An 1823 painting, Will-o-the-wisp and snake. (Hermann Hendrich/Public Domain)
By Michael Irving | Physics | October 4, 2025
For centuries, people around the world have reported seeing mysterious glowing lights floating through swamps, forests, and graveyards. Known by many names — will-o’-the-wisps, jack-o’-lanterns, or ignis fatuus — these eerie flickers have long been linked to ghost stories and folklore.
Some say they’re spirits of the dead or lanterns carried by lost souls tricked by the Devil. But now, modern science may finally have a down-to-earth explanation: tiny bursts of “microlightning.”
The Science Behind the Glow
A new study from Stanford University chemists suggests these ghostly lights could be caused by miniature lightning bolts forming where gases meet liquids — for example, in damp swamps. When gases like methane bubble up, differences in electrical charge can cause sparks to jump between bubbles, igniting the gas.
In their lab experiments, researchers mixed air and methane into water to create tiny bubbles and recorded the process using a high-speed camera. The footage revealed flashes of microlightning — each lasting just a fraction of a millisecond. These sparks appeared even without methane, but they became much more frequent and intense when methane was added.
The team wrote, “Microlightning between methane microbubbles offers a natural ignition mechanism for methane oxidation under ambient conditions.”
In simpler terms: these little sparks could be the natural cause behind the “ghost lights” people have seen for ages — a science-based explanation for the old legends of the will-o’-the-wisp.
A Spark of Life Itself?
Interestingly, this discovery might go beyond folklore. The same researchers have suggested that microlightning could have played a crucial role billions of years ago, sparking the chemical reactions that helped life form on Earth.
The study was published in the journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences).
#ScienceMystery #WillOTheWisp #PhysicsNews #NaturePhenomena #StanfordResearch