[CONTENT WARNING: mentions of death, blood, human remains, and suicide]
As someone with autism, I’m no stranger to falling down a hyperfixation rabbit hole. Last winter, and through much of 2024, I was obsessed with the lost Franklin Expedition, as some longtime readers of the Book Blog may or may not be aware.
This winter, I have developed a different, but no less strange literary obsession: bogs. More specifically, bog bodies.
This all started in early December, when I received an advanced reader copy of Johanna Van Veen’s Blood on Her Tongue via NetGalley. In this book, which will be released this March, a woman named Lucy receives news that her sister, Sarah, fell ill after assisting in the autopsy of a bog body which was found on her husband Michael’s property in the Dutch countryside. While trying to pry a rock out of the body’s mouth, Sarah cut her finger on one of the body’s teeth, and bog water got into the wound. After this, Sarah began to display some alarming behaviors, which included a sudden and severe wasting illness, a refusal to eat, changes in mood, and, most strangely of all, an intense thirst for human blood. Shortly after Lucy’s arrival at Sarah and Michael’s house, Sarah kills herself after attacking her doctor, who was also a lifelong friend (conflicts of interest didn’t exist in the 1800s); she wakes up again in her casket less than a week later on the morning of what would have been her funeral.
At first, based on this information and the title of the book, I thought, Vampires! Nice! I love vampires!
Lucy begins searching through her sister’s diaries and papers to see if there is any clue as to what has been going on, and she finds a number of scientific publications on blood-drinking bats, ticks, and a strange zombie ant phenomenon. And the whole time, I’m thinking it’s got to be vampires.
It was not vampires. What it actually was is a bit strange and a bit hard to explain, and a whole lot more terrifying. If you like gothic horror and appreciate a good sisters-before-misters story, you might enjoy this one. I’d certainly recommend it.
This book led me to return to a book I’d bought last year but never read past the first few pages, Kay Chronister’s The Bog Wife. This book tells the tale of the Haddesleys, who live on a cranberry bog in West Virginia which has supposedly been in their family for twelve generations. Their father, Charles Haddesley XI, is dying, and his five adult children know this means soon they’ll have to do the ritual that every generation of Haddesleys has done for the last eleven generations: at the moment of their father’s death, they must give his body to the bog; then, the next day, the eldest son must leave the house and venture into the bog naked, bathe in the bog muck, and go in search of The Bog Wife—a fully formed humanoid woman that the bog makes from scratch once a generation—and when he finds her, they must consummate their marriage in the place where his father died, and then return to the Haddesley estate to live as the unofficial lord and lady of the castle ruins that exist, for some reason, in the middle of this Appalachian cranberry bog (it sounds super weird, but Chronister makes it make sense later).
There’s a problem, though: Charles “Charlie” Haddesley XII, Charles XI’s eldest son, is impotent and requires a cane to walk. So, Charles XI asks his second and only other son, Percy, to kill his brother, and to be sure to do it before Charles XI dies so he doesn’t “confuse the bog” about who the eldest Haddesley is. Percy, of course, can’t bring himself to kill his brother, and their father dies the morning after this conversation, before he can be taken down to the bog. When they try to give his body to the bog, it doesn’t accept him, and his body simply floats on top of the sphagnum for a disturbingly long time. Nevertheless, the next morning, Charlie drags himself through the bog in search of his wife, only to find that the bog has not created a woman for him to marry. The bargain which has existed between the Haddesleys and the bog for centuries has been broken, and no one knows why, or what they should do.
This book is also gothic horror, of the Southern variety. It’s also a beautiful story about the give-and-take relationship between humanity and Mother Earth, and a subtle commentary on climate change. There’s much to be said as well about the way Chronister handles generational trauma, and recovering from abuse. This one is probably my favorite of the two books I’ve mentioned so far.
Chronister’s Bog Wife got me thinking, though—Are there bog bodies in North America? After perusing Ye Olde Google, I found out that, yes, there are! And there are even some from Florida!
In the 1980s at Windover Pond, just outside of Titusville, Florida, an underwater cemetery containing the remains of a civilization that existed 7,000–8,000 years ago was found while preparing a wetland for development. Researchers have not discovered much more about this community than what can be gleaned from these bodies and the grave goods found with them. DNA analysis cannot link them to any known Native American population, either from the past or who still exist today, so no one knows who these ancient Floridians were. What is known, however, is that they existed as a community for at least a thousand years, and that they predated metallurgy, agriculture, and most forms of pottery in Florida, but that they must have had some kind of cultural or spiritual beliefs about the orientation of the body in the grave because almost all of the bodies were found in the same position, facing the same direction. They also showed signs of having used medicine such as grapeseed and other local plants which are known to have healing properties or the ability to alleviate pain and help with digestion. Their clothing is also almost all plant-based, though there was evidence of deerskin used to cover the bodies in structures shaped almost like small, one-person teepees.
The Palatka campus library has a book about this discovery, Life and Death at Windover by Rachel K. Wentz. Overall, this book provides an excellent explanation of the findings of the archaeological digs that occurred at the site in the ‘80s, which makes sense because Wentz, though she was never there herself, was a student of one of the archaeologists who led the excavation. I would recommend reading this book if you’re interested in learning more about the graves at Windover, but I probably wouldn’t recommend using it as a source for a paper because Wentz does not cite any sources, she makes several grandiose claims that she doesn’t back up with data, and her writing could have benefitted from another round of proofreading and editing.