a Thomas Hardy short story, based on Dorset legend, about people on Halloween watching a churchyard--the shades of all the people of the village go in and then come out, but the ones that don't come out are the ones that will die in the coming year.

That reminds me of the Breton Ankou: the last person to die in the old year becomes the Ankou—collecting the souls of the dead, carting them on—for the next.