Search results
18 hours ago · Not all haunted houses exist in ghost stories. From the Winchester Mansion in California to the Sallie House in Kansas, here are the real spooky abodes you can visit or stay the night.
- Overview
- Mysterious lights in the fog
- A home to fairy rings and bog bodies
Strange lights, creatures in the mist, and fairy glades are all part of wetland folklore, and stem from their unique chemistry and climate.
A single fallen branch in a frozen lake in the Cambridgeshire Fens in eastern England. The region is home to a diverse array of wetlands, and the bogs here once inspired tales of ghostly spirits and fairies.
Bogs are rich in storied horror, and the wetlands of eastern England are no exception.
The phantom lights of the will o’ the wisp; the devil-dog Black Shuck lurking in the mist; strange rings where fairies dance, witchcraft rules, and only fools trespass—tales of the area are fraught with supernatural peril.
Even today, the region’s 1,500 square miles of wetlands, which stretch from the chill bite of the North Sea to the spires of Cambridge, are a lonely place once the sun sets. It is all too easy to find yourself submerged in fetid water, or sucked into a slurry of thick, black mud.
The Fens, as they’re called locally, are not alone. Similar wetlands are found across the globe, each with a name that has a subtly different meaning. Bogs and fens (bogs are more acidic) are formed in lake basins, created by glaciers receding during the last ice age, and are now filled with rotting and decayed plant matter called peat. This is often capped with sphagnum moss, making the ground soft and treacherous. Marshes, meanwhile, are flooded areas near rivers and coasts, the surface peppered with reeds and soft-stalked shrubs. Substitute these herbaceous plants for woody stumps and trees, and you have a swamp.
Fog is one of the most formidable dangers in a bog.
“If you have enough relative humidity—water in the air—you get condensation onto aerosol particles,” says Nadine Borduas-Dedekind, an atmospheric chemist at the University of British Columbia, Canada. “If you went to the Arctic, you’d never see fog as there are very few particles in the air. But in a swamp, there’s biogenic material and water spray.”
The main culprits for this fog are volatile organic compounds—small particles given off by plants that quickly evaporate. These, Borduas-Dedekind explains, oxidize in the air, forming larger molecules that can easily absorb water and form clouds.
The time of day this happens is also key to a wetland’s illusions.
Left: Wetlands like this are naturally humid and produce dense fog. These conditions are often thickest at dawn and dusk, when our tired eyes might conjure mysterious shadows.
Right: Faint, ghostly lights are sometimes visible in these ecosystems, and scientists think they may result from phosphine gas bubbling up from the water's surface.
Even during the day, these English wetlands still have spots that send a shiver up the spine.
Anyone who has ventured into a marsh is likely to have come across a fairy ring: a strange patch of ground where the plant life is markedly different, often for no apparent reason. These are said to indicate the realm of the Fae, and an area that shouldn’t be disturbed.
Science supports our instinct to avoid these glades—though not because of fairies. Instead, they may be the site of a clandestine burial.
“Decomposition completely changes soil chemistry,” says Amy Rattenbury, a forensic scientist at Wrexham University, U.K. “We call it a ‘cadaver decomposition island’. Fluids leak into the soil, and kill off plant life initially, but then the body becomes a source of nutrition. Previously, you might have had a few different species of plant fighting for the same space. Then, all of a sudden, you get the optimum conditions for a particular species.”
The effect creates a distinct pattern on the ground. “You can see the outline of what’s buried. We’ve noticed that nettles seem to do better where there’s decomposition, compared with where there isn’t.”
There are also far older corpses in the mire.
- Kit Chapman
Jul 28, 2023 · Haunted Mansion: Directed by Justin Simien. With LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish. A single mom named Gabbie hires a tour guide, a psychic, a priest and a historian to help exorcise her newly bought mansion after discovering it is inhabited by ghosts.
- (44K)
- Comedy, Drama, Family
- Justin Simien
- 2023-07-28
Jan 16, 2015 · For more information on Burns Bog and a small, but legal, glimpse of a bog environment, visit the 60-hectare Delta Nature Reserve, located east of Highway 91, near the south end of Alex Fraser ...
Dec 15, 2020 · Bog Bodies are the best-preserved human remains from NW Europe. They have inspired poetry, art and literature. Bogs are not just important as environmental records of the past – they are a vital part of our response to climate change. The archaeology of bogs can help us understand how our relationship with these rich, fertile yet dangerous ...
Haunted Mansion is a 2023 American supernatural horror comedy film directed by Justin Simien from a screenplay by Katie Dippold. It stars LaKeith Stanfield, Tiffany Haddish, Owen Wilson, Danny DeVito, Rosario Dawson, Dan Levy, Jamie Lee Curtis and Jared Leto. Produced by Walt Disney Pictures and Rideback, it is the second film adaptation of ...
People also ask
Are bogs haunted?
Does the Haunted Mansion have ghosts?
Who starred in Haunted Mansion?
How much money did Haunted Mansion make?
Is 'haunted mansion' a Halloween Merch?
What is a bog body?
Mar 20, 2023 · Captain Culpepper Clyne. Captain Clyne is a sea captain whose tub-shaped crypt sits outside the Walt Disney World version of Haunted Mansion, with an inscription that proclaims he “braved the seas and all her wrath, but drowned on land while taking a bath.”. The character is loosely based on the painting of The Mariner that has long hung in ...
