Welcome to the Dark Half of the Year

Halloween started as Samhain, an old Gaelic festival held on November 1. It marked the end of the harvest and the start of what people called the darker half of the year. Their days began at sunset, so the celebration started the night before. That’s tonight!

The clocks change too. At 2 a.m. they fall back an hour, and tomorrow the sun sets here in Portland before 5 p.m. The dark is coming either way, so we decided to enjoy it.

We turned off the lights on seventeen years of Moss & Fog and went looking through the archive for dark things. We found night skies, deep woods, deep water and a few stories that are a little morbid. Here are sixteen of our favorites. Move your mouse, or drag your finger, to shine a flashlight around. There’s a switch if you want the lights back on.

Lights down

Sixteen Dark Stories From Our Archive

Four of Them, Up Close

The lake that turns birds to stone

Lake Natron is in northern Tanzania, near a volcano called Ol Doinyo Lengai. Ash from the volcano washes salts into the lake. The water has no way out, so it gets so alkaline it can burn your skin. Animals that die in it don't rot. They dry out, coated in natron, the same mineral the ancient Egyptians used to make mummies.

The photographer Nick Brandt found birds washed up on the shore and posed them on rocks and branches, as if they were still alive, for his 2013 book Across the Ravaged Land. The pictures are sad and creepy and very hard to look away from. The strangest part is that the lake is also a nursery. About three quarters of the world's lesser flamingos hatch on its salt flats, where the harsh water keeps predators away.

The trees that droop after dark

In 2016, scientists in Finland and Austria scanned two silver birch trees with lasers from sunset to sunrise. Overnight, the branches sank by as much as 10 centimeters, then rose again near dawn. Trees don't have muscles. They stay stiff because of water pressure in their cells, and that pressure drops once the sun goes down. So if a tree looks a little slumped on your walk home tonight, it probably is.

The town of castles nobody lives in

Burj Al Babas is a development of 587 matching mini castles near the spa town of Mudurnu, Turkey. Building started in 2014. The developer went bankrupt before the job was done, and the pandemic stopped work in 2020. The castles still stand in neat rows, pointy roofs and all, and most of them are unfinished inside. Nobody has ever moved in.

The ghosts made in the darkroom

People were faking photos long before Photoshop. In 1840, Hippolyte Bayard posed as a drowned man for one of the first staged photos ever made. Later, spirit photographers used double exposures to put see-through ghosts behind their sitters. And in 1917, two young cousins in England made photos of fairies in their garden using paper cutouts. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes, reportedly thought they might be real!

Where Halloween Came From

For the Gaelic people of Ireland and Scotland, Samhain was a night when the line between our world and the spirit world got thin. The aos sí, the spirits and fairies of their folklore, could cross over. People left out food and drink for them, hoping it would keep their families and animals safe through the winter.

Big bonfires were lit on the hilltops. Some families let their own fires go out, relit them from the big fire, and carried torches around their homes and fields for protection. People also went door to door in costume, saying a verse in exchange for food. It was called guising, and in Scotland it goes back to at least the 1500s. Sound familiar?

The first jack-o'-lanterns weren't pumpkins. In Ireland and Britain, people carved faces into turnips. An old Irish story tells of Stingy Jack, a blacksmith who tricked the devil and ended up wandering the earth with a burning coal inside a hollowed-out turnip. Irish and Scottish families brought the custom to North America, where pumpkins were bigger and much easier to carve. We think that was a good trade.

Things That Glow in the Dark

Some mushrooms make their own light. The glow is called foxfire, and it's cold, green and faint. People have noticed it for a very long time. The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote about a light coming from rotting wood that gave off no heat.

The mushrooms in this photo are bitter oysters, one of the brightest glowing mushrooms on Earth, though not all of them glow. There's also a big orange mushroom called the jack-o'-lantern mushroom, named for its green glow at night. Yes, that's its real name!

People found uses for foxfire, too. They carried it in jars as a lantern, laid it along paths to find their way at night, and used it to light the inside of early submarines. In Finnish, the word for the northern lights, revontulet, means foxfires.

It's mushroom season here in the Pacific Northwest. If you're near some old rotting logs tonight, turn off your phone light, give your eyes a few minutes, and look closely. For more strange fungi, Steve Axford's Remarkable Fungi is one of our favorites, and our trip into the deep sea is full of animals that make their own light.