WILL-O-THE-WISP: a small matter.

Nothing profound here, but maybe a bit of interest....

In a form of "sinful desperation" in search of intellectual stimulation, I have engaged in the immorality of spending too much money on myself --- in this case for a lengthy run of FOLKLORE magazine. I wasn't even sure that there would be much of interest per dollar spent, but at least on that front I can say that quick early perusals indicate a fair harvest awaits. Hopefully, this will encourage some worthwhile entries in time.

But today, to begin, something small..... I picked up one of the latest volumes and there was a Pookha article inside. As the Spirit Dog is becoming one of my favorite Faerie entities, that made me smile. The references indicated an older article in FOLKLORE much further back --- the article by Ethel Rudkin, which all the crypto-pros know about, but which is the sort of thing that amateurs like myself must discover for themselves by luck. This is now of course rumbling about in my head asking for a Pookha-oriented blogpost.

But, it's not a "quickie", so it needs simmering. Instead, in that same FOLKLORE volume {#49, 1938} was another Ethel Rudkin article --- a short one entitled "Will o' the Wisp".

Ethel Rudkin turns out to be one of my favorite types of people: a romantic collector of encounter stories, happy to travel "into the field" to speak to real people at length, and then to write it all up so that the rest of us can be enlightened and thrilled by it all at the same time.

If it were not for interviewer-explorers like Ethel Rudkin, stay-at-home bums like myself would have nothing to do our "academic" armchair theorizing about. There should be a Hall-of-Fame somewhere for these folks.


Back in the 1920s and particularly the early 1930s, Ethel Rudkin began to try to save the "legends" of Eastern England, particularly Lincolnshire, from the grinding oblivion encouraged by Modernism. Although her study of the Pookha stories is deeper and more well-known, she also collected several incidents of what the UFOlogists call BOLs in the area around her home.

This is the general area of most of this BOL activity. The teardrop marked "A" is Willoughton, the home of the main informant for these tales. On the rightside of the map is Atterby. Drawn acroos the middle of the picture horizontally is a straight-ish road called {intriguingly} "Old Leys Lane". What you see marked as "A15" was once a road called Ermine Road. In the straight stretch between Ermine Road and to the left across Old Leys Lane was where the BOL would regularly be seen.

Prior to the publication of this article, the Light of Old Leys Lane was seen many, many times, and most often in the night in Wintertime. [Whether it still manifests, who knows? Ms Rudkin was of the opinion that as the road becomes more auto-traveled the phenomenon might stop]. It always moved on the road, suspended above it, but not high [perhaps belt-to-shoulder height]. It was described as like a bicycle lamp in size, height, and color. The informant's daughter had seen the BOL often, and in her case it was between 8&10pm. Many others had. One young man, who lived in Atterby but was wooing a girl in Willoughton was so afraid of the thing that he'd take the by-ways instead of the Lane, costing him much walking time.

Perhaps the key incident involved an Atterby policeman just getting off duty. He spotted the "bicycle-light" coming up Atterby lane, and decided to wait on it. The Light came on all the way to his position, But when it got abreast of him, IT SIMPLY WAS NO LONGER THERE! Well, now, just the sort of thing that we like around here on this blog. Weird. Strange. And completely impossible to figure out.

Ms Rudkin found other things worth noting. The area we've been talking about is just south of the village of Kirton-in-Lindsey as marked in the upper portion of this map. Ethel Rudkin may have herself lived in Lincoln. Between them, at about the teardrop, is Cammeringham Top [or Hill]. This structure was {is?} also associated with a BOL, called the Cammeringham Light. From the language in the article, it sounds as if Ms Rudkin's own postal carrier had an encounter with this thing. He saw the light at Cammeringham Top and it continued to pace him, bounding up and down near the hedge which ran along the west side of the road [then called Middle Street]. Suddenly: Vanish. The carrier stopped and searched off the road but could find no sign that anything had been there.

In another courting calamity, a young man from Willoughton, who was amorously involved with a girl in Kirton, felt that he had been chased so badly by a light, causing him to run all the way back home to Willoughton, that from then on he talked a friend into walking the way with him, his friend spending the courting time drinking while the other did whatever he and his lady did [not recorded].

The last BOL story recorded was of a BOL at Harpswell [you'll have to locate that yourself, I forgot]. This thing would appear, cross a fish pond, move along the grass at the foot of a hill, and sometimes break at an angle and race off towards a cottage before disappearing.

So...? Well, the "natural process" theory will need a lot of help to "solve" this one, methinks. In this case things like the piezoelectric rock-squeezing speculations of Michael Persinger are particularly hard to swallow since the countryside [like Lincoln Ridge above] is not quartz-rich igneous rock, like the granites, but "low-energy" sedimentary rock, like limestone. Also, the main informant, and presumably everybody else involved, was very familiar with swamp gas-type firelights, as there were marshy areas elsewhere which produced that phenomenon. The informant remarked how different the color and motion characteristics were.

And, so.....?

By the way, Ethel Rudkin kept a travel diary of all this stuff, which she later published....

Hmmm.... I don't have this in my resource collection, and......

It would be a really nice Halloween present......