Ghost Lights & Orbs

Ghost lights are unexplained lights seen outdoors: glowing balls that bob along railway lines, hover over marshes, or appear night after night on the same ridge. Europe’s will-o’-the-wisp was said to lead travellers into bogs; the Brown Mountain Lights of North Carolina and the Marfa Lights of West Texas draw visitors to official viewing areas; Norway’s Hessdalen valley has hosted an automated scientific monitoring station since 1998; and in outback Queensland the Min Min light is said to follow cars. Many are attached to legends of lantern-carrying ghosts – a railwayman searching for his head, a lost lover, a murdered traveller.

This is one category where scientists have done fieldwork. In 2004 physics students from the University of Texas at Dallas concluded that most Marfa Lights were the headlights of cars on US 67, distorted by atmospheric effects; the neuroscientist Jack Pettigrew proposed in 2003 that the Min Min light is a Fata Morgana mirage carrying distant lights over the horizon; and chemists have long tested whether marsh gases can ignite to create will-o’-the-wisps. Some lights, such as Hessdalen’s, remain genuinely puzzling to the researchers studying them.

Indoors, “orbs” in photographs are a different matter: almost all are dust, pollen, insects or droplets lit by the camera flash close to the lens. Each entry here sets out the legend, the measurements and the explanations.