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Will-O'-The-Wisp

I've found it on the bottom of an old stump that I dug up out of old swampland. Neat bacteria. :D
 
Could the floating wood have been held aloft by a mini-dust-devil, so limited in area that your grandfather didn't even feel the air current?

And didn't sailors in the old wooden spar days handle St. Elmo's Fire without burning their hands?
 
Seminole10 said:
... I saw a weak glowing light coming down the road.It was swinging up and down slightly and appeared to me to be someone walking along with a lighted cigarette in their fingers..Another fisherman I thought.Odd I thought that they would be out after dark without a flashlight. ...

I went towards the light planning to ask the fisherman if I was in the place I thought I was. As I neared the light I finally could make out it was just a wisp of light that now appeared to be more bluish than the orange glow it had been before.More importantly, I could see that there was no person there. The light continued on for a few yards and seemed to drift a bit higher than eye level and flickerd out. ....
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My most compelling earthlight / ghost light / will o' the wisp experience also happened in the American South - in northeast Tennessee (in the Appalachians). It was similar to Seminole10's sighting in that the light first appeared to be moving so as to suggest it was held by someone walking.

NOTE: I'm certain I posted this years ago on FTMB, but it appears the post has been lost. Anyway ...

It was summer 1963. My Boy Scout troop was spending a week at (the now-defunct) Camp Tom Howard, just off US Hwy 421 east of Bristol, Tennessee. (Note 1) Each troop had its own campsite, with tents, cots, and a campfire pit. Our troop's campsite was perhaps the most isolated one of all. It was situated up on a spur ridge that rose from the camp's central area and led up onto / into the wooded mountain overlooking the camp (Holston Mountain). A steep trail led up from the camp's center onto an ridgeline with 'peaks' and 'sways'. You crossed over two minor 'peaks' along the trail before arriving at our campsite, where the trail terminated.

The campsite was basically just a clearing atop the ridge. A row of tents ran along each side of the ridge's crest, which was open with the campfire pit in the middle. At the upper end of the clearing sat the leader's tent. Behind that tent the ridge became steeper as it ascended to the flank of the mountain above. The ridge dropped away steeply on each side, and we were surrounded by mixed deciduous forest with medium undergrowth.

My best friend and I occupied the tent sitting next to where the trail entered the campsite. It was past 'lights out', on a clear and moonlit night. We were lying on our cots talking. The tent's front flaps were pulled back so we could look out into the woods and the valley below the ridge.

We noticed a light maybe 60 to 80 yards away - in the direction of the first 'peak' one crossed when following the trail up to our site. The light appeared to be discrete, round, and yellow with a slight greenish tinge - somewhat like a bright firefly. However, once we determined its location it was clear the light was too big to be a firefly, and it wasn't blinking. The light appeared to slowly bob up and down. We then realized that the light was also apparently moving along the trail (along the ridge crest) toward us. We originally thought it must be someone with a flashlight coming up to our camp. Since it was a rules violation to be out after bedtime, we positioned ourselves to find out who it was.

We watched the light continue to follow the trail, slowly bobbing up and down as if being carried by someone walking. We watched it descend slightly from the first 'peak', climb and cross the second 'peak', and approach our position. The light seemed to be continuous, except for blinking obviously associated with passing behind the undergrowth bordering the trail.

The undergrowth stopped where the trail entered our site's clearing. My friend and I were only about 15 feet away from the point where the trail entered the clearing, so we could get a clear look at whomever was out after hours.

After some 2 to 3 minutes of our continuous observation, the light entered our site's clearing. Instead of the flashlight we originally presumed, it turned out to be a sphere of pale light floating along some 3 to 4 feet in the air above the trail. It was no smaller than a golf ball, and no larger than a tennis ball. It was pale yellow with a slight greenish tinge. It was a single spherical shape with no features.

As it came out from the underbrush lining the trail, we had a clear view across the clearing (and on to the valley beyond) with the ground before us illuminated by moonlight. There was no person (or anything) holding the light up. There was only the light itself.

It continued at its sedate walking pace - bobbing up and down as if with footsteps - up-slope through the center of our campsite. It barely missed the leader's tent at the clearing's uphill end before continuing up onto the steeper slope leading upward to the mountain, thus disappearing into the forest. All this happened in total silence.

My friend and I compared our observations, and we agreed we'd both seen the same thing (as described above). During our week at camp we asked around about weird phenomena (ghost tales, etc.) associated with the camp, but nobody knew of any such lore.

I've never been sure how to categorize what I saw. Right or wrong, in my experience 'foxfire' referred to static luminescence and 'will o' the wisp' to tenuous or flame-like lights. What we saw that night certainly wasn't static, and it had a consistent discrete spherical shape. I don't think it falls under 'ball lightning', because it moved at a sedate pace and there was no storm activity at the time.

In recent years I've come to associate this sighting with 'earthlights', because it definitely followed the crest of the ridge and thus suggested a possibly geological origin or correlation.

Note 1. Camp Tom Howard's location is marked on the Shady Valley Quadrangle (TN / VA) topographic map from USGS (available online). I believe the ridge upon which the campsite sat would be just below the word 'Howard' appearing on the map.
 
Doesn't ball lightning ever get that sedate? Could there be a connection between what you saw and that? There must be some stories along those lines, the phenomenon doesn't move that fast from what I've read, and I don't think it always makes a noise either.

What was the weather like at the time of your sighting? It might hold a clue, after all storms aren't essential to ball lightning.
 
The weather was calm and clear. There hadn't been any rain or storm that day, and it continued to be clear through that night. The reason I'm confident about this is because the 1963 week at that camp (my first ...) was hot and dry, such that we were not allowed to build a campfire at our site until the last night (after it finally rained). This sighting occurred on the first or second night we were there - at least 3 days prior to finally getting any rain.

I've never seen a ball lightning sighting report that described the light moving so sedately for so long as what we saw.

Then again - reports of 'ghost lights', 'earthlights', and 'ball lightning' are so jumbled up (as far as attribution to one or another category) that it's hard to figure out where the categorization boundaries (if any ...) lie.

I've also witnessed the Brown Mountain Lights in North Carolina on multiple occasions. The general form and character of the light witnessed at the camp was very similar to a Brown Mountain light, but on a much smaller scale and more obviously mobile.
 
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Last weekend, my Dad told me about a will o' the wisp he experienced a few years ago.
My Mum and Dad were visiting a friend, and they were having tea in the back garden. Both of them saw what appeared to be a purplish flame bubbling up out of the lawn and then disappearing.
They told their host, who said she'd seen it happen quite a few times for years, since she'd bought the place.
I guess the house is built on a bog or something.
 
I was just looking to see what the weekend's weather held when I noticed this 'weather' related headline on the forecast page:

Mysterious sounds and lights in Lake Weyba bushland have some residents spooked
While it may appear to be a paranormal phenomenon ripped straight from the X-Files, one expert says there is an explanation for the "humming noises and flickering lights" apparently haunting some Sunshine Coast residents.

Talk of spooky experiences in the Lake Weyba area have sparked supernatural debate on social media after a walker asked if anyone had noticed anything "strange" at the Peregian end of Noosa National Park.

"I was walking there today and heard a weird humming sound, like a human humming a tune," Kerr Eban said in a Facebook post.

"It followed me for 30 minutes, it sounded like it was getting closer too before I left the fire track."

Former Lake Weyba resident Sarah-Jane Stockton said she had also experienced strange things when she and her partner lived in a house that backed onto bushland in the area.

"We used to go walking down there a bit in the bush, we always had a feeling like we shouldn't be in there, a little bit of a spooky feeling," she said.

"You would hear strange noises through the bush like someone was walking parallel to you but there wasn't anyone."

But Ms Stockton said the strangest experience was when she was woken one night to darting lights.

"We were lying in bed, there's no fence between our house and the bush, and this really strange light appeared probably about three-metres high and it was darting across the front of the bushland," she said.

"At first we thought, 'Is it a torch?', but the way that it moved was way too strange to be somebody with a torch.

"We watched it for probably for about 30 minutes and then it disappeared & it was gone."
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https://www.weatherzone.com.au/news...a-bushland-have-some-residents-spooked/531609
 
One thing I keep thinking about is how few good 'modern' accounts of will-o'-the-wisps there are. By which I mean this sort of thing from @Mythopoeika

My Mum and Dad were visiting a friend, and they were having tea in the back garden. Both of them saw what appeared to be a purplish flame bubbling up out of the lawn and then disappearing.
They told their host, who said she'd seen it happen quite a few times for years, since she'd bought the place.
Click to expand...

Now I know 'marsh gas' has been a common enough explanation for unusual phenomena for a long time. But this seems to be based largely on assumptions and folklore. Even then there are holes in it - I mean, the folkloric will-o'-the-wisp was a bluish or greenish light, but methane burns with a yellow flame as far as I know.

And why does hardly anyone see these things any more? Is it just that all the likely marshes have been drained, or is it just such a dim light that our modern street lit world means it goes unnoticed? I would have expected more people to have seen or photographed it.
 
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Another point: looking at both this thread and the site linked at

http://inamidst.com/lights/wisp/

The account I mentioned above definitely sounds like ignition of a gas - the classic description. But the one earlier in the thread of a floating, glowing piece of 'spongy' wood sounds a bit more like the description from Notes and Queries mentioned on the site:

Will with a wisp is more frequent in places unctuous, marshy, and abounding in reeds. They haunt burying-places, places of execution, and dunghills. Some that have been catched consist of a shining viscous matter, like the spawn of frogs, not hot, but only shining; so that the matter seems to be phosphorous, raised from putrefied plants or carcases
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So do we perhaps have more than one phenomenon here? One a burning gas and another some luminous "matter"?
 
BS3 said:
And why does hardly anyone see these things any more? Is it just that all the likely marshes have been drained, or is it just such a dim light that our modern street lit world means it goes unnoticed? I would have expected more people to have seen or photographed it.
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This is a good question and you are probably correct with your suggestions. A will-o-the-wisp is one of things I would most like to see.

There aren't any execution places left thankfully but dunghills pop up all over the place before being spread on fields. Might be worth keeping an eye on!
 
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On reading through the link you posted, graveyard are probably no longer the hotbed of putrifying gases they once were as well.
BS3 said:
So do we perhaps have more than one phenomenon here? One a burning gas and another some luminous "matter"?
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This seems very possible. The description of the "frog spawn" sounds a bit like star jelly which of course is a mystery in itself!:thought: When I next find star jelly, if I am in a position to go back to it in the dark I will try that.
 
Min Bannister said:
This is a good question and you are probably correct with your suggestions. A will-o-the-wisp is one of things I would most like to see.

There aren't any execution places left thankfully but dunghills pop up all over the place before being spread on fields. Might be worth keeping an eye on!
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There's still plenty of standing water and rotting wood in the country, too. Why aren't there more will-o'-the-wisps? A lot of marshland was drained in the 18th century as part of the enclosures, but I'm sure I remember reading that the proportion of land under active cultivation in Britain was highest around the time of the Napoleonic Wars, so it's not automatically true that everything is drier and better maintained these days.

I'm wondering if it really is just a matter of people not noticing them? Judging by the anecdotes of older relatives and the like, it seems clear that people in rural areas no longer make nearly as many journeys on foot at night as they used to. So it might be that I suppose. I'm just surprised there is so little 'hard' evidence for something that is widely assumed to be real. I'd love to see one as well - I suspect marshy woodland would be the best place to look, if the theories are right.
 
BS3 said:
I'm wondering if it really is just a matter of people not noticing them? Judging by the anecdotes of older relatives and the like, it seems clear that people in rural areas no longer make nearly as many journeys on foot at night as they used to. So it might be that I suppose.
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Yes, this must have a lot to do with it too. The descriptions of weary travellers being led into the marsh by these lights, thinking them to be the lights of human habitation is something that just sounds old fashioned. When was the last time you travelled through a marsh on foot at night? No, me neither.
 
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Posted this in another thread some time back.

A few years back me n the wife were out in the car as we rolled up to the main
road from a side road just on the edge of the village we both saw what I took to
be a Will O The Wisp, it passed between two hen sheds on a small farm just across
the road, we both exclaimed "What the F was that" looked like the small tornado
thing that the cartoon corrector Taz turned into seemed to be a luminous mist, it was
a cold damp but still night, dark just after 10 pm, never saw it before or since.
 
RaM said:
Posted this in another thread some time back.

A few years back me n the wife were out in the car as we rolled up to the main
road from a side road just on the edge of the village we both saw what I took to
be a Will O The Wisp, it passed between two hen sheds on a small farm just across
the road, we both exclaimed "What the F was that" looked like the small tornado
thing that the cartoon corrector Taz turned into seemed to be a luminous mist, it was
a cold damp but still night, dark just after 10 pm, never saw it before or since.
Click to expand...

Livestock farms often have a burial area and/or burn pit for their “failures”. One or both might account for your sighting.

maximus otter
 
RaM said:
Posted this in another thread some time back.

A few years back me n the wife were out in the car as we rolled up to the main
road from a side road just on the edge of the village we both saw what I took to
be a Will O The Wisp, it passed between two hen sheds on a small farm just across
the road, we both exclaimed "What the F was that" looked like the small tornado
thing that the cartoon corrector Taz turned into seemed to be a luminous mist, it was
a cold damp but still night, dark just after 10 pm, never saw it before or since.
Click to expand...

I suppose a farm would have plenty of rotting organic matter around one way or the other. What sort of colour was the mist?
 
It was white with a sort of milky colour to it, I knew someone related to the owners
and asked if they knew anything but nothing there's a small lake about 100 yards
away and the area was one big swamp until drained many years back, dykes still
run water off to the sea.
It was a few ft high and seemed to be spinning though it was a still night, it just
seemed to drift slowly between the buildings.
 
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I've found the text of a short talk given to the Cardiff Naturalists Society in the 1870s which seems to suggest the phenomenon was extremely rare even then: "few persons have ever seen them". Here it is described as a blue, yellow or reddish flame that tends to move away from the witness due to air currents so that it is difficult to get near.

One point the lecturer (a Mr Scott) makes is that in order for the spontaneous ignition of the methane to take place, then a small amount of "phosphuretted hydrogen" (phosphine) needs to be present, which he suggests means that "animal matter" must be present: "the remains of some animal or fish, or perhaps some unfortunate traveller!"

He says the phenomenon is extremely rare in much of the country and mentions two sites, a small pool on the railway between Penruddock and Threlkeld in Westmorland, as well as a "similar light [...] seen in a churchyard in Warwickshire , and described as a phosphorescent blue light playing over a grave", which sounds suitably Fortean. One of the audience then chips in with his "strong but ungratified wish" to see a will-o'-the-wisp - much like us 150 years later, then.

One thing I certainly don't see is how such a delicate sounding, elusive phenomenon can be suggested as the solution in earthlight type cases involving large balls of light flying through the air.
 
BS3 said:
He says the phenomenon is extremely rare in much of the country and mentions two sites, a small pool on the railway between Penruddock and Threlkeld in Westmorland…
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lt was only about 8 miles from Penruddock to Threlkeld via the “Cockermouth, Keswick and Penrith Railway”.

Although the Lake District isn’t short of water - the clue’s in the name - a casual glance at the 6” to the mile Victorian OS map suggests that the “pool” might refer to Tarn Moss, not far from Penruddock.

Tarn Moss is described as:

“…a basin mire supporting nutrient-poor fen. It developed in a shallow hollow in acidic glacial drift, and is fed by nutrient-poor ground water. The fen found here is a good example of this northern British vegetation type.

Sedges and bog mosses are well represented at the site. Other characteristic plant species include round-leaved sundew, heather, cross-leaved heath, marsh violet, marsh cinquefoil and lesser bladderwort. Where the ground water is richer in nutrients the site supports marsh marigold, ragged robin, bog bean and marsh lousewort.”

http://www.visiteden.co.uk/location-area/tarn-moss-national-nature-reserve/?pageCategory=attractions

“Tarn Moss is remarkable in being almost entirely devoid of tree or scrub cover, as well as being little disturbed with no obvious signs of past peat-cutting.”

https://sac.jncc.gov.uk/site/UK0030339

A local Fortean, perhaps with access to thermal imaging kit, might find a nocturnal visit to be…rewarding?

maximus otter
 
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Hm, it says a "small pool surrounded by trees and bushes" (in the 1870s), so maybe not Tarn Moss if it's treeless?
 
In my effort to get hold of some more 'solid' (not folkloric) accounts of will o the wisps, I've dredged a couple more descriptions from 19th century books.

It seems that in 1833 a German bloke called Blesson managed to conduct a few 'experiments' on will o' the wisps, described as small, purple-blue flames, that he saw in a marshy forest in Gorbitz, Brandenburg. He was able to prove that it was gas causing the flame by going back in the daytime and noting bubbles in the same place, and proved the gas was actually burning by lighting a piece of paper from it. The gas was so sensitive to air currents that he had to avert his face when lighting the paper, or his breath would disturb it. The flames seemed to get closer to the earth near dawn, and then disappeared (though he assumed the gas was still burning, just invisibly in daylight).

Also J. H. Humphrey in 1840, on the road from Dunoon to Holy Loch, saw "several lights, precisely like the flame of a common candle", flitting about a foot over the surface of a reedy pond.
 
Blesson's essay is online, for anyone desperate to find out more. I am still surprised there seem to be so few good accounts of the phenomenon.

As a bonus he talks about star jelly / foxfire as well!
 
BS3 said:
Blesson's essay is online, for anyone desperate to find out more. I am still surprised there seem to be so few good accounts of the phenomenon.

As a bonus he talks about star jelly / foxfire as well!
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This is very useful stuff. The daytime bubbles he describes are interesting and would be another plausible way for the modern WOTW hunter to try and track one since I suspect most of us would be far more confident wandering about a marsh during the day rather than trying it at night! :thought:
 
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...and a handful of 20th century accounts, from a 1938 article on the same website.

Not all of these sound like burning marsh gases; the Old Leys Lane one is more like a canonical 'ghost light'. Again I think there are a few different phenomena bundled under the same heading.
 
I reckon that anyone with a reasonable sized garden pond could probably try certain things to experimentally create a WOTW.
 
Last one for a bit. This is an 1839 account from Powick in Worcestershire.

I had for several nights before been on the look out there for it, but was told by the inhabitants of the house that previously to that night it was too cold. I noticed it from one of the upper windows intermittingly for about half an hour, between ten and eleven o'clock, at the distance of from one to two hundred yards off me. Sometimes it was only like a flash in the pan on the ground; at other times it rose up several feet and fell to the earth, and became extinguished; and many times it proceeded horizontally from fifty to one hundred yards with an undulating motion, like the flight of the green woodpecker, and about as rapid; and once or twice it proceeded with considerable rapidity, in a straight line upon or close to the ground.

The light of this ignis fatuus, or rather of these ignes fatui, was very clear and strong, much bluer than that of a candle, and very like that of an electric spark, and some of them looked larger and as bright as the star Sirius; of course, they look dim when seen in ground fogs, but there was not any fog on the night in question; there was, however, a muggy closeness in the atmosphere, and at the same time a considerable breeze from the south-west. Those Will-o'-the-Wisps which shot horizontally invariably proceeded before the wind towards the north-east.
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This is a bit closer to what I was thinking of in terms of a light able to be perceived as 'flying' - in this case I suppose driven by the wind.
 
BS3 said:
One thing I keep thinking about is how few good 'modern' accounts of will-o'-the-wisps there are. By which I mean this sort of thing from @Mythopoeika



Now I know 'marsh gas' has been a common enough explanation for unusual phenomena for a long time. But this seems to be based largely on assumptions and folklore. Even then there are holes in it - I mean, the folkloric will-o'-the-wisp was a bluish or greenish light, but methane burns with a yellow flame as far as I know.

And why does hardly anyone see these things any more? Is it just that all the likely marshes have been drained, or is it just such a dim light that our modern street lit world means it goes unnoticed? I would have expected more people to have seen or photographed it.
Click to expand...
Methane usually burns with a blue flame, IIRC - but if it is intermixed with other gases, it may burn orange.
I found out that the house my parents visited had been built on the site of an old landfill (rubbish dump), so there was probably a lot of methane percolating up out of the soil. I guess you'd call this marsh gas.

My memory is hazy about it, but I think this was in Englefield Green, Surrey. Note that Englefield Green is right next to Runnymede, which is a marshy area.
 
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Foxfire round here is referring to a algae that settles on long lines, set at low
tide then when the tide goes back out you go and collect the fish, if you gave
the lines a flick they would light up with a green luminescence know as Foxfire, don't
think I have seen long lines set for about 20 years though.
I suspect these names mean different things to different people or in different areas.

:omr:
 
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