There's something about a swamp that gets under your skin in a way that other wilderness doesn't.

A forest is dark, but it's navigable.

A mountain is dangerous, but you can see where you are.

A swamp is something else.

The ground isn't ground. It's negotiable.

The water doesn't flow. It just sits there, going nowhere, knowing things.

The trees twist and lean at angles that don't make sense for trees.

And the sounds, the sounds at night in a swamp are the sounds of a place that is not particularly concerned with whether you're there or not.

People get lost in swamps. They've been getting lost in them for as long as people have been going into them.

And not just physically lost. Sometimes people go into a swamp and come back changed.

Sometimes they go in and don't come back at all.

And sometimes the swamp is already occupied by the time you arrive, by something or someone

that found the remoteness useful. Today I want to tell you five stories, five real encounters

from five different swamps. Each one the kind of thing that stays with the

person who lived it in a way they can't quite shake, even years later. Let's begin. Story

1 The Traps

Achafalaia Basin, Louisiana

The Achafalaya Basin in south-central Louisiana

is the largest river swamp in the United States.

It covers more than a million acres of floodplain,

Cypress Forest, and interconnected waterways that shift and change year to year

in ways that make any map you print off before a trip,

...