🪓 December 17, 2025

Coldwater Pass was a quiet place in winter—white fields, shuttered cottages, smoke curling from crooked chimneys. It was the kind of mountain village that still whispered old tales by firelight, especially in December, when the snow came down like ash and the sun never quite rose all the way.

Every year, starting on the eve of Yule, one house in Coldwater Pass would leave a loaf of black bread and a bowl of goat’s milk on the stoop. Every year, someone new. No one talked about how they decided who. They just knew.

And if the offering was gone in the morning, that meant the Yule Hag had come and gone—and no one had vanished.

This year, the Bouchard family’s turn came.

“I don’t believe in that rot,” said Jerome Bouchard, a recent transplant from the city who’d inherited his uncle’s house and was eager to make Coldwater Pass modern. “Fairy tales to keep kids in bed.”

He didn’t leave out the bread. He drank the goat’s milk himself.

The next morning, the village woke to a single scream.

Jerome’s house was still standing.

But he was gone.

No sign of struggle. The front door was ajar, letting in snow. The fireplace burned low, and three sets of muddy footprints circled the hearth: one small, one large, one… sharp. Like bare heels and claws.

The only clue was a long, gray hair caught in the woodpile.

Mrs. Elspeth Holloway, the village’s oldest resident, muttered to herself as she peered at the house.

“She was merciful, this time.”

They sealed the door shut with ash and birch twigs and burned mugwort under the windows. No one entered the house again that winter.

Locals say the Yule Hag comes from the north winds—riding the auroras in a tattered red cloak, her skin pale as hoarfrost and her breath sharp as broken glass. Her eyes are coal-pits. Her smile is made of other people’s teeth.

She once had a name, long before the calendars changed. They don’t speak it now.

She appears only when she’s been forgotten.

Only when someone doubts.

It is said she lives alone in a hut carved from a glacier, where the snow never melts and time doesn’t pass. On the darkest night of Yule, she lights a lantern with the last breath of the one she took, and walks the frozen forests, singing lullabies in a dead tongue.

And when she sings, doors creak open.

Hearts stop beating.

And children cry in their sleep.

The Bouchard house still stands, though the shutters are always drawn and no one passes close. Sometimes, in the deepest part of winter, the door is open again.

And sometimes there’s a bowl of goat’s milk, long frozen.

Untouched.