A Close Encounter of the Poetic Kind

Peasant Poet John Clare meets UAP

I’ve seen the midnight morris-dance of hell

On the black moors while thicker darkness fell,

Like dancing lamps or bounding balls of fire,

Now in and out, now up and down, now higher,

As though an unseen horseman in his flight

Extract from Will-O’-Wisp by John Clare (1793-1864)

Since the beginning of recorded history people from every profession and background have reported experiences with anomalous lights.

However they are described - most recently as UAP, UFO, flying saucer or just plain old fashioned unexplained lights - they always hover at the boundaries of our perception.

Statue of ‘the peasant poet’, John Clare (1793-1864) at the cottage museum where he was born in Helpston, Cambridgeshire (Copyright David Clarke)

Much is made of the reporting skills of police officers, astronomers, aircrew and military pilots who report unidentified flying objects. But what about our writers and poets who are keenly aware of their surroundings and the world around them? They are also trained observers who, by nature of their calling, absorb details that are often translated into vivid imagery.

William Blake is of course famous for the mystical visions that he experienced throughout his life, including the angels, demons and other spiritual entities that accosted him in everyday places, from windows to stairwells.

Lesser known but equally profound are the weird encounters with anomalous lights and other supernatural creatures that are described in the prose and poetry of John Clare. The so-called ‘Peasant Poet’ was born in 1793 at the Fenland village of Helpston, now in Cambridgeshire but at that time in Northamptonshire.

Clare spent much of his early life in abject poverty but his illiterate parents encouraged him to learn how to read and write. Soon the farm labourer was using his special gift to capture on paper and in song the wonders of the landscape and natural world that was under threat from the enclosure of the common land.

His poetry and prose are filled with vivid descriptions of the the Fenland people and their folklore and traditions along with the birds, animals and plants that shared the rural farming communities. But after nightfall another category of supernatural creature emerged from the landscape that he struggled to categorise or explain. Clare makes frequent references in his writings to the Will o’the Wisp or Jack O’Lantern or - using its local name, ‘Jenny Burnt-Arse’.

Clare lived and died during the Age of Reason and the tension between belief and disbelief in phenomena that could not be explained is highlighted in his journals that describe encounters with the lights that haunted his landscape. For example,

‘…one dark night I was coming accross the new parks when a sudden light wild and pale appea[r]ed all round me on my left hand for a hundred yards or more accompanied by a crackling noise like that of peas straw burning I stood looking for a minute or so and felt rather alarmed when darkness came round me again and one of the dancing jack a la[n]-thorns was whisking away in the distance which caused the odd luminous light around me…’

Scientists from the time of Isaac Newton tried to explain the Will o’the Wisp or ignis fatuus (‘foolish fire’) as the product of methane and other gases produced by decaying vegetation in low-lying boggy places. Igniting spontaneously, these appeared as phosphorescent lights moving - and dancing - above the horizon after sundown.

Forty years ago I collected accounts of these phenomena for my first piece of published writing, Spooklights: A British Survey, with Granville Oldroyd. Long out of print, I am revisiting some of the locations such as Helpston that have traditions of hauntings by anomalous lights for a revised and updated book-length version.

There are many first-hand accounts in the 18th and 19th century newspapers and magazines of brilliant lights that led folks astray, sometimes into dangerous swamps. These stories in turn inspired and reinforced a rich and ancient collection of beliefs that attributed the lights to mischievous spirits who animate the lights: Jenny with the burnt-tail, Will with the Wisp and many others. In South Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Lincolnshire the traditional name for such lights was Peggy with the Lantern

An engraving by TW Cook depicting a Will o’the Wisp seen ‘on the spot’ near Belvoir Castle in Lincolnshire in 1811 (Author’s Collection), originally published in Gallery of Nature and Art 1815.

The flat, Fenland landscape that surrounds Helpston would appear to be the perfect home for ‘marsh lights’. In one account from 1830 John Clare describes a ‘great upstir’ about strange lights in the village that led him to join a companion for what we would today call a UFO skywatch. The first light he saw over Eastwell Green he took to be a meteor but it grew larger and larger and appeared to be moving up and down and against the prevailing wind. Another appeared in the southeast and

‘…as if the other saw it danced away as if to join it which it soon did and after dancing together a sort of reel as it were - it chaced away to its former station and the other followd it like things at play and after suddenly overtaking it they mingled into one dissapeard and sunk in the ground…’

This spectacular display left Clare ‘robbed…of the little philosophic reasoning which I had about them’. But more was to come. On another occasion a light approached him that crackled like ‘burning straw’. It was surrounded by a ‘mysterious terrific hue' & ‘the enlarged size & whiteness of my own hands frit [frightened] me’ as the light pouring from the thing magnified the darkness all around him. He grasped hold of a stile for support ‘till it darted away’ after which he ‘took to my heels & got home as fast as I could’.

The brilliant, fast-moving, dancing lights described in Clare’s journals hardly sound like wispy methane flames escaping from the marsh. Research by Dr Alan Mills of the Department of Geology, University of Leicester, published in the journal Chemistry in Britain, has debunked the marsh gas theory. Using controlled laboratory conditions, Mills failed to produce a will o’the wisp light despite producing quantities of flammable methane, phosphine and other natural chemicals that were suspected as contributors in the chemical soup. What is more he could not find any other natural ignition that could ignite the gasses produced by rotting vegetable matter.

Whatever the Will o’the Wisp was, Dr Mills concluded, it was not created by marsh gas. Mills spent thirty years trying to find a location where Will o’the Wisps were seen today and was left empty-handed. Like many others who have studied this elusive phenomenon he concluded that it is now long extinct from the British landscape.

But is it really? Do people see Will o’the Wisps today and report them as UFOs or unidentified aerial phenomena?

It certainly seems logical that they should do so, as folk beliefs are constantly evolving. An unexplained light that was once believed to be carried by an evil spirit or fairy is now easily explained in contemporary folklore as a visitor from outer space.

One of the places near Helpston where John Clare saw Will o’Wisps is the 18th century Maxey Mill, a grade II listed building. During the First World War the owner of the mill penned a letter to his local newspaper to report how he and his family had ‘plainly seen’ a Will o’the Wisp dancing over the fields between the mill and nearby River Welland

Maxey Mill, a grade II listed building near the river Welland in Cambridgeshire, where mysterious lights have been reported for hundreds of years (image Copyright David Clarke)

‘It was a few feet above the ground, sometimes in motion, travelling up and down the field,’ he wrote. ‘It would grow very bright and then it would disappear and reappear again. It is only seen on dark, mild, stormy nights, in marshy places or near a river; and many a traveller has lost his life by going to it, thinking it was a light from some cottage, and it has led him into a river or pond. Perhaps some of the readers of your valuable paper will state the cause of this wonderful phenomenon’.

Sources: My folklore friend Simon Young is currently preparing a book that includes an examination of Will o’the Wisp folklore alongside a host of other supernatural creatures from British lore and legend. His enthusiasm has reignited my interest in the phenomenon and led me to revisit my archive of material on these anomalous lights that I began to collect some four decades ago. This resulted in a paper, Peggy with the Lantern: the folklore of Lincolnshire’s UAP, that I presented at the AHRC-funded Lincolnshire Folk Tales Project symposium at Nottingham Trent University on 11 April 2025.

For the quotes I have drawn upon Selected Poems and Prose of John Clare edited by Eric Robinson and Geoffrey Summerfield (OUP 1966) and John Clare By Himself (Carcanet Press 1996). The first six lines of the poem Will o’Wisp is taken from The Poems of John Clare, edited by JW Tibble (John Dent & Sons, 1935). I must also thank Paul Devereux who first drew attention to the link between Clare’s encounters with mysterious lights and UFO/Earthlight phenomena in his book, Earthlights Revelation (Blandford Press, 1989).

The John Clare Cottage Museum at Helpston is well worth a visit for anyone interested in landscape writing, poetry and folklore. A sighting of mysterious lights during your visit cannot be guaranteed though.