Blue Lights in Cemeteries


In my book "Vacationing With Ghosts," I showed some interesting encounters with soft balls of blue light that danced around the cemetery across the road from our summer home. At one point, I went in the daytime to figure out where they came from when something whizzed past my ear with a buzz and static charge that made my hair stand up.

One thing I run in years of research is repeated witness reports of similar things. I ran across a researcher who is very pragmatic who spoke of sitting in a graveyard in Arizona and seeing a ball of light come out of the ground - the size of a basketball perhaps (the ones I saw were perhaps baseball-sized). Then, I was reading about Gettysburg Cemetery and a man who said a blue ball of light chased him out of the graveyard.

I went about researching for more incidents and found a cemetery called Silver Cliff Cemetery in Colorado known for "will-o-the-wisp." This has been studied for years and many explanations including escaping methane gas and reflective granite headstones. The dancing lights were said to be anywhere from blue to green to yellow to white.

Some people refer to these kinds of lights as spooklights or will-o'-the-wisp (atmospheric ghost lights). That they happen in graveyards is rather intriguing. 

In fact, Bachelor's Grove in Illinois, long said to be haunted, has had reported blue balls of lights.

Source:  The first ghost stories that began circulating among the tombstones were the glowing blue balls of light that seemed to display some form of intelligence. They eluded pursuit even though aJoliet man named Jack Hermanski in the early 1970’s chased them on a number of occasions. The light was the size of a baseball and floated through the cemetery just out of his reach. He reported that the ghost light blinked at fifteen to twenty-second intervals and just when he thought he had overtaken it; the light disappeared then reappeared behind him. And so the chase began again throughout the nights he observed it.

In December of 1971, Denise Travers claimed that she was able to pass her hand through the light on a very close encounter. She felt no heat or sensation at all. It was like putting your hand into a void. Skeptics say that the blue lights were actually the methane gas given off by decomposing bodies. However, most of those bodies had crumbled to ashes long ago. The blue lights have not been seen since the latter 1970's however a new light has been reported with increasing frequency zooming up and down the main trail leading to the cemetery’s entrance. This light has been likened to a red skyrocket and is never stationary but constantly moving.


What are these blue balls of lights and why cemeteries? There is nothing about the content of a cemetery that should be different than anywhere else, except perhaps the amount of bodies decomposing in the ground, but for that matter, it would seem any forest floor should be seriously haunted by such lights. 

As a child, the ones I saw seemed to be very much natural, the way they were lit, the way they came and went, dissolving in a fraction of a second as if they had passed through an unseen doorway. They seemed to gloat and dart around, but not particularly purposeful. 

I intend to continue my focus on these blue balls of light and keep readers updated.

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