Woolly the Christmas Baggley

Every town has its own kind of ghosts.

Matlock’s are peculiar ones.

Some drift through mirrors, others linger in mines or haunt forgotten attics. But the strangest of them all are the Baggleys, ghosts who desperately want to be human. They hide their hollow faces behind paper bags, drawing expressions on with soot and charcoal, pretending that if they smile hard enough, they might belong again.

Among their odd little family, one ghost stands out more than the rest: Woolly, the Christmas Baggley.

They say Woolly was once a boy who loved winter more than anything else, a boy who never went inside when the snow began to fall, who stayed out until his cheeks turned scarlet and his fingers blue. He adored the sound of laughter through frosted windows, the glow of hearthlight, the smell of cinnamon and coal smoke drifting through the streets.

He wanted to keep Christmas forever.

But one year, he caught the cold that everyone feared, the kind that turned lungs to ice. His family wrapped him in blankets by the fire, but he slipped away on Christmas Eve, just as the church bells began to ring.

When they buried him, they left his favourite red hat on his grave. It was meant as comfort. Instead, it called him back.

On the first anniversary of his death, something stirred in the snow near the churchyard. A faint humming, not a carol, exactly, but close enough. When the dawn light hit, villagers found small footprints circling the grave and a paper bag tucked neatly under the headstone. Drawn on it was a clumsy smiling face and, written beneath, one word:

“Woolly.”

The Baggleys took him in, of course.

They were a curious bunch, ghosts who refused to accept that they were dead, each wearing a paper bag painted with the likeness of who they’d once been. Some drew grand moustaches, some rosy cheeks, and others just the faintest curve of a smile. They lived in the cracks of Matlock’s rooftops and behind the walls of the old post office, whispering about what it must be like to breathe again.

But Woolly was different. He wasn’t trying to be anyone, he was trying to be everyone.

Every December, when the first snow fell, he’d climb out from the rafters of the abandoned tailor’s shop where the Baggleys kept their things, tug on his red knitted hat, and set off into the cold. His paper face, two black oval eyes and a crooked grin, flapped softly in the wind.

He would wander through the streets, pressing his face against windows, watching the living unwrap their lives. Families gathered around fires; children wrestled with tangled lights; shopkeepers whistled carols as they locked up for the night.

He didn’t haunt, he studied.

He’d copy the laughter he heard, sketching little smiles in charcoal on his bag until they looked right. If he saw a family arguing, he’d draw a tear beneath one of his eyes. And if he passed a lonely window with no light behind it, he’d tap gently on the glass and leave behind a new paper face, a blank one, ready to be filled with something hopeful.

It was said that Woolly’s paper face changed every time he felt something human. A crack of joy would appear as a pencil line near the mouth; a sudden giggle would make his eyes brighten like ink on a damp page. The Baggleys teased him for it.

“Careful, Woolly,” one would whisper. “If you smile too much, the bag might tear.”

But Woolly didn’t care. He wasn’t afraid of fraying. He was afraid of forgetting.

One Christmas Eve, a blizzard swept through Matlock. The streets emptied, the shopfronts went dark, and even the ghosts kept close to their hiding places. All but one.

Woolly was out in the snow, wandering as usual. The wind tugged at his hat, nearly snatching it away. He stopped near a row of cottages at the edge of town, where candlelight flickered through the windows.

In one of them, a little boy sat alone, staring at a broken snow globe. The glass had cracked; the glitter inside had frozen solid. The boy shook it gently, but the snow refused to fall.

Woolly pressed his paper face to the glass.

He didn’t think, ghosts rarely do, but he knew sadness when he saw it. He tapped once on the window, then disappeared before the boy could turn.

When the child looked again, a paper bag lay on the windowsill. It had a clumsy smile drawn on it, two oval eyes, and beneath them, a message scrawled in charcoal:

“Don’t forget to shake the sky.”

The boy didn’t understand, but he smiled anyway and set the bag beside the broken globe.

The next morning, when he awoke, the globe was whole again. The snow inside whirled perfectly, the flakes dancing in the light. And for just a moment, as he turned it in his hands, he thought he saw a tiny red hat drifting within the miniature snowstorm.

From that night onward, the Baggleys noticed a change in Woolly. His paper face had begun to shine. Not literally, of course, paper doesn’t glow. But there was a strange warmth to him now, a faint shimmer along the charcoal lines, like candlelight reflecting off tinsel.

He started leaving more drawings, dozens of them, all over Matlock. Smiling paper faces pinned to trees, bus stops, lampposts. Some had crooked grins; others looked surprised or sleepy or downright silly. But all of them, in their own way, seemed to make people feel lighter.

Children began collecting them, hanging them on trees or sticking them to their bedroom doors. Adults found them tucked into coat pockets or hidden beneath wipers on their cars.

No one saw him do it, but everyone knew.

“It’s Woolly,” they’d say. “He’s making Christmas happy again.”

Professor Barnabas Ravenwood once wrote in his notes:

“The Baggleys may be the only class of spirit who envy the living without resentment. They long not for revenge, but for participation, to join the laughter they cannot quite remember. Woolly appears to have transcended even that, becoming a kind of bridge between our world and theirs. A ‘joy mimic,’ perhaps.”

In time, Woolly became a local legend. Children left out blank paper bags on Christmas Eve instead of cookies, hoping he’d visit. By morning, each one would have a new face drawn on, sometimes cheerful, sometimes sleepy, sometimes wild with excitement, but always kind.

And every so often, on the coldest mornings, one of those bags would be found with frost around the edges and a faint scent of cinnamon and coal smoke clinging to it.

It was said that meant Woolly himself had lingered nearby, just long enough to watch the living wake up and remember how to smile.

The Baggleys still whisper about him, of course. They call him the Warm One, though they say it with amusement, not envy. Some believe his hat keeps a spark of human joy trapped inside it. Others think the pom-pom holds the memory of his last laugh, the one he gave before the cold took him.

But the truth is simpler. Woolly just loves Christmas.

He loves the sound of wrapping paper and bells. He loves the glow from windows and the smell of pine. And though his smile is only drawn in charcoal, it’s the most genuine grin in all of Matlock.

If you see a paper bag this Christmas, folded neatly by your door with a face drawn on it, crooked and happy, keep it.

You might just be holding Woolly’s gift: a little reminder that even ghosts wish to be part of the laughter.

And somewhere, in the snow outside, a small red hat bobs away into the night, humming a half-forgotten carol that sounds suspiciously like joy.