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Updated: June 5, 2025
On one of his visits he stayed uncommonly late. It was nearly ten o'clock when he set off for home. The town had been abed an hour or more; the night was murky and oppressively still, and corpse-candles were dancing in the graveyard.
Mr Davis in a work by T. Charley entitled The Invisible World, corpse-candles are so called because their light resembles a material candle-light, and might be mistaken for the same, saving that when anyone approaches them they vanish, and presently reappear.
Presuming, however, that corpse-candles and all sorts of family ghosts are analogous, I should say that the former are spirits which have attached themselves to certain localities, either owing to some great crime or crimes having been committed there in the past, or because at some still more remote period the inhabitants of those parts the Milesians and Nemedhians, the early ancestors of the Irish, dabbled in sorcery.
In the farther distance, where the figures were invisible, the lights could still be seen mysteriously, as it seemed, moving over the closely-ranged graves like corpse-candles, as the old superstition termed the phosphoric lights which may in certain states of the atmosphere be seen in crowded graveyards.
With regard to the origin of corpse-candles, as of all other clanogrians, one can only speculate. The powers that govern the superphysical world have much in their close keeping that they absolutely refuse to disclose to mortal man.
Of course one knows all about these maritime corpse-candles, and can explain their nature; but nevertheless the sudden kindling of them upon the darkness of the night, in the dead hush of the calm or amid the fury of the shrieking hurricane, produces feelings which there is nothing in science to resolve.
Mr Davis, and in an old number of Frazer's Journal I came across the following account of death-tokens, which, although not exactly corpse-candles, might certainly be classed in the same category. It ran thus: "In a wild and retired district in North Wales, the following occurrence took place, to the great astonishment of the mountaineers.
Margaret told many ancient tales and dismal predictions of secret murders, corpse-candles, and visions of second-sight, after which, as midnight approached, they became more restless and anxious respecting their friends, wondering what they would do, and expressing their hopes, or their fears, in dark sentences, such as these: "We trust no blood may be shed! if there should be blood! if Dymock or poor Shanty should be hurt!"
Just when, having finished her ceremony as taster of the Queen's table, she was about to take up the keys, the page, who stood beside her, and had handed her the dishes in succession, looked sideways to the churchyard, and exclaimed he saw corpse-candles in the churchyard.
In addition to corpse-candles and blue lights, the Welsh, according to Mr Wirt Sykes, in his work, British Goblins, pp. 212-216, possess a species of ill-omened ghost that is not, however, restricted to any one family, but which visits promiscuously any house or village prior to a death.
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