Little Details

I'm trying to figure out how the skin color, such as how dark or how light it is, would affect their social status within the society at large as well as their standing within the slave community.

Time and Place: United States, mainly the southern states. Between the late colonial times and post Revolution. All this during the time of slavery, not after it.

Any sites or sources would be greatly appreciated. I'm looking at both males and female slaves in all vocations/areas of slavery.

I have tried several searches, pretty much all of them yielding little to no information.

Searches:
"United States"+slavery+"Skin color"+social status"+African Americans"
Several variation of the above
Slavery+"Skin color"+advantages.
"African-americans"+Slavery+benefits+Coloring.

When I was in girl guides, we once made a burner out of a coffee can. (we made French toast on it.)

I want to use this burner in a story. I've googled and googled and googled, but I can't figure out how to make one. All the things I find are about how to cook *inside* a coffee can. I want to flip it upside down and cook *on top*.

Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Remember the name of the burner?

I'm writing a fanfiction for the tv show Supernatural (it's a show about two brothers who hunt anything paranormal) and I need some help with paranormal creatures. In my story, the characters find some bodies that are aged into desiccated corpses after the people have only been missing for a few hours or days. Does anyone know of any paranormal creatures that would do something like this or legends that explain similar situations? I already know what I'm going to have killing the people, I just need to know what the brothers would suspect of doing this before they figure out what it really is. The story takes place in America, but the legend/creature can really be from anywhere.

I've tried a few google searches like "paranormal murders" or "supernatural deaths", etc., but I can't really find anything helpful.

time and place: England, late 1940's (after the war)

I've tried googling different variations on the subject line and get mostly commercial sites that aren't very relevant to the time period and/or contradict each other. What are some traditions/customs that a middle-class English bride in the 1940's would observe? I want to make sure I don't do anything blatantly American, for example.