The Fire-Eyed Demon of Buck Hollow

This was originally published in the February 1983 issue of the Fairfax News. Cathy Howell was the editor of the paper.

(Editor's Note: I received this story unexpectedly in the mail recently. The accompanying note said it had been told to the author "by a long-time dweller in the Hollow" and promised more "hauntings, ghost stories, etc." if readers of The Faifax News found them interesting reading. We hope we will see more "Fairfax legends" from our new mysterious friend!)

On a frost-whiskered horripilating January afternoon in 1845, the funeral of Lazarus Wraith was held in the front taproom of George Buck's temperance public house in Buck Hollow. After the sin eater had absorbed the bread and coin in the candle-lit inn, and the holy Euchrist was given to the Hollow mourners, the dour farmers, the middle-aged pallbearers, and the ox-drawn hay-wagon hearse began the mile and a half journey across the intervale in a snow storm to Carroll Hill cemetary carrying Wraith in his rough pine board coffin.
The northeaster howled so terrifyingly that the iciness of the pallbearers' staring could have frozen the bleating snowflakes into stillness before flooding the freezing freshlet of Mill Brook. So horror-striking and thought numbing was this winter storm on the feast day of St. Wulfstan that the vicar suggested that they deposit Lazarus Wraith and his coffin in a snowbank blanket to wait out the duration of the hellish storm. They could return to Buck's hostel and tomorrow they could finish their trek to the cedar-rimmed burial ground. So the coffin was reposed in a snow-bed, covered with a snow robe, at the Four Corners at the bottom of the Hollow by Douglas Buck's new wooden framed house, to sleep out the raw Vermont snowstorm.
The next sunny mid-morning when the funeral party dug out Lazarus Wraith and his coffin, they found the casket, but no Lazarus Wraith, the Hollow copper.
Where had the corpse gone? No wolf or catamount tracks were leading away from the bone box. Yet the coffin's pine lid was open and there was no snow within the box. Was Wraith dead?
Hauntings have been known at the Four Corners since that time-the shimmering spector of a large hairy man surrounded by cawing crows. Many hunters and hikers have told of
seeing strange fire-blood slanted eyes, demon eyes, burning in the night scene on many side roads leading into the dark woods that entomb Buck Hollow.

Phinias Butwhile