untouched. Resting in shadows.

Beside it, an old, leather-bound journal.

The last page is dated December 14. Today.

Outside, the wind picks up.
The first snow of the season begins to fall.
And the bells begin to ring.