Will-o'-the-Wisp: A Light in the Swamp

of the thin land. Okay. So there's some marshes all around you, and this is a time and place where for your life the world is sort of alive with magical beings. So who knows if there's a ferry or a goblin hiding under a rock or in a bush over by the side of the road. Who knows. There are lots of things out there that you just don't understand. It's a world lit only by fire. It's a demon haunted world. Yeah, yeah, I think that's a perfect way

of putting it. Um. So you're out one night returning home from church, and dusk is coming on, and as you're walking your way through the path that winds along the marshlands at night, and the crickets are chirping and you hear the frogs. You suddenly see something kind of strange off off to your left, sort of in the right, at the edge of your field of vision. You see a bluish looking flame that's just hovering over the ground that that's sort of beyond where you can see exactly

where it is. It's it's among some trees and some some marsh grasses. Now what do you do? Do you just continue on your path or do you walk over to see what it is? Who? What can I do? Uh? Let me do a perception check. Okay, Ah, well, I'm I'm seeing a basically a ghostly blue flame that's just hovering in the air. I'm thinking I'm gonna want to avoid anything to do with that, because if it's some sort of supernatural entity at night, Uh, it's probably up

to no good. It's I'm probably better off to stick into the course and going straight home. Well, you're fantastic at resisting temptation. Congratulations, you're incurious, proud of it, and you're gonna live a live to a ripe old age

in the solid knowledge that you just didn't check things out. Well, yeah, I mean, because I've probably heard enough stories like how does every weird horror story begin, every strange folklore against with that guy getting off the beaten path, moving out of the path and going into the wilderness and maybe following some sort of strange flame. Well, okay, let me try you again. Then let's say that we do the

same scenario, but you've already gotten lost. You're on your way home from church, dusk is coming on, You've lost the path and suddenly you are lost in the marsh lands and you you can't find your way back to the path. But up ahead you do see a light. Uh, you see a flame bobbing that's just above the horizon ahead of you, and you're not quite sure what it is. Now do you go toward the light or not? Well, I'm lost, So that light might very well be somebody's

camp buire. That might be there's a sign of humans out here, so I should Yeah, maybe I should head that way because either that either they're in the clear or maybe they can help me get out right. It could be a traveler's lantern could lead you back to the path and get you on your way home and

out of this muck. So let's say you follow it for a while, but you can't ever seem to catch up with it, and you just keep going farther and farther along in the marsh, but it's always just out of where you can reach it or get a good look at exactly what it is. Do you keep following? Well, the more I follow, the more I'm probably gonna feel like I'm being manipulated. And this led on a winding

goat trail to nowhere. So uh, which, granted, and maybe that's a perfect metaphor for life, but I'm probably gonna get a little frustrated. Yeah, but what other choice do you have right now? You're lost in the marsh, and you better keep following. Yeah, I can't go back. It's just as much trouble to go back as it is to push forward. And maybe if I hurry a little bit, I can actually catch that durn thing. Okay, So let's

say you're trying to catch it. Unfortunately, you keep coming up on it, thinking you're just about to get to it, but it goes away and eventually you don't see it anymore at all, and you're there alone in the dark, stuck in some quicksand quicks in the marsh and what are you gonna do? Well, you're gonna stay still, struggle, You struggle, that's how you get out of quicksand. No, it's not, it's not at all. Do we have an episode on quicksand? I don't think we do yet, but

it's a fascinating topic. Yeah, maybe we should explore that sometime. Well, if you ever find yourself trapped in quicksand, whether you're in a marsh and you have been led there by a ghost light or not, don't struggle. Oh that's why I have these sperrets in my backpack. They're gonna help me out. That'll just work you deeper into the into the muck. No, that's not what you want to do.

But anyway, I've been describing a scenario that might sound kind of outlandish to your people at home, but I think this type of story was very common two people of say Europe in the Middle Ages, or actually it's too folklore all over the world in one form or another, that there will be stories that bear similarities to this, That there's a glowing entity or some kind of flame that looks like a lantern or like a blue luminescence that's just hovering out of your vision and if you

if you try to get to it, you can never quite catch it. Yeah, what is this thing? It is the will of the wisp, that's right, and it goes by a number of names as well discussed, but it's it's it's that that false fire, right, that ignus fatus right and in fatuous fatuous, that's what I think. It's. It's ignie so fire yeah, and then f a t u u s that makes me think fatuous, like you're being fatuous, being foolish. Yes, so this is uh, it's

it's the swamp light, the marshlight, the fairy light. It's this ghostly luminescence that appears typically in marshlands and swamp lands, by ways, fins, marshes, the lonely roads, the places that maybe you wouldn't want to be stuck at night, you'll see this strange glowing entity. Um, what is it? Is it a mischievous spirit? Yeah? Oftentimes it is. It's seen as this either a mischievous spirit or sometimes an outright

demotic demonic entity that ends up leading humans astray. If you try and follow it, you can't quite catch it. And eventually you're gonna wind up in the quicksand just loft in the wilderness over a cliff, falling off a cliff, walking straight into hell who knows what, but it's leading you off the path. Like I'm you made a great comparison. It's like a bad GPS system. Yeah, do you remember that in there an episode of the Office, the g P s tells them to drive the car across the lake.

Its scenario. Because also sometimes you see motifs where it's the it's the light that's representing like fairy gold or something. So who I follow it, I'll get some riches like and you can't reach it because it's like the other end of the rainbow, right. Yeah, And this lower comes from all across time, all over the world. It's very common. One common feature of the ghost light or the glowing ento the will the whisp lower is that the lights

tend to recede as you approach them. You can never quite get to them or get ahold of them, and they draw the traveler farther and farther off course as they go. Another common feature is the color, and this is interesting, so sometimes people just report various types of light, but it's very often described as blue or bluish green. And in the words of one scientist to study the phenomenon, Alan A. Mills, who were going to quote later in the episode, he called it quote an ephemeral bluish loo

minas exhalation associated with Marshy places. That's his Will of the Whisp definition. So it's it's instantly identifiable as as something that's it's it's not a torch, it's not a lantern. It's something else, something perhaps magical. Yeah. And so we have various names for this phenomenon. I'm not gonna run through all of them, but just some of them. For instance, in the English traditions, you have Dicko Tuesday, Um, Kinky Puck.

Hinky Puck, by the way, is a key punk punk. Yes, hinky punk is a sprite with only one leg and it carries a candle to miss Lee travelers. Yeah. Um, you know about the names like corpse, candle, l fire hob, lantern, hobby, lantern, fire drake, jack O lantern. Uh. So we're seeing a convergence here with like Will of the Wisp, Jacko lantern. Uh. Maybe Dicko Tuesday is something else, but anyway, anyway, that the idea here is that this first part is actually

a name. It's like Jack or Will. These are characters who have emerged in the lore of people trying to explain what happens when they see these ghost lights in the marshes. But it's a character who carries some kind of light or torch with them. The whisp idea of being like a wisp of sticks, that would be a torch, right, I mean, it's the idea that there seems to be a consciousness behind it, a will behind it. It seems to be an entity of some sort. One that comes

up a lot is Will the Smith. Not Will Smith, our beloved national treasure, but but rather the soul of a debauched human who has given, who has given a second chance at life in order to redeem his soul. Only he's screwed up again and so now he can't get into heaven or hell, so he has to wander the earth, and Satan gave him a glowing coal to warm him, stuff which he uses to lure other victims to his dinner, to their doom because he's just a

horrible individual. So he's walking around with some hell fire in Marsh's trying to get revenge on humanity, right. And you see a number of different variations on will the Smith, where it's some sort of immortal wanderer, some sort of a spirit uh entity that can't get into heaven or hell. Um. You also have in Scotland the Spunkies. In Ireland you have fox Fire or William with the little Flame, which is essentially will the Smith. In Germany you have blood.

You have the Dickie potent weight hold on blood just blld. And then there is of course uh ear lickt uh and this is uh the ear lit is actually as as the willow the whisp in today is the subject of an Arnold Bockland painting as well as the cloth Shool's album. So there you go. Um. And you see a lot of accounts of this phenomenon from from Germany

for sure. Uh. In France there's a sandyand Tad, which in the folklore of Brittany is a type of elf, and they dance together at night with candles on their fingertips, each spinning independently, and any mortal who happens upon them becomes disoriented and confused. So it's kind of like the the the the example in the Hobbit right where they see some fire in the woods and they follow it out there and it's elves having their their mischief there

in the woods, and it's just disorienting. Yeah, like they're they're I imagine there's some elfin debauchery going on. Yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, Tolkien doesn't get into it as much, but you know, they get up to some weird stuff. Uh. In Finland you have Likiko, which means the flaming one.

And this is interesting because in this you have the transformed soul of a child that's buried in the forest and now wanders with a flame at night, but also serves as a guardian of wild animals and plants that are in the woods. So it's kind of almost like a swamp thing vibe going on here, where it's the spirit guardian of the environment. Um. You see a version.

You see versions in Native American traditions. You see the one I ran across from the Penobscate to Native American tribe in the name for this issue date, there's also the Kanza perry uh. And this is something that exists in the folklore of the Cheermis and Mari people. That's a Finno, you grick ethnic group. You see. You also see it in the Amazon Basin in the form of betata. Oh,

and this one's a really good one. This is in uh, South America, in Chile, the creature known as Alecanto, and this is a night spirit in the shape of a glowing metallic bird. Yeah. It lives in the mountains and it's said to feast upon gold and silver veins. So if you glimpse its light at night and you're you know, you're kind of a greedy individual, you might want to follow it and find that rich mining deposit. But Alecanto uh is hip to your your scheme here, and we'll

probably lure you over the edge of a cliff instead. Oh, this fits the same stuff you would encounter in Europe about sometimes the will of the whisp being the guardian of a treasure. Yeah, not just luring you off the path, but like standing guard over where the gold is hidden. Exactly. And I and I wondered to what extent it's just a continuation of European beliefs in the New World there, I imagine that's very much the case. But there are

also plenty of ghost lights in in Asian folklore. In Bengal traditions, you have Layah, which is the name given to unexplained strange um Marshall wood lights there. Okay, and then of course, uh, outside of folk folklore and folk tales, we have versions and are more recent media as well. Right, Well, I mean I would call dungeons and dragons perfectly acceptable folklore. Yes, And you know, for a lot of people, this may be one's first encounter with with will of the whisp

or will whisps as they're called there. Uh. In case your dungeon and dragons fan or have any a familiarity, their their alignment is chaotic evil. So they are bad news. They're not just a little mischievous. They're awful. If they were just a little mischievous, what would they be chaotic neutral? Yeah, I think they would be more I would I would say more chaotic neutral if that were the case. But

they are just completely like evil, mischieous, mischievous. Uh. They have a challenge rating of two, so they're not too bad.

But get this, they have a dexterity stat of twenty eight. Uh. That's like like generally eighteen is an exceedingly high level for a normal humanoid, so they have crazy dexterity to give them a plus nine and all dexterity sex and according to the most recent Monster manual UH, their quote the souls of evil beings that perished in anguish or misery as they wanted it, forsaken lands, permeated with magical powers, and they use the the usual lure people to their

doom act in the game, plus, they can shock victims for two D eight damage, they can drain life, and sometimes in the Dungeon and Dragons the world, they align themselves with hags or black dragons or evil cultists in order to quote drink the agony of slaughter. So so they're pretty cool. I kind of want to buff one out in UH in my game. Now, well, that's great, and that does mirror some of the folkloric tradition, like the idea that they might be an unrighteous spirit that's

left wandering the world. So they might be, you know, a person who's just rendered spiritually unclean, maybe by having died unbaptized in Christian tradition or something, or or maybe there are you know, a sinful person who can't get into heaven or hell. Like we talked to Uh, like we talked about with Will the Smith and the titular will intil the Whisp. But the will of the Whisp

also shows up in in plenty of later literature. You know, in some classic English poetry, you'll get references to the Will of the Whisp, like in the Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner by Coleridge. Uh. There is there is a scene that describes ghost lights out on the sea that says about about in real and route the death fires danced at night the water like a witch's oils burnt green and blue and white. Yeah, I like that. There's Will the Wisp in Paradise Lost too, and John Milton's

Paradise Lost. There is the scene where the snake in the Garden of Eden is it is attempting to tempt Eve. Attempting to tempt is trying to get Eve to come and eat of the fruit, you know, the forbidden fruit. And it compares the snake's temptation of Eve to a will of the Wisp in the sense that both would

be leading someone astray. This is in book nine, starting around line and so it compares the snake too, as when a wandering fire compact of unctuous vapor with the night condenses and the cold environs round kindled through agitation to a flame, which oft they say, some evil spirit attends, hovering and blazing with delusive light, misleads the amazed night wanderer from his way to bogs and myers, and off through pond or pool. They're swallowed up and lost from

sucker far. Now this is this is interesting and I think potentially telling for later on In that um Milton is describing a supernatural entity by comparing it to willow the wisp, So keep that in mind and talking about will of the whisp as a natural phenomenon, right, I mean he's describing a thing from a magical story in terms of the will of the whisp, meaning that the will of the Wisp must have been a thing that people were so intimately familiar with it could be used

as a reference point. Yes, yeah, And I would think for modern people, you'd you'd be more likely to go the other way, like you'd compare the will of the Whisp to something in the Bible that people might be more familiar with. But he goes the other way around, Yeah, as if to say, this is the thing that the average reader will have a familiarity with and then can therefore use as a reference point for this mythic thing. Yeah, but of course it's not just the stuff of fairy

tales and an ancient literature and fiction imagical storytelling. There are many like sober secular accounts of the ignis fatuous or the will of the Wisp throughout world literature, including scientific literature. For example, Isaac Newton mentions the will of the Whisp as if it were a commonplace occurrence in

his third Book of Optics. He says, the ignis fatuous is a vapor shining without heat, and is there not the same difference between this vapor and flame as between rotten wood shining without heat and burning coals of fire? Which is interesting because their Newton is attempting to distinguish actual physical characteristics of the Igney's fatuous, like it's not

like flame because it lacks heat. So yeah, you'd get pretty often people making sort of secular material physical observations of these things, as if it's just a phenomenon that they were trying to catalog and understand. So very often you'd hear about this this sort of hovering blue flame near the ground, but some accounts differ that there are other types of appearances that people also categorized as will of the Wisp. One comes from a first hand account

by the English folklorist Jabez Allies. I wonder if I'm saying that name right, But he had a treatise called Igny's Fatuous or Will of the Wisp and the Fairies, from eighteen forty six, and I'm just going to read a piece of this. In this story, he gives about how he witnessed the will of the wisp one night. He says, 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 in an undulating motion, like the flight of the green woodpecker, and about his 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 fatuous, or rather of these ignace fatu i or 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 look larger and as bright as

the star. Serious 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 muddy closeness of the atmosphere and at the same time a considerable breeze from the southwest. These will of the wisps, which shot horizontally invariably proceeded before the wind towards the northeast. That's interesting because it's a very scientifically minded, um and

practical response to viewing this. Yeah, he's describing it in terms of electricity, describing the color and sort of the position, and the motion and speed of motion, and then explaining that it follows the pattern of the wind. Yeah. And I but I do love the fact that he's he's really standing back and taking a serious, calm approach to it. Because one of the accounts that I was looking at an earlier account from traveling German lawyer Hintsner Paul Hertzner,

who wrote about his travels in England and Uh. He wrote the following about a journey from Canterbury to Dover. He said, quote, there were a great many jack o lanterns so that we were quite seized with horror and amazement. Um. And of course if you're seized with horror and amazement, you get into that whole realm of like what am I perceiving? How is my mind perceiving it? And then

how am I recalling that memory and altering it? I mean, the you know, part and partial to any paranormal experience where the experience is valid, but they're varying mental factors that are going to play into your interpretation of the event, particularly if Englishmen have been telling you tales of the strange lights in the in the in the swamp lands

and what they represent. Yeah, And of course everybody's got an interpretive framework that they bring to to seeing things like this, Like I'm sure that our German traveler friend brought a magical interpretive lens to it, saying there's a spirit out here it wishes us harm. It might be that dungeons and dragons chaotic evil spirit. I need to

stay away. Uh. Jabez Allies brought a more secular approach to it, he said at the end of his recollection of the different events that he witnessed, he says, from all the circumstances, stated it appears probable that these meteors rise in exhalations of electric and perhaps other matter out of the earth, particularly in or near the winter season, and that they generally occur a day or two after a considerable rain and on change from a cold to

a warmer atmosphere. Now, whether all that is true, we don't know. It might not be the case that you're more likely to see it under those circumstances. But it's interesting that he's trying to narrow down the physical causes that that would create this, and he of course tries to blame it on electricity, which would make sense if you're writing in the eighteen thirties or eighteen forties, when

you know electricity is a very interesting thing. Yeah, and it's certainly that the difference between magic and electricity there's a lot of crossover and an understanding of it. Electricity is very much this uh, this this lofty uh partially understood concept. Yeah. And then there was another thing that I looked at. There was an article on ignis fatuous from the Scientific Monthly in nineteen nineteen, and it just

made some observations. For example, the flames of the ignis fatuous used to appear very consistently in some locations, So there are places where you could just expect to see them, and if you went there, you you would probably see them, and that they gave off neither heat nor odor, and that they don't set fire to the things around them.

Of course, granted you're talking about marsh lance and swamp plants in many situations here, so yeah, but I mean there should be lots of dead grass and stuff like that. I mean, it would seem like if you're with a hot flame, you would expect it to set fire to something. So that's going to throw a wrench in a lot of the explanations that people have given for this. So the main point of giving all these stories about what

people saw is that it's not just made up. I mean, clearly a lot of the explanation of what causes the will of the whisp is is magical thinking and and very fairy stories and things like that. But the phenomenon itself, I think we can be pretty confident is real. It was actually referring to a thing people witnessed firsthand. Because why would there be so many stories from so many

different places, especially from varied commentators too. It's not just the religious or the folklore like, it's also scientifically minded individuals who are just talking about the lights in the woods that simply occur, and that everyone says, if everybody knows what you're talking about. And of course we'll get into this later, but one of the disconnects is that we don't see lights in the woods and strange lights in the marsh all the time like we apparently used to.

So it's harder for us a to put ourselves in that world in that mindset and alsways, we'll discuss harder to go out and try and study something that doesn't seem to be occurring anymore, or at least occurring with the same frequency. All right, on that note, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, we will look at some of the possible scientific explanations for

this phenomena. All right, we're back discussing Willow the whisp, jack a lantern, will the smith, Uh, pinky punk, whatever you wanna call that strange glow in the marsh lands, in the woods, in the swamp. Pinky punk is a really great personal insult that I've never heard used before. Yeah, I might have to adopt it. When I have my son in the car, because you normally always call people uh, dumble doors or or use the word duck. Uh here there,

But that's pretty good. But maybe hinky punk. We should make a list of the great insults that we come up with from our research on these podcasts, because when I was doing an episode a couple of years ago, forward thinking, we came across the term aggregated diamond nano rods in a material science context. But man, what a great thing to call a person a nano rod. I've I've kept it with me ever since. And now hinky punk goes on the list as well. Look at that

person driving like a complete hinky punk nano rod. Okay, but now we need to bring it back to talk about what on Earth could be the actual scientific material cause of all these phenomenon that people have called will of the wisp. And there are a couple of things

that make this part of the discussion difficult. One of the problems is that, unfortunately, most research into will of the whisp has been coming up with physical explanations that try to match historical descript options, because the will of the whisp has never, to my knowledge, been captured sampled, measured, really or even satisfactorily recorded on film in any useful way.

I think there's some claims that some people sort of got a photograph of one, but not in any way that's useful for like a spectral analysis or anything like that. So we've been just trying to figure out ways to match people's descriptions of what they saw. And most of these description descriptions come from more than a hundred years ago. So already you're having a problem here because there's nothing

direct you can compare your examples too. You just have to experiment and say, well, does this look like what people were talking about back then? Uh. Then there's another problem in scientific explanations of the will of the whisp, which is that it's possible that similar but different phenomena have sometimes been grouped together under the category of will

of the whisp. So there could be lots of different types of ghost lights and various luminescent events that occurred in the marshes or in the wilderness in the past, and that people assumed, well, they're pretty similar, they're they're all the same thing, and that they weren't actually all

the same thing. Yeah, I mean, especially if if the phenomenon that's occurring as a product of the environment, it seems entirely likely you would have a different phenomenon occurring, say in the mountains of Chile, as opposed to the

swamplands um you know of of Italy yea uh. And another aspect, and this is my read on it too, is that so many of these explanations are taking meticulous care with chemical or physical properties that maybe in play, without taking into account, of course, the mental aspects of it, the psychological aspects and again some of the problems with memory and perception that I mentioned earlier. So you're which is part of it. You know, you're you're just looking

at a possible physical chemical uh, reaction and it's going on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's not like like we're saying, it's not a photograph. I mean, there's it's not objectively recorded. Even by people who are trying to bring a scientific or skeptical mindset to these things, they're they're still sort of interpreting with a cultural script like you're saying, or a framework that they're working from. They know this is a phenomenon people

have observed before. It usually is described to look like X, so they're already bringing that to the table when they're seeing it. All right, Well, let's let's roll through some of them. Let's start with electricity. We mentioned electricity earlier, Yeah, that was in in Jabez Allies account. He suggested, quote these meteors rise in exhalations electric h of electric matter

out of the earth. And some people have tried to offer the hypothesis of like ball, lightning, or other aberrant electrical phenomena to explain what's going on when you see lights in the marsh Alessandro Volta, according to one source, apparently thought that the these fatuous could be explained by way of interaction between electrical currents and what he called inflammable air, which I think is referring to methane, which

we will definitely get to in a minute here. But this I think has been rejected by modern people who have looked into the phenomenon. Alan A. Mills, who wrote a couple of papers on this on the subject of Will of the Whisp, didn't think that the electrical explanations really fit what people were describing when they saw Will of the Wisp and saw and explained what they saw. It just doesn't sound like the same kind of thing. Right now, as far as the next idea, bioluminescence goes,

there's an interesting ideas here, some more plausible than others. Right. So, bioluminescence, of course is the natural illumination of animals or of of life forms, and not necessarily just animals. It could be microbial life So fireflies or bioluminescence, they can light up in the dark, and I can definitely see that.

There may have been some cases in the past where people saw fireflies and then they had a pre existing cultural script of ignis fatuous and they say I saw it, I saw the light in the marsh when they were really seeing fireflies. That's possible, but it doesn't seem like fireflies can explain all of these instances because they don't really closely enough match what people are usually describing um. And it just seems like that could maybe explain some instances,

but probably not most. Yeah. Also, if you're used to seeing the fireflies, you know, it seems like they would maybe make more sense if you were traveler to an area where I've never seen a firefly before, and then there are these random pinpoints of light in the wilderness or potentially in the Asian model, because in in parts of the Asia you see fireflies that particularly Thailand, that that light up in unison in a way that we

don't see so much in the United States. Yeah. Um, there's also fungus, right, yes, there are in particular type of fungus that keeps up popping up in these uh these theories is our malaria. This is a parasitic kind of fun guy. That's also known as honey fungus. Oh, that's a cuter name. It sounds delicious, a little tangy and sweet. Um, So this could be responsible for some

of these apparitions. Some species of our malaria are bioluminescent, and you know, growing in just the right place and perceived and just the right atmosphere could be seen as a will of the whist. Now, one of the people writing on this subject that we read, Jan's Elassa Witz commented that sometimes, though probably not in most cases, but in some rare occasions, people might have even been talking about owls. Yeah, because on one hand, you know owl

nocturnal flyer, very silent, very quiet, kind of ghostly. Just to perceive an owl even in the daytime, it's it's it's there's something slightly supernatural about it, So you can especially if the moonlight is catching gray or white plumage just right, or if the owl has trapped in the feathers in its wings, some rotting wood or a bioluminous at fungus, like if it's been rolling in the fungus and the fungus glows and then the owl swoops around

in the dark. This may possibly explain some instances of what people are seeing, but it seems similar to other things we've been talking about so far, the fireflies and things like that. It might explain some cases that people map onto the existing cultural script of the Igney's fatuous, but it just doesn't sound very much like what people are usually describing. Yeah, it doesn't seem like a good excuse, universal excuse for what's going on, and it just doesn't

seem really all that common now. And another version of this is, of course that they could just you could just be perceiving a reflected light from another source. Yeah. One great example of this is I was recently in in Big Ben National Park in Texas, and near that we went through the town of Marfa, Texas, which is famous for the Marfa ghost lights. Have you ever heard of these? Are these railroad related or they just are

they not? That I know is there are a lot of traditions, I think, even around my own hometown in Tennessee, tales of ghostly lights out on the railroad tracks that are kind of a will of the Whist type of scenario, but I think are generally related to uh, reflected lights from other sources. Yeah, well, so the Marfa ghost lights are probably not the same phenomenon as well of the Whist because it's not Marti area, it's you know, desert, and they they seem to be a different kind of thing.

They're not really what people are describing there either, but they are a type of ghost light that from what I've read, a common skeptical response to this is people are just seeing reflected car headlights from like their cars driving far out in the desert and they get reflected by the atmosphere in a certain way or somehow end up reflecting their light to people near the town of Marfa, and they're like, Wow, that's an amazing light I just saw in the desert. What could what could explain it?

Or it's can't fires? You know, I know, we're both familiar with the Chattanooga, Tennessee area. Oh yeah, I grew up there. Well, I've I've definitely driven through Chattanooga on like really dark nights before, and I'll see of what essentially car lights that are driving up on the hills and the mountains. But it's dark. It's so dark that for a split second, I see there's some sort of strange light. It must be a UFO or something. And then I realized, oh wait, that's that's a there's a

mountain right there. How disappointed just the mountain people. Yeah, so in our age, that is just so just full of ubiquitous artificial lighting screwing up our perception of nighttime. Uh, there's plenty of room for will of the whisps to

emerge that way. Yeah. So electrical phenomenon, biolumin essence, or reflected lights, like we said, all of these may account for some small subset of of these historical sightings, but they don't really seem to fit the bill in terms of what people usually describe when they talk abut the ignis fatuous. So what's something that's closer to the traditional description and really seems to match. And here we get to the main event, which is marsh gas, good old,

good old marsh gas, good old swamp gas. Unfortunately, as we'll see, this is not without problems of its own. But finally we're getting into the territory that that could really be a viable explanation. So, Robert, what happens when a body of a dead animal or a bunch of dead plant matter lies down to its final repose in a marsh or swamp. Oh, that's that's going to break down, and it may sink to the breakdown of organic matter.

This is just part of the swamp marshland ecosystem, right, And so the decomposition of dead organic matter often happens underwater or under damp soil in these types of environments, and the swamp, in the marsh, in the bog and what we would call an anaeroba environment. So that's without access to air. Now, things can decompose with access to air too. You lay something on the ground in the forest, it'll have a chance for all this air to get

at it. And that's a different kind of decomposition than anaerobic decomposition that happens without air. Decomposition that happens without air tends to produce gaseous byproducts, including methane and carbon dioxide. Methane is flammable, and if you get any of your home power from natural gas, this is a somewhat similar mixture. It's composed primarily of methane. That's what's burning with that

nice blue flame. So many sources treat the matter of the scientifically known you know, skeptical latitude cause of Will of the Whisp as pretty much completely settled. It's spontaneous combustion of methane in marsh gas. Just one example is one we looked up together the Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase

and Fable. The entry on ignis fatuous. It says, quote the will the Wisp or Friar's lantern a flamelike phosphorescence flitting over marshy ground due to the spontaneous combustion of gases from decaying vegetable matter and deluding people who attempt to follow it. Hence any delusive aim or object or some utopian scheme that is utterly impracticable. It's kind of a kind of a political stance from Brewers there. But anyway, but it sounds possible, right, Yeah, it's but it also

the way it's the way it presents it is. This is not just one hypothesis that has been offered, but it acts as if this is a settled matter. Yeah, it's the spontaneous combustion of marsh gas. Another example would be one scientific paper I found that said the following quote, the once widespread sightings of will of the wisp also known as ignice fatuous on northern European peat lands, were probably the result of methane abiliations ignited by lanterns or

other ignition sources formerly used for nighttime illumination. So again they treated as pretty much settled. It's marsh gas being set on fire, and that's what the will of the whisp is. But I don't know, that seems kind of weird to me. I mean, wouldn't people have noticed it

had to be set on fire with sparks or lanterns? Yeah, you think the stories would revolve more around some individual wandering out with it with his or her lantern and in poof a willow whisp you know, suddenly pops into being right next to you, as opposed to seeing one in the distance. Right, And so the story I think is not nearly as settled as many of these older sources would seem to indicate because of this big question,

what is the source of ignition? Is it really fair to assume that the people who saw these things were constantly inadvertently setting fire to methane bubbles around them without realizing they were doing so. Maybe, Again, it's kind of like some of the other things. Maybe in some weird cases, but it kind of seems like a stretch to say

this is the primary phenomenon being described. So here we get to some chemistry where the answer could possible lie, because what you're starting to look for is what could be a chemical spark in the natural environment that could naturally ignite methane gases escaping from a marsh a marsh land. Yeah, but the only thing that comes to mind off hand

top pose front. Let's see, you have lightning strikes, you have spontaneous combustion, which is a possibility with anaerobic situations such as say a hay bale yah, but like if the heat builds up in it, it gets really hot. Yeah. Aside from that, the only thing that comes to mind is like a wolf that that that that somebody's tied fire to its tail or, if you know, something of

that matter. But yeah, otherwise, maybe put some flints to its teeth, so every time it chomps, it strikes sparks, a rock falling off a cliff and just happening to somehow spark on the way down. A guy traveling from the future and the time machine with a flamethrower, yes, or just a cigarette. He's just he's just traveling through time, stops for a smoke in a medieval and then continues. But and then, oh the butterfly effect. Now the future

we all have frog frog tongues. So in other words, it sounds a little sketchy, right, I mean, yeah, we need we need a better ignition system than that. Yeah. And so the ignition system that has long been proposed by people trying to explain the will of the whisp has been phosphorus compounds. So instead of being lit up by a lantern, marsh gas leaking from the ground could be ignited in the presence of oxygen if there were phosphorus compounds in play, for example phosphene or pH three.

You could also call that hydrogen phosphied or die phosphine P two H four. So phosphine is a highly toxic gas In fact, I saw this mentioned online and I went back and revisited it. You know, if you go back to the beginning of Breaking Bad, right right at the start, there's a scene where Walter White uses a chemical reaction producing phosphine gas to poise in a couple of gangsters. Okay, now, yeah, now that you mentioned it,

I do though. I've actually read chemists looking at that and saying the chemistry of that seems a little bit wrong, but but it is true that phosphine is highly toxic. Well, it was a similar theme though that we're seeing here. People sort of shuffle the explanations off to the realm of chemistry, and for most people that's sufficient. Okay, it's a matter of chemistry. I don't really understand all the ins and outs of chemistry, but it seems like a

realm where everything is possible. Everything in the world hinges on chemistry. So well enough, but then when the chemists start breaking it apart, these problems emerged. Yeah, and so phosphine is extremely extremely flammable. It can totally catch on fire at a moment's notice. And then this other compound, the die phosphine P two H four is a liquid that will ignite just spontaneously combust when it's exposed to

the air. So you get this stuff out of its anaerobic environment up to the surface where air comes into contact with it, and it just erupts with fire and this ignites the phosphine or the methane itself. Phosphine igniting ignites the methane and then boom, you've got fire in the gas escaping from the marsh. It's been utilized in weapons before, um, kind of hillacious weapons that we tend to shy away from. Oh really, I didn't know. Because it burns in the air. That's gross. Oh I guess

like phosphorus based incendiary weapons. That's horrible. But anyway, the idea is that the dead, decaying organic matter down under the marsh releases these gases. It releases phosphine, diphosphene, methane, and the reaction with the air causes ignition. The methane

catches on fire. Is this plausible, Well, I think the answer is sort of, but maybe not entirely, And so it's It is apparently true that some microbial life forms can produce these types of phosphorus compounds through the process of decomposition, going to work on on bones and other organic materials that might be buried down in the swamp.

They can release the phosphorus compounds that we've talked about, But other sources have contested the idea of straight up combustion of methane and other gases, including the phosphine match or the phosphorus based ignition systems, And there are a

few things to consider. One of them is that methane, if ignited by fire, will burn with a what one of the people we read described as a brief, hot, bright flame, which really goes opposite to how people usually describe the will of the whisp, but that's more often described as having a cool blue luminessence that does not seem to produce any heat or much heat at least

depending on the source. Yeah. If the situation is not that Will the Smith lit a fart in the night, is that Will the Smith has some sort of ghostly illumination that is seems to be pretty constant though moving. Yeah. Another thing is that people have found that the ignition of phosphine gas mixed with methane results in acrid smoke. This is not a common feature of will of the Whisp, descriptions, right, Yeah,

because that would be a whole other thing. Right. You can imagine the tails would revolve around, oh, there was a campfire in the woods of mist, and there's clearly fairies or elves that hadn't know it's there's no mention of the smoke. Other questions would be that why is the willow wisp often reported to run away when you

approach it or then follow you when you don't. The best explanations that I ran across had to do with just complex fluid dynamics of the situation, disturbing the mixture of gases in the air as you approach, and you just kind of make it waffed away by their movements, like trying to catch up a stray bit of cat hair floating in the in the room you know you never can get. Yeah, And I think that's a perhaps good explanation. But then there's another big one that I

think is kind of important. If this is ordinary hot combustion, just like hot flames, like the fire, we normally know, why doesn't the flame spread, like why doesn't it catch fire to surrounding dead grass and vegetation. Well, my response to that would be, in many cases this is a bog or a marsh land. And when's the last time

you heard about a bog burning down? Right? I mean, I think it's still possible for the for the dead plant matter that's above you know, whatever kind of damp soil or is there what's poking out above the ground. That seems like that could catch fire. But potentially yeah, I mean yeah, but just the damp environment tends to make me give less credence to that. But but I agree, it seems like there would still be the potential for

something to catch on fire. Yeah. So there's actually a geologist named Alan A. Mills who who wrote a couple of papers on the subject of the ignis fatuous or the will of the wisp, and explained that he based on some analysis he did and some experiments he conducted, he didn't think that the marsh gas explanation cut it. It just didn't really work, he claimed. He tried it. He didn't experiment with putting a bunch of stuff into a container of damp garden soil, peat and rotten compost,

and he tried to incubate it in the dark. He did get methane marsh gas out of it, but it did not spontaneously combust And then he also he tried adding phosphine phosphine generating compounds, and that apparently this produced a great stink, but it did not It did not create a spontaneous luminescence. So he could produce march gas, but he couldn't find a natural way to get it ignited like that. And whatever the cause of the ignition, it seems like the traditional sightings of the ignis fatuous

really must not have featured hot flames. Now you're probably wondering, Okay, what's the opposite of hot flames? What would the DLB with cold points? What cold flames? Um? Cold flames are produced by ether or carbon disulfide, when he did just below the ignition point, so they're not exactly cold, but they're not as hot as flames usually are. So you heat certain substances up to the point where they're almost about to catch on fire, but they don't, and they

produce this, uh, this sort of halo. Yeah, I've seen it described as that luminescent precombustion halo um. Again, right, when the various compounds are heated, it just below the ignition points. So and again this perhaps this would be due to a natural um This would be a natural product of the decay in the swamp. Yeah. So this is a possibility that a few people have explored in some experiments. And then there is also a parallel possibility. In fact, the cold flames might even be an example

of this. But the broader concept is chemo luminescence, which would mean glowing or light created by a chemical reaction. So it's not exactly fire, but it is chemicals reacting in a way that produces light. For example, the oxidation of those phosphorus compounds we were talking about creating a chemo luminescent glow. This seems likely too. It's kind of the bioluminescent model, except without the without the direct involvement

of an organism. Yeah, and so Alan A. Mills. This one researcher described how he put together an experiment where he created a glow just by exposing different gases to each other. So he says that he found experimentally quote that the entrainment of crude phosphene into natural gas at low concentrations insufficient to cause ignition did result in a cool, glowing cloud visible in the dark. However, its color was green like the glow associated with aerial oxidation of yellow

phosphorus rather than blue. So he's saying that just by mixing together the phosphorus compounds and the natural gas in the dark in the right concentrations, he got it to glow, even though it didn't catch five air. Okay, but it does. It does seem to lend cred into the possibility that a different type of chemical reaction could be taking place. We just maybe don't know all the ingredients that are

they're involved. Yeah, yeah. And then there was also another experiment I read about that was done by some Italian researchers more recently, I think it was just seven or eight years ago. So they just had a container of phosphine gas phosphene vapor that they fed with a stream of air and nitrogen and when they did that, just righte a like they described, a faint, pale greenish light

could be seen in the dark. And I think, as far as most scientists who have looked into this are concerned, the chemo lumin essence is probably the most viable answer to the question today, though it still doesn't seem to fit perfectly. Though maybe we should just never expect anything to fit perfectly, especially given the the uncertain shape that has been presented by these these very historical accounts, right. Yeah, because ultimately we're being held back here by the lack

of observation of this phenomenon today. And that's another really interesting aspect of the Will of the Whisp. Claimed sightings of will of the Whisp, for some reason, have drastically dropped off in the past century or so, almost to the point of some people saying that the Will of the Whisp, whatever it was, is now extinct or or

endangered in near extinction. And I think it's really interesting to imagine what could be the cause of this, because, as we've talked about, it's widespread enough that we think it is referring to a real thing. It's not just people imagining it. But what could the thing have been if people generally don't see it anymore? And I do want to point out that, you know what, we're not saying that they've completely vanished, but clearly they used to.

They used to be more prevalent than they are today. Um. I know, for instance, I was looking around and the U. S. Air Forces Project, a blue book that came out in the nineteen sixties um had to do with the UFOs and possible explanations for UFOs. One major explanation presented by Jay Alan Heineck, and that was that, particularly in the rural Michigan area, swamp lights might be the reason for

that people were claiming to see UFOs. But then again, UFO sidings are also down today compared to what they were in the in the previous century, so I don't know. Maybe that also plays into this gradual disappearance of the swamp lights. That's interesting because you see UFO sightings suddenly come into the picture in the twentieth century, right at the time when these the Will of the Wisp sightings seem to largely disappear. Yet they're probably not the same

thing because they I mean, they're described in vastly different ways. Yeah, but I wouldn't be surprised if there's a little overlap. And again we're falling into the potential trap of trying to explain a whole host of different phenomena with one explanation. Yeah. I think that's the most important thing to keep in mind is again, like we said, the will the Whisp might not be just one thing. It might be a sort of center of the road script that a lot

of different phenomena are mapped onto. One of the big things to discuss here, though, in terms of why the willow wisp phenomenon would have faded away, is just to first of all, look at where it's occurring. Most of these accounts have to do with wetlands, marshlands boss and what has happened to our marshlands in uh in the

last cuple over the last couple of centuries. Right, If a lot of this folklore is coming out of the marshes of Europe, the marshes of Europe have largely been transformed into places where agriculture happens or in the cities, or they've been drained, they've been bliced up. They are

no longer the ecosystem that they once were. Yeah. So if you think of if you think of of the willowist phenomenon as being a phenomenon that naturally occurs though as something of a rarity in a large wetland in VI and then it's reduced to a small wetland environment a few centuries later, it seems like you would haven't even rarer occurrences that whatever is causing it be it an organism, be at a particular chemical build up, the potential for that to to happen is going to be

far less because we've essentially terraformed our our planet. We've we've we've more than doubled the nitrogen cycle. We've we've we've we've decided to pick and choose what organisms are going to flourish, which ones we're going to do our best to eradicate without even knowing that we're doing it right at the time. Yeah, And and marshlands and wet lands,

I mean that is there. They've been a real rallying point of in recent history of us trying to say, ho, slow down, these are actually important ecosystems, and we don't just need to, you know, push them out to the edge of existence. So we've lost a number of species already that have made their home in wetlands. Is it possible that we've also exterminated or nearly exterminated something that

produces the willowest phenomenon? Yeah, I mean we may have just been watching too many times the documentary Man Versus Nature, The Road to Victory, But yeah, it's essentially along the same lines as something that people have brought up with the idea of terraforming Mars. We think that Mars probably doesn't have any life forms on it today. Probably it may have had some in the past, but whether it currently has any strange microbial life surviving anywhere, or ever

had it in the past. What if by terraforming Mars in the future, by turning it into a suitable earthlike environment, we destroy whatever pockets of existing life or evidence of past life we're already there. Yeah, that's one of the big arguments against terraforming and uh and indeed it's it's one that we have already encountered with a certain degree

here on this planet. And I think the under line concept here is one that several scientists we referred to have alluded to, which is that the the will of the whisp phenomenon may have a sort of species based origin, like that there might be a particular kind of microbial life form or microbial life ecosystem that produces it. There are tiny creatures in the ground that are responsible for

the will of the whisps people used to see. Yeah, one of the articles out there floating around is from Howell G. M. Edwards titled Will of the Whisp, an ancient mystery with extreme aphile origins question mark and uh yeah.

This basically the basic concept here seems to be that that either the biolumin essence or the biologically discharged gas resulting it may be resulting from an extreme file organism that previously carved out of fragile niche lifestyle and swamps and marches marches, but has since snuffed it due to

its delicate positioning in the eCos system. So again it comes down to the fact that this is it's something out there and maybe it's in its place in the world is fragile, and then when we start eradicating and cutting down this environment, it all that goes away. It makes me wonder what kinds of strange phenomena other than the will of the whisp could go extinct in the future.

What are the things people see today that we might class as paranormal that maybe will mostly disappear in the future, and we might not know why because we might not know what caused it to begin with. What if we enter a future, can you imagine a world where people don't see UFOs anymore? Well, we kind of, we kind of live in it already. I mean, I feel like looking at these cases we presented here, you could say that, all right, take the UFO. There are varying reasons why

one might see a UFO. Uh. Some of them involve sleep paralysis, some of them involve mental illness, some of them involve um a, sleep deprivation, etcetera. You can make a long list of them. And and if if a certain type of swamp gas phenomenon is on that list and that becomes eradicated due to environmental change, then yeah, that changes how it is perceived. It becomes less than an object of nature and more of a mental uh existence,

more of a mental animal as opposed to a chemical one. Yeah. Yeah, And that is interesting because the will of the whisp seems to have largely gone away, but the phenomenon of seeing lights has not. I mean, we people still see lights. Yeah, We've always seen them, and we're going to continue to see strange lights that we can't explain, but try to Our brain ends up trying to explain them in the form of hallucination, and then it also in the form

of various cultural scripts to apply to it in retrospect. Okay, but Robert, I want to bring you back to the place we started. Yes, I want to change everything and say you're not a medieval peasant. You are not out on the fens of medieval England. You are yourself and you are currently out, let's say, hiking in a US national park. If you ever, do you have a favorite national park? Well, you know what, Let's say, let's say

state park. Let's go with with ok Finoki in here in Georgia, because it's a swamp, and it's a swamp where people have claim to have seen marsh lights in the past. Perfect. Okay, So you're you're out walking in the okay, Finoki. You realize you've you've hiked too far in the late afternoon, and suddenly dusk is coming on. You need to head back in the other direction to

get back to the visitor center in your car. But on the way, you see some blue lights that are just out of just beyond range, out off the path. Would you go and investigate? Really, knowing what I know now, yeah, I would probably not, but I feel like I would stop and watch and and hopefully I would watch this phenomenon with the presence of mind that what I'm observing

is a rarity. Whatever is causing it has become scarce in the world, be it and a organism that is dying out, a chemical scenario under the soil that is less prevalent, or you know, fairies that are leaving the world, or a certain damned individual who somehow weasel his way back into hell. Man, I feel like I have the I must have the horrible curiosity i'd have to go to you're gonna die? Well, no, I'm not. No, That's

exactly why I brought it to the modern day. So you don't think that there's a hankkeey punk out there who's gonna lead you off a cliff or into into Quicksand do you think this is probably some kind of natural occurrence. It's something that maybe gas, maybe something you can touch. Maybe you could be the person who has the insight onto into what is causing this because you can finally get close and get a good look and

catch some in a jar. Yeah, but this is but as we've discussed, this is not happening in the city. This is happening in the wild and humans and despite despite all of our GPS technology, we can still die in the wilderness, and we can we can, we can do so fairly easily. They're still alligators in the okafin Oky, there's still bears in other national parks, and there's still things to fall off of, and you know, have to cut your own leg off and that sort of thing.

And that's what the willow Wisp wants to happen. But sometimes you gotta walk through some alligator infested waters to achieve your terrible purpose, the terrible purpose, terrible purpose, as palm wad Deep might say, Yeah, yeah, he'd probably walk out and see what they were doing. All right, Well, there you have it, Willow the wisp, uh, hinky punk, whatever you want to call this particular scenario, marsh lights, self light, fairy fire. What was the answer in the end?

I guess it was the best one was chemo lumin essence, but we still don't really know for sure. Yeah. I think the lassa what's kept describing it as a quote chemical animal, and I really like that idea that it's it's not it'sself an organism, but it's kind of a chemical manifestation linked to organisms, certainly linked to organisms, either by some unknown extreme of file microbe in the in the soil or just the breakdown of other organic organisms unknown.

It's almost like a shadow organism in that sense. But yeah, it seems like those are the best explanations out there, all right. Yeah, so hey, we'd of course, we'd love to hear from anybody out there who has seen anything like this. If you are one of the rare individuals who has glimpsed ferry fire in this modern age, we want to know about it. You can get in touch with us a number of ways. First of all, always get a head on over to stuff to Blow your

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