Read Online Great Australian Ghost Stories by Richard Davis - Free Book Online Page A

shopkeepers and no-nonsense bushman have seen the Min Min Light — most of them intelligent and honest people whose credibility is unquestionable. All describe it as a round or oval ball of light glowing so it illuminates its surroundings, travelling between one and two metres above the ground either in a straight or undulating line. Sometimes it appears to stop and hover; sometimes it bobs about and usually dives towards the earth as it disappears.
    There are almost as many theories about its origin as there are sightings. The supernatural school claim that such lights are spirits of the dead: ghosts in inhuman form. Sceptics with some knowledge of the bush suggest that the lights may emanate from fluorescent fungi (such are quite common) or from birds who have brushed their wings against the fungi. Fireflies are also cited as are swarms of moths, their wings reflecting moonlight. None of these is likely. Personally, I’ve never seen a mobile mushroom and the only common bush birds that hover (eagles and hawks) are not nocturnal. A swarm of moths would not be visible at any great distance. And fireflies? Well, there’s no doubting their ability to emit light but as one bushman put it: ‘You’d need about ten million of the little buggers, standing shoulder to shoulder, to produce a light that bright.’
    Traditional science groups the Min Min and other similar Australian lights along with European and North AmericanWill-o’-the-wisps and Jack-o’-lanterns into the category ignis fatuus which simply means ‘foolish fire’ and attributes them to marsh gas (methane) or phosphoretted hydrogen, the gas that escapes from decaying animal matter. As the Min Min Light was said to originate in a cemetery the presence of the latter was possible once, but its domain is far too arid to produce marsh gas. Subterranean gas escaping through fissures or drill holes is more likely and records show the Min Min Hotel was built beside a water bore, but all theories involving gas rely on the premise that the gas somehow self-ignites, which is impossible.
    That very rare natural phenomenon, ‘ball’ lightning, which travels across the landscape at high speed, has also been suggested as an explanation but, like all lightning, it dissipates quickly and never remains visible for as long as these lights are claimed to.
    Some very distinguished scientists have studied the phenomenon, arriving in Boulia in a flurry of publicity and making claims of infallible theories, but most have not even managed to see the light let alone explain it. The famous novelist H. G. Wells ( The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds ) took an interest in it while visiting Australia, but even his fertile mind could not come up with an explanation. Probably the first plausible explanation came in the 1990s from Colin Croft of Charleville, who discovered that he could see a grass fire at night that was at least eighty kilometres away and below the horizon. Croft claimed that what he saw was a reflection of the fire on a layer of dense air. This tied in with an old theory that said the light only appeared when a lighted lamp was placed in a window at Lucknow, the nearest station homestead to the Min Min Hotel.
    An even more cogent and convincing argument for this theory came in 2003 when a University of Queenslandneuroscientist, Professor Jack Pettigrew, published a paper in the journal of the Australian Association of Optometrists. Professor Pettigrew, who knows his way around Western Queensland and has seen the light, concluded that what he saw was an inverted mirage — the image of a distant bright light carried on a cold, dense layer of air — and that the terrain of the Channel Country makes the area ideal for this phenomenon to occur. Professor Pettigrew also cited another famous case where this phenomenon had produced an image of the Irish coast ‘floating’ above the calm Atlantic and observed by the crew of