Bog Trail · Local History
The Sisters of the Bog
The village beyond the trees called them witches, and they were right to. When cattle sickened, it was the sisters’ doing. When children wandered off and did not wander back, it was the sisters’ doing. The villagers spat at their gate and made signs against them in the dark.
But the sisters were not the evil in the swamp. They were the only thing keeping it there.
Something lived in the bog. It had no name, for it had never needed one, and no shape that eyes could hold. It seeped into the water and the roots and the creatures that drank from it. The crocodile in the reeds grew long and wrong. The toads swelled and watched. A spider in the dying maple grew until its legs could span a man.
The sisters bound it with salt and bone and old words. Each year, on the night the veil wore thinnest, they renewed the binding, and each year the swamp pushed back.
Long ago, the swamp took the eldest sister. They buried her shallow, as the bog allows, and over the years the earth gave up her bones. Last winter, it took the middle sister. Her grave is fresh with wilting flowers.
Now only one remains.
She does not sleep much. She keeps a servant in the old well and on the darkest night she calls it up to stand watch. She lights the lanterns along the path and hangs the carved heads beside them. Each head holds a soul the swamp has claimed, bound now to stand against it.
Some of those souls once came with torches and rope to burn the witches out. The swamp found them first. They guard her road now, whether they wish to or not.
So if you walk the path to her door on All Hallows Eve, keep to the lights. Do not look too long at the water. And if the faces on the posts seem to turn toward the dark, be grateful. They are watching it for you.
