The Lantern Men are the Norfolk Broads' own version of the will-o'-the-wisp, a phenomenon reported across marshy landscapes worldwide in which mysterious lights appear to travellers at night, seeming to beckon or guide them, only to lead anyone who follows deeper into dangerous, waterlogged ground rather than toward safety. In Broads folklore the Lantern Men are understood as genuinely malevolent spirits rather than a natural phenomenon like marsh gas misread in poor light, deliberately luring the unwary to their deaths in the mud and channels of the marsh.
Joseph Bexfield's story gives this general folklore an unusually specific, dated, and named anchor. A working wherryman, thirty-eight years old, plying the trade route along the River Yare between Norwich and Great Yarmouth, Bexfield and his fellow bargemen were in the habit of mooring for the night at Thurlton Staithe. On the night in question, 11 August 1809, he crossed the marsh to the White Horse Inn for a drink, and on preparing to head back realised he had left items on his wherry meant for his wife. His drinking companions warned him directly not to attempt the crossing, telling him the Lantern Men were abroad that night. Bexfield went anyway, and drowned on the marsh before reaching his boat.
The folklore's final, and most self-reinforcing, turn is what tradition holds happened to Bexfield afterward: rather than simply becoming a conventional ghost mourning his own death, he is said to have joined the very phenomenon that killed him, becoming one of the Lantern Men himself, doomed to wander the marsh luring others toward the same lights that once lured him to his death. That closed loop, a specific, named drowning victim who explicitly ignored a folkloric warning and then became part of the folklore that had warned him, gives the Lantern Men tradition an unusually tight and memorable narrative structure compared with most vaguer will-o'-the-wisp legends, a cautionary tale that supplies both its own warning and the proof of what happens to those who fail to heed it.
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