The Christmas Eve story is the best known tale about Windhouse after the ghosts. It says that nobody who tried to sleep in the house on 24 December was ever found alive, killed by some unknown being.
In the usual telling a sailor from a wrecked ship was given shelter in the house on that night in the 1800s. The family warned him of something that happened every year. When the visitor came in the night he struck it with an axe, in some versions after a fight, and buried it close to the house. Retellings call it a troll, a sea thing or a monster.
The tale is a legend with no named sailor and no date, and it reads like the Shetland trow stories more than a record of an event. It is kept here as folklore attached to a famous house, not as a report of something that happened.
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