Will-o'-the-Wisp: Ghost Light

[dannye_chase]

It’s almost spooky-blue-flames day in Dracula! So here’s some info about ghost lights.

In the novel Dracula, poor Jonathan Harker endures a perilous nighttime carriage ride, during which the creepy coachman repeatedly stops to make piles of stones in places where blue flames are blazing. Apparently, Jonathan has managed to arrive in the area on the eve of St. George’s Day (given as May 4 in the book), a night when evil freely walks the land. It’s also the one night a year when buried treasure can be located by blue flames. Anyone brave enough to go out on that night can mark the treasures’ locations and dig them up later, which probably explains why Dracula’s got piles of gold coins lying around his castle.

But guess what—unlike some of the other paranormal topics discussed on this blog, ghost lights are actually real. So what the heck are they? Let’s look at some theories!

Read the whole story on my blog and get writing prompts, such as:

Just a little filthy lucre buys a lot of things. So Dracula probably didn’t give a flying mirror (haha) about the supernatural provenance of the gold he dug up, but the rest of us might want to take more care. Because what are the odds that treasure marked by blue flame on the most evil night of the year is not cursed? A story could get into different aspects of this idea: where does the gold come from, anyway? (In Dracula, it’s wealth hidden during times of war.) Who buried it? Are they planning to come back and get it? Why would a treasure cause a blue flame once a year? And if you did manage to get your hands on the treasure, is there a way to un-curse it? Perhaps if you give most of it to good causes, or have it blessed by a priest—unless of course it’s so unalterably cursed that the priest dies and the good causes have a horrible spell of bad luck…

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