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.