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Corpse-Candles

B

Bloodbeard

Gone But Not Forgotten
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Aug 14, 2009
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I have been reading about Charles Stewart Parnell and came across the following description of him provided by a contemporary (1880's)

'looking like the terrible corpse-candles of Welsh superstition'

Any ideas as to what a corpse-candle might be? I am intrigued.
 
I think they were glowing marsh gas or somesuch, weren't they? A natural phenomenon with a macabre nickname, anyway.
 
They were supposed to appear over graves too.
 
I think a similar thing to the will o' the wisp.
 
'looking like the terrible corpse-candles of Welsh superstition'
Click to expand...

I think that in that context it's got something to do with the old coffin tracks we have here over the mountains. In the past coffins were carried in relays from one town or village back to the deceased's birth place for burial. I seem to remember that flickering lights seen on the mountains are associated with this.

I know we've got a bit of a history of earth light type things here maybe they're something to do with it.
 
My parents were talking about this kind of thing today.
A few months ago, they visited someone and went out into the back garden.
While their friend went inside to get tea, they saw lights like little bluish flames flickering about on the lawn.
When they mentioned it to their friend, she said 'oh, you've seen it too - glad I'm not going mad'.
It turns out that these 'will o' the wisp' type events had been occurring for years since she'd moved in. I think she said the house was built on marshland or something like that.
 
In the case where my parents witnessed something, it was not fireflies.
They said it was like the flames you see with natural gas. It is possible that marsh gas is percolating to the surface and somehow spontaneously igniting.
 
When i still lived with my parents our house was on top of a hill and just across the way there was another hill where previously the land had been used as a small domestic landfill. Although latterly this was disused, at night you could occasionally see small blue flames flickering about on there, which i was always led to believe was the gas burning off. Like mythopoeika says though it just looked like natural gas burning.
Fast forward a few years and i was living elsewhere and saw on many a summer evening fireflies floating round and congregating in bushes. They were more of a greeny blue colour, smaller and not quite so flame shaped.
Pretty though.
 
As I understand it Corpse Candles are caused by decomposing matter when gas is vented through the earth and is ignited (I don't know how!?). The nickname 'corpse candles' coming about prior to modern-day burial techniques when gases from fairly fresh graves could escape. It can be caused by decomposing plant matter in the same way, as other posters have said.

That's my understanding anyway, I've always thought they sounded wonderfully spooky!
 
The gas being given off by decomposing matter part I understand - but how does it get ignited?
 
bacteria ferment which causes the temperature to rise, the heat cant escape as it's insulated by surrounding organic matter,temperature rises above the point of ignition and then provided there's a sufficient supply of oxygen, spontaneous combustion can occur.
Things do ignite spontaneously in air (sodium and phosphorous are two that spring to mind,) but this is a different thing to the spontaneous ignition of organic matter i think.
Anyhoo its down to those little bacterium.
 
There's quite a lengthy discussion about this somewhere here, mostly it was about hay and exploding oil paintings.
 
oldrover said:
There's quite a lengthy discussion about this somewhere here, mostly it was about hay and exploding oil paintings.
Click to expand...

Yes. I contributed to that. But I know that hay generates heat as it decays, and linseed oil can cause heat to be generated in a confined space under certain unfavourable circumstances. In both cases you can get either slow smoldering or a major conflagration.

Is the same true of the stuff that causes marsh gas? If so, you'd expect the occasional bigger bang as well where the gas has built up but is unable to escape. I'm not sure I've heard of any exploding cemetaries, and I certainly wouldn't want to live near one :shock:
 
Cochise, i would say, off the top of my head, that you dont come across too many exploding cemetaries as in a runaway thermal reaction temperature is limited by water loss due to evaporation. As bodies tend to be a high percentage of water compared to all the burnable stuff, maybe an upper limit is reached where the temperature just doesnt get high enough.
Oldrover i dare say lightening plays its part. i think if things get past their ignition temperature they will just burst into flame without any need for an outside source of ignition.






(edited for turn of phrase)
 
An old name for these is corposants- and indeed, they are caused by decomposition releasing gasses.

The Thugee of India knew how much gas a human corpse will produce, and so the knife, for slitting the bellies of victims was one of their three tools, the others being the strangling cord and the pick-axe.

And remember, when you need an explanation for the paranormal, blame swamp gas!
 
There's a great account of corpse-candles in Welsh Folklore here:

In Wales, Christmas and New Year have long been the time for ghost stories and spooky tales.

When the nights are dark and the wind howls around the corners of the house, it is the ideal moment to gather the family together around the fire and enthral, intrigue and frighten them with stories of headless horsemen, strange apparitions and things like the mysterious corpse candles that once haunted the imaginations of our ancestors.

Corpse candles were directly related to corpse roads – corpse roads being exactly what the term suggests, old roadways which from the medieval period onwards were used for taking dead bodies to the church, chapel or burial ground.

Corpse candles were small balls of yellow or blue light that seemed to hover around these roads, usually at dusk – or, sceptics might say, once the innkeeper had closed up shop for the night and sent everyone on their unsteady way home!

As might be expected in the rural parts of Wales in the days before industrialisation brought an influx of people to the country, legends and folk tales quickly grew up around these strange lights. It was not long before they left the rigid confinements and limitations of the corpse roads and became an entity in themselves.

The corpse candles, as people who saw them would testify, invariably travelled in a straight line, taking the direct route from the home of the deceased man or woman to the church or graveyard. They went over mountains, valleys, even rivers and marsh land, never bothering with traditional routes and seeming to be able to travel wherever they wished.

More description and possible explanations follows:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/wales/entries/7a238820-7a42-35c4-93b1-118530e88167
​
And here's a first-hand account from The Welsh Fairy Book (1908) by W. Jenkyn Thomas:


A CLERGYMAN in Carmarthenshire had a son who came home one night very late and found the doors locked against him. Not wishing to disturb his father and mother, and fearing also their reproaches and chidings, he went to the man-servant's bedroom, which was over the stable. He could not awake the man-servant, but while standing over him he saw a small light issue from his nostrils. He followed it out. It went over a foot-bridge which crossed a brook and on to the road which led up to the parish church. After following the corpse candle for some time, the young man, just to see what would happen, struck at it with his stick. It burst into sparks, but afterwards reunited into a flame as before, which stalked on until it finally disappeared in the church yard.

Not long afterwards the man-servant died: at his funeral the bier broke at the spot where his master's son had struck at the corpse candle, and the coffin fell to the ground.

Source:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/celt/wfb/wfb76.htm
​
And here's a short but interesting account of how the belief was incorporated into early-ish Christianity and legitimised in the Sixth Century by tying the practice St. David:

https://www.spookyisles.com/2013/03/the-welsh-corpse-candles-of-st-david/

The author doesn't pursue the subject, but he briefly compares this phenomenon to the Japanese hitodama.
 
This from the entry in A Dictionary of English Folklore by Jaqueline Simpson & Steve Roud (OUP: 2002), p.79-80.

In areas bordering on Wales, where the belief was particularly common, they were called ‘corpse candles’, and in Sussex ‘corpse lights’; the 19th-century Sussex folklorist Charlotte Latham found the belief was widespread, but thought glow-worms might account for it. (Folk-Lore Record I (1878), 49–50). ​
 
I think there was something in the Netflix drama The Alienist (or maybe Penny Dreadful)?

Hollow metal tubes, looking like think cones of metal, were inserted into the stomach cavity to allow methane to escape. The mortician lit the gas to help illuminate the body during the autopsy.
 
There are a few accounts of corpse candles in Jonathan Ceredig Davies's Folklore of West and Mid-Wales. Here is a report of the nearest to me:


Owen Evans, Maesydderwen, near Llansawel, Carmarthenshire, who is over 90 years of age, gave me the following account of a Corpse Candle which had been seen at Silian, near Lampeter.
When Evans was a boy, his father lived in an old house close to the churchyard walls, and kept the key of the church door. At that time singing practice was often conducted in the church, especially during the long winter evenings. One evening a certain young man entered the churchyard with the intention of going to the church to attend this singing-class, though it was a little too early; but he could see light in the church through one of the windows. So on he went to the church door thinking that the singing had commenced, or at least that some one was in the church. But to his great surprise he found the door closed and locked, and when he looked in through the key-hole there was not a soul to be seen inside the church. The young man then went to the house of Owen Evans’s father and informed the old man that there was light in the church, but that he did not see anyone inside. “You must be making a mistake,” said my informant’s father to the young man, “there cannot possibly be any light in the church; no one could have entered the building to light it, for the door is locked, and I have the key here in the house.” “But I am positively certain,” said the young man again, “that there is light in the church, for I took particular notice of it.” Both of the two men now went to the church together, and as they approached, they noticed a light coming out from the church. This light moved slowly towards a certain part of the churchyard, and the two men followed it and watched it until it suddenly disappeared into the ground. That it was a corpse candle they had no doubt in their minds. The young man had a walking stick in his hand with which he made a mark or a hole in the ground on the spot where the light had sunk. Soon after this a death took [204]place in the neighbourhood, and the dead was buried in the very spot where the corpse candle had sunk into the ground.
My informant told me also that he had seen a corpse candle himself before the death of an adopted son of one Mr. John Evans, who lived at Glandenis, in the same neighbourhood.
 
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