Freaky! Street sign casts shadow of hanging man

boing
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[Read the post]

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I see a wood pecker pecking a tree. A pine, I think.

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I wonder if there really was a gallows anywhere nearby, or if it’s a folk-tale created to make a bit of pareidolia seem even more creepy. I suspect I’ve answered my own question there. (Now I want to go find shadows that resemble things and make up stories about them. “See this shadow that looks like a frog? This is where the 'great frog massacre of ‘67’ happened.”)

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No offense, but aren’t there people who’s livelihoods consist almost entirely of photoshopping?

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Yeah - but they are using photo shop for work, not make fake weird shadows of wood peckers for no reason.

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The junction is locally known as “Dead Man’s Cross” and is reportedly the former site of a gallows.

And I’m sure that report comes from the always reliable source of The Guy Who Makes Shit Up.

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Not to mention that it doesn’t look like a hanging man so much as a man tied to a pole.

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Keep Calm

and

Hang On

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Yes, they commonly work for fashion magazines.

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I feel like a professional photoshopper would have known that people were typically hanged by the neck, not the forehead.

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Oh, please! Hang-person!

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Oh, great. Woodpecker hauntings. That would irritate the hell out of me.

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ho-hum, another ARG for the new Lego™ Star-Wars™ game…

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It is clearly a man tied to a post, with a one and a half quart saucepan on his head. Not quite as visceral an apparition as a gallow-less hanging.

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IG-88 is very kinky.

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(Why can’t I edit or remove this?)

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The Daily Mail quotes “a spokesman for Dartmouth Museum” as saying “hangings were common at Dead Man’s Cross in the 1400s” and that according to her a book by Ray Freeman called Dartmouth and its neighbours described hanged bodies being left in chains at Dead Man’s Cross for days to deter as a deterrent…
There is also quite a bit about the Gallows Gate in Devon to be found online. Then there is this list EXECUTION SITES

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New, more efficient crucifixion: just a pole and one giant nail, straight through the head. Works just the same.

No cross required, actually. We might need to invent a better name.

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Listen, jerk. What other people do for fun is none of your damn business.

Also, yeah, in what way does this look like a hanging man?

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I suppose my question is not really so much whether “dead man’s cross” actually existed (as a hanging spot), but whether this is actually that location, or if, as a result of the shadow, people decided that was the location. Every mention of “dead man’s cross” I can find is connected to this story of the shadow. It wouldn’t be the first time that people remembered a significant location but had only the vaguest notion where it had been, but then decided it must be in a specific spot when something else happened there, and people couldn’t resist turning it into a “coincidence.”