East Anglia

Marsh gas, or the will o’ the wisp, is common in the flat lands of East Anglia and has been personified as the Lantern Man. He is said to lure people to their deaths by drawing them to his light and then drowning them in thick mud and water. At Thurlton, a village to the south of the river Yare, a gravestone to the north of All Saints’ church tells of the death of wherrymanloseph Bexheld at the hands of the Lantern Man in the nineteenth century.

He would take his wherry up and down the Yare between Norwich and Great Yarmouth and would often tie up for the night at Thuriton Staithe, halfway between the two, and stay at the White Horse Inn. On 11 August 1809 he was at the inn when he remembered he had left a parcel for his wife on the wherry It was pitch dark and another of the wherrymen warned him that the Lantern Man would be out and about, but he said he knew the marsh too we” to be led astray by any Jack O’Lantern. Days later his corpse was washed up between Reedham and Breyd0 People say that on misty nights his ghost wanders the marshes still.

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