PHANTOM LIGHTS
Stories of mysterious lights suddenly illuminating the nocturnal
darkness of unfrequented spots have long been current throughout the
world. In the 'Odyssey,' when Athene was mystically present as Odysseus
and Telemachus were moving the weapons out of the hall (xix. 21-50),
Telemachus exclaims, 'Father, surely a great marvel is this I behold!
Meseemeth that the walls of the hall, and the fair spaces between the
pillars, and the beams of pine, and the columns that run aloft, are
bright as it were with flaming fire. Verily some god is within of them
that hold the wide heaven.' Odysseus answers, 'Lo, this is the wont
of the gods that possess Olympus.' In Theocritus, when Hera sends
the snakes to attack the infant Heracles, a mysterious flame shines
forth. The same phenomenon occurs in the Sagas of Burut Njas, when
Gunnar sings within his tomb. The brilliance of the light which attends
the presence of the supernatural is indeed widely diffused, and, as
Mr. Andrew Lang writes,[129] 'Philosophers may dispute whether any
objective fact lies at the bottom of this belief, or whether a savage
superstition has survived into Greek epic and idyll and into modern
ghost stories.'
Although science has years ago explained many such phosphoric
appearances as governed by certain atmospheric laws, superstitious
fancy has not only attributed to them supernatural causes, but
associated them with all kinds of weird and romantic tales. According
to one popular notion, strange lights of this kind are the spirits of
persons who, for some reason, cannot remain quiet. Thus a spectre known
as the 'Lady and the Lantern,' has long been said to haunt the beach
at St. Ives, Cornwall, in stormy weather. The story goes that a lady
and her child had been saved from a wreck, but the child was swept away
and drowned, and she is supposed to be hunting for its body. Similar
tales are told elsewhere, but the object of search is not always the
same. A light, for instance, hovers about a stone on the Cornish coast,
locally designated 'Madge Figg's Chair,' which is supposed to be the
ghost of a wrecked lady whom Madge stripped of her jewels. In Scotland
the appearance of a spectral 'lady of the golden casket' was attended
by a phantom light, and it is also related how the ghost of a murdered
woman is seen by her lover at sea, approaching in the shape of a bright
light, which assumes the human form as it draws nearer. She finally
calls him, and he springs into her arms, and disappears in a flash of
fire.[130]
There is the popular legend of the 'Radiant Boy'--a strange boy with
a shining face, who has been seen in certain Lincolnshire houses and
elsewhere. This ghost was described to Mr. Baring-Gould[131] by a
Yorkshire farmer, who, as he was riding one night to Thirsk, suddenly
saw pass by him a 'radiant boy' on a white horse. To quote his own
words, 'there was no sound of footfall as the boy drew nigh. He was
first aware of the approach of the mysterious rider by seeing the
shadow of himself and his horse flung before him on the high road.
Thinking there might be a carriage with lamps, he was not alarmed till,
by the shortening of the shadow, he knew that the light must be near
him, and then he was surprised to hear no sound. He thereupon turned
in his saddle, and at the same moment the "radiant boy" passed him.
He was a child of about eleven, with a fresh bright face. "Had he any
clothes on? and if so, what were they like?" I asked. But the old man
could not tell. His astonishment was so great that he took no notice
of particulars. The boy rode on till he came to a gate which led into
a field; he stooped as if to open the gate, rode through, and all was
instantly dark.'
At the commencement of the present century the little village of Black
Heddon, near Stamfordham, in Northumberland, was greatly disturbed
by an apparition known as 'Silky,' from the nature of her dress. She
suddenly appeared to benighted travellers, breaking forth upon them in
dazzling splendour, in the darkest and most lonely parts of the road.
This spirit exercised a marvellous power over the brute creation, and
once, it is said, waylaid a waggon bringing coals to a farm near Black
Heddon, and fixed the team upon a bridge, since called, after her,
'Silky's Brig.' Do what he could, the driver could not make the horses
move a step, and there they would have stayed all night had not another
farm servant come up with some mountain ash about him. It was generally
supposed that Silky, who suddenly disappeared, was the troubled phantom
of some person who had died miserable because she owned treasure, and
was overtaken by death before she had disclosed its hiding-place.
An old barn situated near Birchen Tower, Hollinwood, which was noted
for the apparition of Madame Beswick on dark and wintry nights, at
times, it is said, appears to be on fire, a red glare of glowing heat
being observable through the loopholes and crevices of the building.
Sometimes the sight is so threatening that the neighbours will raise an
alarm that the barn is in flames. But when the premises are searched,
everything is in order, and nothing found wrong.[132] And a Welsh
romance tells how, after Howel Sele slew his cousin Glendower, and
buried him in 'a broad and blasted oak, scorched by the lightning's
vivid glare,'
Pale lights on Cader's rocks were seen,
And midnight voices heard to moan.
Such phantom lights are not confined to land, and most of the tales of
spectre ships speak of their being seen by the affrighted crews. In the
'Salem Spectre Ship' we are told how
The night grew thick, but a phantom light
Around her path was shed.
They are generally dreaded as foreboding a catastrophe, and have given
rise to a host of curious stories. A light is said to hover about in
Sennen Cove, which is thought to be an ill-omened apparition; and a
Welsh story speaks of a ghost, the 'Cyhyraeth,' that appears on the
beach, in a light, with groanings and cries.[133] Flames are reported
to issue from the Eider River, and from several lakes in Germany.
Where ships have been wrecked, blue lights are supposed to faintly
glimmer, occasionally accompanied by the spirits of wrecked or injured
persons. A notable instance is told of Sable Island,[134] where, with
the leaping flames, is seen the 'Lady of Copeland' wrecked and murdered
by pirates from the Amelie transport. She has one finger missing on her
hand.
Sometimes weird lights flickering in solitary places are thought to be
the unhappy spirits of wicked persons who have no rest in the grave.
Milton refers to this fancy in his 'Paradise Lost' (ix. 634):
A wandering fire,
Compact of unctuous vapour, which 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 mires; and oft through pond or pool
There swallowed up and lost from succour far.
Hence they were doomed to wander backwards and forwards carrying
a light. A tradition current in Normandy says that a pale light
occasionally seen by travellers is the unquiet spirit of some
unfortunate woman who, as a punishment for her intrigues with a
minister of the Church, is doomed to this existence. There are various
versions of this story, and one formerly current in this country tells
how the hovering flame--the cause of terror to many--is the soul of a
priest who has been condemned to expiate his vows of perpetual chastity
by thus haunting the scenes of his disobedience. Brand, quoting from an
old work on 'Lights that Lead People out of their Ways in the Night,'
informs us that the lights which are seen in churchyards and Moorish
places were represented by the Popish clergy to be 'souls come out of
purgatory all in flame, to move the people to pray for their entire
deliverance, by which they gulled them of much money to say mass for
them, everyone thinking it might be the soul of his or her deceased
relations.'
According to another explanation, it is believed on the Continent that
the ghosts of those who in their lifetime were guilty of removing their
neighbours' landmarks are fated to roam hither and thither, lantern in
hand, 'sometimes impelled to replace the old boundary mark, then to
move it again, constantly changing their course with their changing
purpose.' A Swedish tradition adds that such a spirit may be heard
saying in a harsh, hoarse voice, 'It is right! it is right! it is
right!' But the next moment qualms of conscience and anguish seize him,
and he then exclaims, 'It is wrong! it is wrong! it is wrong!'[135]
It is also said that these lights are the souls of land-measurers,
who, having acted dishonestly in their business, are trying to remedy
the wrong measurements they made. A German legend tells how, at the
partition of the land, there arose between the villages of Alversdorf
and Röst, in South Ditmarschen, great disputes. One man gave fraudulent
measurements, but after his death he wandered about as a fire sprite. A
flame, the height of a man, was seen dancing about till the moor dried
up. Whenever it flared up higher than usual, the people would cry out,
'Dat is de Scheelvalgt'--that is the land-divider. There is a tale told
of a certain land-measurer near Farsum, in the Netherlands, who had in
his lifetime acted dishonestly when he had a piece of land to measure.
He suffered himself 'to be bribed by one or other, and then allotted
to the party more than was just, for which offence he was condemned
after death to wander as a burning man with a burning measuring-staff.'
Popular fancy, too, has long identified phantom lights as being the
souls of unbaptized children. Because such souls cannot enter heaven,
they make their abodes in forests, and in dark and lonely places, where
they mourn over their hard lot. If at night they chance to meet anyone,
they run up to him, and walk on before to show him the way to some
water where they may be baptized. The mysterious lady, Frau Bertha, is
ever attended by troops of unbaptized children, whom she takes with her
when she joins the wild huntsman. One tradition relates how a Dutch
parson, happening to return home later than usual, was confronted with
no less than three of these fiery phenomena. Remembering them to be
the souls of unbaptized children, he thoughtfully stretched out his
hand, and pronounced the words of baptism over them. But, much to his
unexpected surprise, in the same instant hundreds of these moving
lights made their appearance, which so frightened him that, forgetting
his good intentions, he ran home as fast as he could. In Ireland
unbaptized children have been represented as sitting blindfolded within
fairy moats, the peasantry supposing such souls 'go into nought.' A
somewhat similar idea may be found in Longfellow's 'Evangeline,' where
we have introduced among the _contes_ of an Arcadian village notary
allusion to
The white Létiche, the ghost of a child unchristened,
Died, and was doomed to haunt unseen the chambers of children.
Closely allied with the notion of phantom lights are the strange
phosphoric appearances said occasionally to be seen about the dying.
In Russia, the soul under certain circumstances is believed to assume
the form of a flame, and such a ghostly apparition cannot be banished
till the necessary prayers have been offered up.[136] According to
a Sussex death-omen, lights of a circular form seen in the air are
significant, and it is supposed that the death of sick persons is
shown by the prognostic of 'shell-fire.' This is a sort of lambent
flame, which seems to rise from the bodies of those who are ill, and
to envelope the bed. On one occasion, considerable alarm was created
in a Sussex village by a pale light being observed to move over the
bed of a sick person, and after flickering for some time in different
parts of the room, to vanish through the window. But the difficulty
was eventually explained, for the light was found to proceed from a
luminous insect--the small glow-worm.[137] Marsh[138] relates how a
pale moonlight-coloured glimmer was once seen playing round the head
of a dying girl about an hour and a half before her last breath. The
light proceeded from her head, and was faint and tremulous like the
reflection of summer lightning, which at first those watching her
mistook it to be. Another case, reported by a medical man in Ireland,
was that of a consumptive patient, in whose cabin strange lights had
been seen, filling the neighbourhood with alarm. To quote a further
instance, from the mouth of a patient in a London hospital, some time
since, the nurses observed issuing a pale bluish flame, and soon after
the man died. The frightened nurses were at a loss to account for this
unusual sight, but a scientific explanation of the phenomenon ascribed
it to phosphoretted hydrogen, a result of incipient decomposition.[139]
Dante Rossetti, in his 'Blessed Damozel,' when he describes her as
looking down from heaven towards the earth that 'spins like a fretful
image,' whence she awaits the coming of her lover, depicts the souls
mounting up to God as passing by her 'like thin flames.'
Another form of this superstitious fancy is the corpse-candle, or
'tomb-fire,' which is invariably a death-warning. It sometimes appears
'as a stately flambeau, stalking along unsupported, burning with a
ghastly blue flame. Sometimes it is a plain tallow "dip" in the hand
of a ghost; and when the ghost is seen distinctly, it is recognised as
that of some person still living, who will now soon die[140]--in fact,
a wraith.' Occasionally the light issues from the person's mouth, or
nostrils. The size of the candle indicates the age of the person who is
about to die, being large when it is a full-grown person whose death
is foretold, small when it is a child, still smaller when an infant.
When two candles together are seen, one of which is large and the
other small, it is a mother and child who are to die. When the flame is
white the doomed person is a woman, when red a man. A Carmarthenshire
tradition relates how one evening, when the coach which runs between
Llandilo and Carmarthen was passing by Golden Grove, the property of
the Earl of Cawdor, three corpse-candles were observed on the surface
of the water gliding down the stream which runs near the road. A few
days afterwards, just as many men were drowned there. Such a light,
too, has long been thought to hover near the grave of the drowned,
reminding us of Moore's lines--
Where lights, like charnel meteors, burned the distant wave,
Bluely as o'er some seaman's grave,
and stories of such uncanny appearances have been told of nearly every
village churchyard.
It should be added that, according to a popular idea, the presence of
ghosts was announced, in bygone years, by an alteration in the tint of
the lights which happened to be burning--an item of folk-lore alluded
to in 'Richard III.' (Act v. sc. 3), where the tyrant exclaims as he
awakens--
The lights burn blue. It is now dead midnight,
Cold fearful drops stand on my trembling flesh.
* * * * *
Methought the souls of all that I had murder'd
Came to my tent.
So in 'Julius Cæsar,' (Act iv. sc. 3), Brutus, on seeing the ghost of
Cæsar, exclaims:
How ill this taper burns! Ha! Who comes here?
Phantom lights have also been associated with buildings, as in the case
of the ancient chapel of Roslin, founded in the year 1446 by William
St. Clair, Prince of Orkney. It is believed that whenever any of the
founder's descendants are about to depart this life, the chapel appears
to be on fire, a weird and terrible occurrence graphically portrayed by
Harold's song in 'The Lay of the Last Minstrel':
O'er Roslin all that dreary night,
A wondrous blaze was seen to gleam;
'Twas broader than the watch-fire light,
And redder than the bright moonbeam.
It glared on Roslin's castled rock,
It ruddied all the copse-wood glen;
'Twas seen from Dryden's groves of oak,
And seen from cavern'd Hawthornden.
Seem'd all on fire that chapel proud,
Where Roslin's chiefs uncoffin'd lie;
Each Baron, for a sable shroud,
Sheathed in his iron panoply.
Seem'd all on fire, within, around,
Deep sacristy and altar's pale;
Shone every pillar foliage-bound,
And glimmer'd all the dead men's mail.
Blazed battlement and pinnet high,
Blazed every rose-carved buttress fair;
So still they blaze when fate is nigh,
The lordly line of Hugh St. Clair.
But notwithstanding the fact that the last 'Roslin,' as he was
called, died in 1778, and the estates passed into the possession of
the Erskines, Earls of Rosslyn, the old tradition has not yet been
extinguished.[141] Sir Walter Scott also tells us that the death of
the head of a Highland family is sometimes announced by a chain of
lights, of different colours, called Dr'eug, or death of the Druid.
The direction which it takes is supposed to mark the place of the
funeral.[142] A correspondent of 'Notes and Queries' gives a curious
account of a house at Taunton which possessed 'a luminous chamber,'
for, as common report said, 'the room had a light of its own.' As an
eye-witness observed, 'A central window was generally illuminated.'
All the other windows were dark, but from this was a wan, dreary light
visible; and as the owners had deserted the place, and it had no
occupant, the lighted window became a puzzle.
With the North American tribes one form of spiritual manifestation is
fire; and among the Hurons, a female spirit, who was supposed to cause
much of their sickness, appeared like a flame of fire. Of the New
England Indians it is related that 'they have a remarkable observation
of a flame that appears before the death of an Indian, upon their
wigwams, in the dead of night. Whenever this appears, there will be a
death.'[143] The Eskimos believe that the Inue, or powerful spirits,
'generally have the appearance of a fire or bright light, and to see
them is very dangerous, particularly as foreshadowing the death of a
relation.'[144]
FOOTNOTES:
[129] The _Nineteenth Century_, 'Comparative Study of Ghost Stories,'
1885, xvii. pp. 629, 630.
[130] Rev. W. Gregor, _Folk-lore of North-East of Scotland_, 1881, p.
69.
[131] _Yorkshire Oddities_, ii. p. 105.
[132] See Ingram's _Haunted Homes_, 2nd S. pp. 29, 30.
[133] See Wirt Sikes' _British Goblins_, pp. 219-221.
[134] 'Secrets of Sable Island,' _Harper's Magazine_.
[135] See Thorpe's _Northern Mythology_, ii. pp. 97, 202, 211; iii. pp.
11, 158, 268.
[136] _Songs of the Russian People_, 1872, p. 116.
[137] _Folk-lore Record_, 1878, i. p. 54.
[138] _Evolution of Light from the Living Subject._
[139] _Transactions Cardiff Natural Society_, iv. p. 5.
[140] Wirt Sikes, _British Goblins_, p. 239.
[141] See Ingram's _Haunted Homes_, 2nd S. pp. 219-221.
[142] See 'Essay on Fairy Superstitions' in the _Border Minstrelsy_.
[143] Rink's _Tales and Traditions of the Eskimos_, p. 43.
[144] Josselyn's _Two Voyages_, p. 133.