New paper fails to connect Summerville spook light to earthquakes
A new article by seismologist Susan Hough was published this week in Seismological Research Letters that attempts to connect the legend of the Summerville, South Carolina spook light to earthquake lights (EQLs) resulting from the faults around Charleston that caused the great 1886 quake. Since Hough is a seismologist at the U.S. Geological Survey, her words carry credibility. News of her findings have been appearing in the media strongly suggesting that the mystery of the Summerville light is solved by this conclusion. It is not.
Unfortunately, my read of it is that this paper shows that Hough didn’t know much about the wider scale of reports of either earth lights (spook or ghost lights) or earthquake lights (luminous phenomenon associated with seismic events). As part of the release of the paper, Hough says that the idea came to her after reading a Halloween-week USGS newsletter with links to “spooky science” studies and that it sparked an idea she hadn’t thought much about – connecting the ghost stories of Summerville to EQLs.
To make a convincing case, the Summerville story would have to be sufficiently unique to other spook light stories and temporally tied to earthquake lights to suggest this cause. Hough’s paper, Haunted Summerville: Ghostly Lights or Earthquake Lights?, fails to make that case.
The Summerville spook light
Charleston, SC has a lot of ghost stories. The Summerville light is included in common and widespread lore related to a ghost walking the railroad track with a lantern. Associated strange events near Summerville noted by Hough include car engines stopping, frost appearing on windows, audible whispers or voices, strange fingerprints found later on cars, visible apparitions, and cars that “violently shook”. The latter is considered by Hough to be evidence of small shallow, localized quakes.
The paper goes on to talk about a nearby “haunted house” and weakly ties apparition sightings to hallucinogenic gases released (as with Delphi) along faults. This is an unconvincing stretch – the two locations are not comparable. Gases aren’t causing people to hallucinate ghosts.
The earthquake history of the Charleston/Summerville area is obvious, but it is not possible to correlate seismic activity with sightings of the Summerville light because of the lack of recording of small quakes at this time and the inability to cite all reports of the light. Perhaps this can change, maybe a result of this paper – an exciting possibility.
Hough then moves to the similar story of the Maco light of North Carolina. I cannot follow the connection that can be made to seismic activity and this spook light location. Kaczmarek (2003) noted that the Maco light sightings stopped after the tracks were removed. I’m not sure if this is true but maybe the rails are more of a key to the spook light mystery than faults.
Spook lights not by de-fault
It is a mistake to generally link earth (spook) lights to fault lines. The sheer number of earth light locations worldwide have not correlated well to fault areas. It may be possible that some are, and that the mechanism remains difficult to resolve, but earth lights are their own phenomenon separate from EQLs.
Several years ago, I began a database to collect locations of earth lights. I let the work slide as it became overwhelming; I reached an incomplete list of 214 different locations of anomalous earth lights worldwide. These locations consisted of tales (usually multiple occurrences) of near-ground sightings of luminous phenomena. While some of these are dubious, faked, or one-off events, many of these locations became notable for their spook lights – Marfa, Min Min, Joplin, Brown Mountain. This list is biased toward US locations because of my sources (Kaczmarek, Gritzner and Palmer).
I pulled up the database again to cross-check the details. Though I did not confirm all of their characteristics, 129 of 214 were explicitly called “ghost lights”, “spook lights”, or were directly connected with a ghost legend. (I’m not sure about the rest because I haven’t looked into the details enough, but I would bet that many more have associated ghost tales.) Such phenomenon accrue strong local folklore aspects and are thus reinforced over time.
Out of the 129, 34 were associated directly with railroads. And, 31 were described with a distinctive “swinging lantern” movement that people connected to the action of someone walking along the tracks searching for something. (This may be a natural results of our visual capability in tracking light sources in the dark – UFOs are also said to move back and forth in response to our involuntary eye movements.)
Paul Devereux is my favorite resource on earth lights. In his Earth Lights Revelation, he explains that earth lights may be conflated with UFOs, but they appear to be internally produced by the earth in several places where they can be regularly observed. They have been reported across much of human history to the point that they obviously exist, but the mechanism is unclear or has multiple sources. Those mechanisms include electrical phenomenon (including a variant akin to ball lightning), burning gases, and metal deposits (acting like a battery).
Because of their unpredictability and association with haunted areas, earth lights exists on the edge of scientific awareness. This is similar to earthquake lights, which have different characteristics that set them apart from general earth/spook lights. EQLs appear as upward floating orbs, glows, curtains, or flashes. While it is possible that EQLs could be associated with faults, EQLs aren’t associated with railroad tracks and ghost stories which are very much a subset of anomalous light stories.
In short, it has been speculated by some researchers that earth lights may be associated with stressed rock along fault lines (3 such places appeared in my list), but they are not usually associated with earthquake events. If these earth lights appear with coincident earthquakes, that correlation would already have been made long ago. There are many more places that have earth/spook light legends that are not associated with fault lines than places that are.
Interestingly, Hough admits in the paper that earthquake lights are a recognized natural phenomenon. This is a substantive admission since the USGS has always downplayed the idea of EQLs. To me, this shows that the scientific community is now recognizing that the research into EQLs is legitimate.
The press release concludes that “maybe the friendly ghosts are illuminating fault zones in the east”. Again, that is far too much of a reach from this paltry data set.
Unsatisfactory conclusion with a glimmer of hope
The conclusion reached by Hough is baffling. She writes:
Although earthquake phenomena cannot explain every ghost story in every region, considering the lore of the Summerville Light, one is left with three plausible explanations: (1) there was no physical basis for the lore, beyond fanciful imaginations among a local population “spooked” by stories, (2) the legends are true, the ghost of a bereaved wife wandered along a stretch of an old trunk line with a lantern, searching for the head of her decapitated husband, or (3) accounts of apparently supernatural phenomena in and around Summerville can be explained by local earthquake activity starting around or before 1959, including small events that were not recognized as earthquakes.
She favors the last one resulting from ignition of water-soluble gases emitted from faults, like radon or methane, that were then ignited by a spark of static electricity or rock movement. She said that the gases trapped in water droplets might also help explain why these tales of ghost lights seem to occur on dark and misty nights. High humidity is not conductive to static sparks, so this makes little sense.
Left out of these possibilities are other obvious explanations for the stories of famous earth lights. These involve a combination of optical and atmospheric effects, local history and perceptions, social interest in the stories, legend tripping, etc. Speculatively linking the Summerville (and Maco) lights with EQLs in this paper feels misleading and overly simplistic, ignoring the influential social aspects at play with ghost legends and haunted places. And, it may be considered explaining one unknown with another.
Finally, there are two exciting bits in this paper: First, a USGS scientist admits that EQLs are worth scientific attention, and second, it favorably presents the option that EQLs may occur in the seismically stressed area of Charleston, so monitoring and collection of reports of lights should be considered. Hough cites the Enomoto paper, which I also referenced in this recent piece, that provides examples of the stronger evidence emerging in support of EQLs. I am all for more research into this area.
But as for the Summerville light being fault-related, this paper poorly supports that hypothesis. Spooky geology must include the wider, social component to be viable.
References
Devereux, Paul. (1990) Earth Lights Revelation.
Gritzner, Charles F. (2019). North Carolina Ghost Lights and Legends.
Hough, S. E. (2025). Haunted Summerville: Ghostly Lights or Earthquake Lights? Seismol. Res. Lett. XX, 1–7, doi: 10.1785/0220240442. https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/srl/article-abstract/doi/10.1785/0220240442/651455/Haunted-Summerville-Ghostly-Lights-or-Earthquake (Paywalled)
Kaczmarek, Dale D. (2003) Illuminating the Darkness: The Mystery of Spooklights.
Palmer, Sean B. (undated) Earth Lights: Spooklights and Ghost Lights. http://inamidst.com/lights/earth
#earthLights #earthquakeLights #folklore #ghostLight #HauntedSummerville #legends #seismology #spookLight #spookyScience #Summervillle #SusanHough
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