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Welcome to Get Sleepy, where we listen, we relax, and we get sleepy.
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As for our story this evening, I want to give a big thanks to Alicia Stefan for writing yet another intriguing, yet sleepy tale, which I have the pleasure of reading for you.
Thousands of years ago, people began observing dancing flames and orbs in the darkness.
These elusive lights weren't celestial.
Rather, they seemed to be attached to the earth and the water.
Separately, cultures all over the globe created stories to explain these mysterious beacons.
Tonight, we'll explore that mythology and the science behind it.
We'll hear tales of the fairies and their mischief, of lost souls making up for bad deeds, and of deities who foretold the fate of mariners.
Before we set off in search of these ethereal apparitions, make yourself completely comfortable.
Adjust your pillow so that your head and neck rest heavily.
Feel the pull of gravity as it encourages your limbs to embrace the support of the mattress.
Let all your cares of the day slip away.
And as you breathe more slowly and more deeply with each inhale and exhale, close your eyes and lose yourself in the darkness you find there.
This is where our story begins.
Imagine for a moment that you've been transported to a rural village in Ireland hundreds of years in the past.
You and your friends have just enjoyed a night of merriment.
Perhaps there was a celebration of some kind or a gathering at the home of a friend.
Whatever the case, You and your near neighbors are now walking home together through the utter darkness of the autumn night.
In order to light your way, each of you carries a little carved turnip that contains a single ember from the fireside you just left.
Your friends helped you fashion these rough lamps before your departure, amid much laughing and many jokes.
But the comical little root vegetables will give you welcome illumination to keep your steps sure and your route as straight as possible.
The night air is brisk.
You pull your scarf more tightly around your chin.
As you travel this familiar path, the leaves on the trees around you lightly rustle in the chilly breeze.
A faint smell of smoke drifts by on that wind. telling of a warm hearth in a home somewhere nearby.
You think of those folks nestled in their cottages and yourselves outside.
You have fond thoughts for your warm bed at home and wish to reach it very soon.
But even as you near your destination, one of your friends whispers loudly and points into the darkness.
A flame, he says breathlessly, gesturing to the marshy field.
You and your companions stop and stare. stepping almost imperceptibly closer to one another.
You hardly breathe as you watch and listen.
You see nothing.
Your friend exclaims that it was there.
The fairies were about, he whispers.
You all laugh softly, chiding yourselves for your alarm.
But you link arms more tightly and hasten to finish your journey, because each of you knows the fireside stories about the fairy lights.
Since you were a child, you've known about the bad luck that is bound to befall those who allow themselves to be led astray in pursuit of a distant flame.
As you bid your friends farewell and deposit your little jack-o'-lantern by the door, you smile and shiver to yourself ever so slightly.
You turn towards the wilderness, offering the deep darkness of the landscape a final good night.
Then, you open the door and find your way to the bright fire that still glows in your own hearth.
Through this imagined experience, you have walked in the steps of many a historical nighttime wanderer.
Stories of fleeting distant lights are cross-cultural, spanning continents and centuries, and appearing in places ranging from swamps to salty oceans.
Lights on the nighttime horizon have traditionally held a variety of meanings for the people who saw them.
To some, they were the mischief of a ghost or woodland sprite.
To others, they were omens, both good and bad, indicating what type of luck was coming.
But these widespread and unpredictable lights have one thing in common.
Whether attributed to naughty sprites or saints, and whether over land or sea, folklore has cast almost all of them as supernatural in nature.
Folk wisdom has advised those who saw them to keep their distance or protect themselves with charms and rituals.
Such a fleeting display of mysterious lights has gone by many names, but there are a few that are most well known.
One of those is Willa the Wisp, and it is often found in the folklore of Northern Europe.
Others are also likely to sound familiar.
For example, as the centuries passed, the tales of Willa the Wisp became intertwined with those of the Jack-o'-lantern, now a much-loved tradition of modern Halloween and Samhain celebrations.
In both cases, the name refers to figures from folk tales who carry a light through the darkness.
When people started to write about these lights, There were those who preferred to call these mysterious flashes by a Latin phrase.
They named them Ignis Fatuus, which roughly translates to foolish fire.
For many rural northern Europeans, the lights were attributed to fairies early on.
They were sometimes called elf fire.
Shakespeare seemed to be channeling this belief when he portrayed the mischievous Puck of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
In scene two of the famous play.
A fairy asks of Puck Are you not he that frights the maidens of the village tree, mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Puck later says I'll follow you, I'll lead you about around through bog, through bush, through brake, through briar.
Sometime a horse, I'll be sometime a hound, a hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire and neigh and bark and grunt and roar and burn like horse hound hog bear, fire at every turn.
The reference about misleading maidens to harm was well known in folklore before Shakespeare, which generally portrayed these country spirits as creatures to be avoided.
They existed in many cultures, and went by countless names.
In fact, Shakespeare didn't invent the name Pat.
It was already a word used to describe mischievous household and nature fairies.
Looking beyond the British Isles, you might have heard of the unpredictable Mimmin that glowed in Australia, or the serpent creature called the Boitata that could be found in Mexico.
In India, they whispered of the misleading Brahmra Choke with its pot of fire.
And in Korea, the Tokebi Bul, or Goblin Fire, could be seen in the rice paddies.
But perhaps one of the very earliest proofs of the phenomenon of fairy lights is found in a written character from the Chinese Shang Dynasty of the second millennium BCE, which seems to represent a human-like figure dancing over fire and surrounded by dots.
Back in the British Isles, The lights of the Will-o'-the-Wisp were often attributed to a widely recognized folk fairy named Robin Goodfellow.
In fact, Shakespeare playfully embodied this familiar peasant figure with the character of Puck.
Shakespeare gave his Puck familiar attributes of the naughty imp Robin, who was famously blamed in stories for both good household deeds and all sorts of bawdy misbehavior, ranging from pinching and kissing maidens to stealing from villagers.
In her 20th century book An Encyclopedia of Fairies, Accomplished folklorist Catherine Briggs also pointed out how Shakespeare seems to make Puck and Robin one and the same.
She wrote, Shakespeare's Puck is the epitome of the Hobgoblin, with the byname of Robin Goodfellow.
In folk tradition, emphasis is perhaps most laid on Puck, as a misleader.
She also noted that Robin was the best known and most often referred to of all the hobgoblins in England in the 16th and 17th centuries.
Indeed, in a sense he seemed to swallow all others and their names were made nicknames of his Robin.
Seems to have been a very versatile and busy trickster.
Similar to Shakespeare, who gave Puck the ability to appear as fire.
A poem generally attributed to 17th century writer Ben Johnson suggested Robin also produced fairy lights.
It said, Sometimes he'd counterfeit a voice, and travellers call astray.
Sometimes a walking fire he'd be, and lead them from their way.
Some call him Robbing Goodfellow, Hobgoblin or Mad Crisp, and some again do term him oft by name of Will the Wisp.
Apparently, after the Protestant Reformation the Christian church made an earnest effort to stamp out talk of robbing Goodfellow.
However, he was still well liked, and the general population kept him around.
As mischievous spirits go, he was a survivor, And so beings like Robin Puck and the ubiquitous Will With His Wisp perpetuated the pagan ideas about the causes of fairy lights, despite Christianity interfering.
The legendary poet John Milton brought together folklore and religion in his masterpiece Paradise Lost during the 17th century.
In one part, he alluded to wandering lights as the serpent led Eve astray.
He described it as 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.
And somewhere between the overtly pagan nature of the fairies and the very religious nature of Milton, there was another category of folktales that has existed to this day.
Those are the ones calling the lights a jack-o'-lantern, or one of the many variations on the idea of a person who was fated to wander the wilderness.
In Jack's case, because of his wrongdoings in life.
Consider the original Irish story of how the jack-o'-lantern came to be.
A man named Jack made a poor gamble and tried to cheat the devil.
Although he initially succeeded in his trickery and managed to keep his soul, he found himself stuck forever on Earth as a result.
He didn't have to go home with the devil. but he was also blocked from heaven due to his sins.
As the story goes, he was fated to wander the countryside forever with just an ember to light his way.
He has been known as Jacko the Lantern ever since.
While the folktale was first seen in print in the mid-19th century, it's hard to say how old the concept of a jack-o'-lantern really is.
As early as 1658, the Oxford English Dictionary recorded the term being used to refer to the phenomenon known, perhaps by earlier folks, as Willa the Wisp and more formally in Latin as Ignis Fatuus.
As we mentioned earlier, those terms really stuck, because they are still around today.
Before that time, people may have been using lots of lesser-known names to describe a spirit who carried a light around, although without any story as specific and moral as that we find for Jack.
A search of folklore connected to Willa the Wisp will turn up numerous human-sounding names for fairies or creatures who moved the light about.
For example, writings from the 19th and early 20th centuries reference people using kit of the candlestick, hobbity's lantern or peg-a-lantern.
In fact, an article from the late 19th century quotes a poem from the 1777 issue of Poor Robin's Almanac that mentions peg.
I should indeed as soon expect that Pegalantum would direct me straightway home on misty night as wandering stars quite out of sight.
Peg's dancing light does oft betray and lead her followers astray.
Swedish folklore puts a more neighbourly and petty judgement on the spirit of Jack.
According to one source, wandering countrylights are the spirits of men who moved important neighbourly landmarks, so they are doomed to stroll around forever, unable to find their way.
Some people might call that getting what you deserve.
Similarly, in Germany, the dancing lights have been attributed to dishonest land surveyors who are doomed to forever watch over the false boundaries they created.
Cornish people referred to a Queen of the Fairies, in tandem with Jack, who went by the name Joan of Watt, which means Joan of the Torch.
But really Joan would be more closely related to a creature like Robin Goodfellow, motivated only by her supernatural objectives rather than morality.
And even the character known as Stingy Jack was transformed back into an earthy hobgoblin when his mythology traveled to the southern United States.
According to an article in the Journal of American Folklore from 1904, people in those parts portrayed a figure called Jack Marlanton, who was more like a goblin than a man and who was to be avoided at all costs due to his bad intentions.
And what if a traveller should encounter one of these light-bearing spirits?
Catherine Briggs related many general methods of repelling them, some of which were religious in nature.
But for simple folks, there was another method that came up in numerous sources.
She explained that a man who was pixie-led, wandering around and unable to find his way out of the field would generally turn his coat.
She further added that this may have been thought to act as a change of identity, for gamblers often turned their coat to break a run of bad luck.
Likewise, those in the United States who had the bad luck to run into Jack Melanton were urged to stick a knife in the ground or to lie down with their eyes closed and ears plugged.
In Denmark running into Jack required one to turn their cap inside out and, above all, avoid pointing at him.
One Scottish sprite named Spunky was seen making lights both over land and sea, which bridged a gap between these earth-pixes and their watery cousins who fascinated sailors.
In fact, Shakespeare seems to have been intrigued by the idea of Ignis Fatuus in both the land-based and seafaring settings.
In addition to his reference, in A Midsummer Night's Dream he also appeared to employ fairy lights in The Tempest, drawing upon the belief of Mediterranean sailors that flashes of that light could foretell a storm.
He gave the fairy Ariel that role.
She told Prospero, I boarded the king's ship, now on the beak.
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin, I flamed amazement.
Sometimes I'd divide and burn in many places.
On the topmast, the yard's, the bowsprit, would I flame distinctly, then meet and join Jove's lightning.
In this case, Ariel delivered the storm herself, but the imagery about the flashing lights that appeared to almost taunt the sailors was reminiscent of the unpredictability of the will-o'-the-wisp anywhere.
As we'll see later, it was a fairly accurate description of a real phenomenon found at sea.
In contrast to the people on land who kept folk names for their fairy lights, the sailors in other parts of Europe, many bordering the Mediterranean, attributed them more commonly to deities or saints.
Among the names given to the mariners' omens were the lights of Saint Helen, Saint Peter, Saint Nicholas and Saint Elmo.
Long after Shakespeare.
Another author who captured those beliefs of the sailors was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
He wrote a poem called Christus, a Mystery, in which he said, Last night I saw St.
Elmo's stars with their glimmering lanterns, all at play on the tops of the masts and the tips of the spars, and I knew we should have foul weather today.
Greek sailors attributed such lights to Helen of Troy if they appeared only once in the sky.
If twice they were supposed to be from her siblings, the Gemini twins Castor and Pollux, and even Magellan's account of his voyage to circumnavigate the globe mentioned such fires.
In his account, he called them after Saint Anselm.
Jules Verne elevated this seafaring type of ignis fatuus to science fiction in his 19th century novel journey to the center of the earth.
During the onset of a storm.
His narrator related On the mast.
Already I see the light play of a lambent St.
Elmo's fire.
The outstretched sail catches not a breath of wind, and hangs like a sheet of lead.
Taking a step back, it seems obvious that this great wealth of stories spanning centuries, religions and countries cannot have been completely fabricated.
Common sense tells us that there must be some kind of scientific explanation for Ignis Fatuus, and that explanation has in fact become increasingly certain in the past hundred years.
As it turns out, there are likely causes of ignis fatuus that do not involve spirits, although the science differs from land to sea.
It's important to know that any fairy lights on land were most often reported in marshes, swamps and damp wooded areas.
Derek Gladwin, a sustainability fellow at the University of British Columbia, characterizes these types of places in Northern Europe as peatlands.
He says this is an umbrella term for what might otherwise be called a bog, a fen, or a moor.
He points out that peatlands have long been a setting for stories of the supernatural, providing the perfect eerie backdrops for masterpieces such as Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights or The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
He further concludes that, although we can't explain the phenomenon of the Will-o'-the-Wisp with total certainty, we have a pretty good handle on how those peatland lights might have been happening.
He turns to a chemist named Kit Chapman who provides some hard science on the processes involved.
In simple terms, marshes are rife with organic matter, and this creates gases.
One amazing fact about peatlands is that they are one of the largest sources of stored carbon dioxide on the planet, holding about 25 of all the soil carbon in the world.
That's double the amount held in our forests.
To quantify that further in the past 10000 years peatlands have absorbed up to 12 trillion tonnes of carbon.
In the anaerobic environment of marshy land, fermentation results in the release of gases called phosphine and diphosphine.
Although scientists don't agree upon the details, it's possible that one or both of these gases can spontaneously ignite upon contact with the air or, in the case of phosphine, at least emit a low-level glow called chemiluminescence.
Although the theories about these gases come up most frequently, there are also scientists who suggest that the lights are caused by bioluminescence from certain types of fungi.
An article in Smithsonian Magazine points to studies performed using samples from places where these mushrooms are easily found, such as Brazil and Vietnam.
They produce a compound called oxy-luciferin, which was first discovered only recently in 2015.
This compound emits light.
It's one of the types of luciferins also found in other plants and glowing animals, such as fireflies and undersea creatures.
According to an article by Dr Maria Wheeler-Dubas, at the Phipps Conservatory, There are just over 70 species of these glowing fungi, which produce different amounts of luciferins throughout any given 24-hour period.
In fact, these mushrooms actually have their own circadian rhythm.
Their glow peaks at night and As the Smithsonian explains, they use that glow to attract insects.
Those helpful bugs then spread the fungi spores to sheltered places where they can reproduce.
So, the mushroom's ability to glow facilitates their survival as a species.
Could these mushrooms be the cause of the fairy lights that have attracted humans for centuries?
Still, there is a lot of skepticism.
To begin with, there are almost no documented sightings of this in the wild.
However, some scientists argue that virtually all ignis fatuus sightings have died out completely due to the human development of wetlands for other uses and the growth of light pollution, which eliminates the darkness.
Indeed, it is increasingly difficult for those of us in the modern world to find a moor worthy of Cathy and Heathcliff of Wuthering Heights.
Although the legend of foolish fire lives on in the eerie dead marshes of J.R.R.
Tolkien or in the comical fire swamps of The Princess Bride.
They would be tough to find in a real-life setting anymore.
Conditions may still be favorable for the occasional sighting of lights over the water, however.
That's because, even though they seem similar to landlocked Ignis Fatuus in folklore, the lights that mariners have long reported out at sea are probably generated by a completely different natural phenomenon.
To start with, it probably doesn't surprise you to hear that these flashes that ignite in watery places aren't really fire.
After all, fire and water are opposites, right?
On the website HowStuffWorks.
The phenomenon of ignis fatuus over the water is described as a gap in electrical charge.
Although it's most often spotted in the vicinity of a storm, this electrical phenomenon is not lighting.
As the article points out, that's probably why sailors weren't really afraid of it in centuries past.
Presenting as more of a glow.
This type of mysterious light was viewed with more reverence than fear, as it did not set their ships on fire.
Pliny the Elder provided one of the earliest accounts of this display of lights on ships.
Like the Greeks, he attributed it to the Gemini twins.
He described him as a luminous appearance, like a star attached to the javelins on the ramparts.
He then further added they also settle on the yardarms and other parts of ships while sailing, producing a kind of vocal sound like that of birds flitting about.
When they occur singly, they are mischievous, so as even to sink the vessels and, if they strike on the lower part of the keel, setting them on fire.
When there are two of them, they are considered auspicious and are thought to predict a prosperous voyage, as it is said that they drive away that dreadful and terrific meteor named Helena.
On this account, their efficacy is ascribed to Castor and Pollux, and they are invoked as gods.
They also occasionally shine round the heads of men in the evenings, which is considered as predicting something very important.
But there is great uncertainty respecting the cause of all these things, and they are concealed in the majesty of nature.
Modern scientists can explain how that majesty of nature actually works, It turns out St.
Elmo's fire is plasma, or ionized air that emits a glow.
Unlike lightning, it's not the movement of electricity from a charged cloud to the ground.
Instead, it's just a spark, electrons bursting into the air.
This can happen when there's enough of an imbalance in electrical charge to cause the molecules to pull apart.
And just as Pliny the Elder noticed, there can even be a hissing sound that accompanies it.
The reason that Ignis Fatuus at sea once seemed to foretell a storm is because thunderstorms create more electrically charged conditions.
When that charge in the air comes into contact with a contrasting object like the mast of a ship, conditions are ripe for a luminous reaction.
And unlike lightning, it can last for up to several minutes, emitting an otherworldly blue glow.
This display happens readily around the same types of tapered surfaces that act as lightning rods, such as church steeples and ship masts.
That's why this kind of ignis fatuus has continued into the modern era, even though we don't sail many ships with big masts anymore.
For example, sightings were reported around the Hindenburg in 1937 and around a World War II aeroplane in 1945.
Such phenomena were also frequently mentioned in books and referenced in films throughout the 20th century and beyond.
Whether they are made by cheeky sprites or awe-inspiring gods of old, these mysterious lights will live on in our shared human experience.
Our ancestors didn't know about phosphenes or bioluminescence, but they did know that the territories of the wetlands were places to be respected at a distance, preserving a rich trove of biodiversity in a space trod lightly by humans, if at all.
In his book The Fairy Mythology of Shakespeare, David Nutt captured the blending of folktale and reality when he described the time-altering power of the peatlands.
He said, At night the belated wanderer sees the fairy host dancing their rounds on many a green mead.
Allured by the strange enchantment of the scene he draws near, he enters the round.
If he ever reappears, months, years, or even centuries have passed, seeming but minutes to him.
But oftener, he never returns. and is known to be living on in Faerie, in the land of bliss.
Ignis Fatuus has stayed with mankind for millennia, always making us mindful that there are some flashes of brilliance in nature that we cannot master.
Better to simply appreciate them from afar and thank the fairies and the gods, hoping for good fortune.
