The ghostly floating lights that we call will-o’-the-wisps in folklore have been popping up in haunted landscapes for centuries.
They show up in dank and dark swamps. They supposedly show up in creepy moonlit forests. They are said to appear in foggy graveyards—all the places you want to be on a spooky night.
The folklore reason they exist in the first place ranges from mischievous spirits to lanterns being carried by wandering spirits. These spiritual entities were born from real-life sightings of mysterious lights.
Now, according to a study out of Stanford, these flickering ghost lights that have spawned centuries of folklore (and several varieties of video game enemies) might all be the cause of something called microlightning.
Will-o’-the-Wisps Are a Spooky Swamp Staple, and Scientists Might Finally Know What Causes Them
The researchers, who published their findings in PNAS, say this ghostly sight isn’t supernatural at all, but rather caused by tiny bursts of static electricity arcing between bubbles of methane and regular old oxygenated air.
To put it in a much more immature way: you aren’t seeing ghosts, you’re seeing nature’s version of setting a fart on fire.
In a series of experiments, researchers pumped air and methane into water, observed the bubbles with a high-speed camera, and found flashes of light sparking between them, which lasted only a few milliseconds. Each spark lasts just a few milliseconds. The more methane there is in the mix, the more these electric sparks show up.
These microlightning bursts happen most frequently in the places folklore says will-o’-the-wisps hang out—the aforementioned spooky places like swamps, forests, and graveyards. They’re all places where gases confront liquids.
When the conditions are just right, the electrical field gets intense enough to jump between methane bubbles and air, igniting nearby methane, and creating a faint flickering flame.
The Stanford researchers think this same microlightning doesn’t just explain the origins of will-o’-the-wisps, but might explain the origins of life itself. Their theory suggests that when the Earth was just a gigantic pot of primordial stew, micro lightning bursts might have been the literal spark that did things up enough to create life.
So, no, that isn’t a tormented soul wandering the swamp. It’s just a swamp fart being ignited.
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