1045: Story 1045: Noosehill Cemetery 1045: Story 1045: Noosehill Cemetery The dead never stayed quiet in Noosehill.
Not since the hangings.
Built on the edge of a hollowed valley, Noosehill Cemetery was once a final resting place for those society deemed unsalvageable.
Murderers, witches, madmen—each buried without ceremony beneath crooked tombstones and strangling vines.
Locals called it “The Garden of the Damned.”
After the zombie apocalypse, survivors thought it safe to hide there.
They were wrong.
The first warning came as windless whispers.
Elias Trent, a grizzled hunter with a silver jaw and a rusted crossbow, led his crew of six into the graveyard seeking shelter.
By morning, two were missing.
By nightfall, the dirt around the graves began to breathe.
And in the center of the cemetery stood the twisted Noose Tree—a gnarled old thing hung with rotted ropes and eyeless skulls that swung without wind.
One rope began to sway on its own.
Then another.
Then six.
“Something’s coming,” Elias said, eyes scanning the rows of sunken graves.
It wasn’t the zombies.
It was the Hung.
Pale, bloated corpses with snapped necks and twisted smiles began crawling from the earth, their limbs stiff with death but moved by hatred older than time.
Their eyes glowed not with hunger—but with vengeance.
They remembered their deaths.
They remembered the townsfolk who condemned them.
And they remembered the curse.
Elias and the remaining survivors fought back, crossbows and hatchets drawn—but the Hung couldn’t be killed.
Wounds bled ash.
Bones cracked, reformed, and kept fighting.
Every strike only fed the Noose Tree, which pulsed with lightless energy and extended its branches like skeletal fingers toward the sky.
And then… it whispered.
A name.
“Maeve.”
Maeve Wyrmstone—the witch hanged in 1722.
Betrayed by her village, burned and bound in barbed rope.
They say her final words turned the very soil of Noosehill into cursed ground.
Her spirit never passed on.
It lingered, poisoning the cemetery, waiting for the veil to thin.
The zombie apocalypse gave her the opening.
One of Elias’ group—young Lily, mute since the fall—was drawn to the grave marked only with a broken doll and a charred ribbon.
She touched it.
The ground cracked.
From it rose Maeve herself—her body half-spectral, half-charred, her mouth sewn shut by a hundred rusted hooks.
She didn’t speak.
She screamed through every corpse.
The Hung surged forward—not just reanimated, but possessed.
The graves cracked open wider, and from beneath the world’s crust rose the roots of the Noose Tree, dragging the remaining survivors into its heart.
All except Elias.
Bleeding and broken, he lit a match soaked in oil and hurled it toward the screaming witch and her tree.
The fire caught—but it didn’t burn them.
It freed them.
The Noose Tree withered into ash.
Maeve’s soul, no longer tethered by pain, evaporated into moonlight.
The Hung fell still.
But when Elias limped away, the cemetery whispered again.
One rope still swung.
And the doll on Maeve’s grave turned its head.