Scary stuff!
Winter is coming. The longest day of the year has passed. For the first time in months, the desert smells of rain.
Sunlight is nutritious: Seasonal Affective Disorder is an acute manifestation of sun malnourishment. We are creatures of light.
We carve jack-o'-lanterns without knowing their meaning — today, we have insulation and grocery stores. We no longer need to satirize death. The lengthening of the night means more expensive produce, losing our tan, thicker clothes, but not much else. Our winter will be easy.
People died more in winter. Trees go bald, critters sleep, people die. People laughed at death, knowing it was the only thing they could do. Halowe'en is in October for a reason: we are creatures of light.
Corpse candles — or, if you're speaking old Welsh, canwll corfe — are synonymous with jack o' lanterns and will o' the wisp. They represent death.
In the fifth century, death was usually sudden. David, patron saint of Wales, prayed for warning. A subsequent vision told him that death would be prefaced by small lights, like those from tapers.
When someone dies in any family, you go through photographs. You find a recent one with a blip somewhere — perhaps refracted light imprinted on the film. Your grief gives it the shape of an angel's wing. We need corpse candles.
Corpse candles are prolific in Welsh folklore as small lights that float along near the ground, stopping at houses where death is forthcoming. But like any legend, it has variations. It follows the path of a future funeral procession; it appears to a doomed party halfway between his home and his grave. A small light signifies the death of an infant. A large light signifies the death of an adult. Similarly, color has significance: red for man, pale blue for woman, pale yellow for child.
While their significance is hearsay, their presence is real. Near waters in the South of Wales, one sees lights at night, like candles.
Phosphorescence is not an obscure phenomenon. Things in nature produce light. I drive long after sunset; lightning bugs answer my headlights, mistaking them for a very large lover coming fast. Gases — particularly those ejected as a by-product of swampiness — combine, and at night you can see them glow. Run electric current through glass tubes containing elemental ether, such as Helium, or Nitrogen. You get light of the purest red and blue you'll ever see.
Mixed correctly, natural gases will always glow, and regardless of anything people will always die. Sometimes serendipity combines phenomena, giving them meaning.
There are countless stories of death being prefaced by mysterious lights. One, provided by William Howell:
In passing Golden Grove from Llandilo to Carmarthen, several people in the eighteenth century saw three corpse-candles gliding down the river at various times three weeks in succession. The persons compared their experiences, and wondered what the omen meant. Was it for the villagers, or was it for the noble family who lived at Golden Grove? At length the solution came. Three members of the nobleman's family died simultaneously in different parts of the country. 1
There are stories of corpse candles appearing in rooms, in houses, far away from swamps. Online author V. Wales reproduces the following account, crediting only a "Mr. Price":
In the year 1880 his brother, a native of Carmarthenshire and captain of a vessel, was away at sea. When at home, he occupied a small room only suitable for one person. One evening, about six o'clock, a dim light was seen in that room by a cousin from a neighbouring farm. The young man asked "Is Jack come home?" "No" was the reply. "Then who is in the room?" he asked, and the answer was that "nobody had been there with a candle." The circumstance passed unnoticed, until another member of the family, and an inmate of the house, saw a dim glimmer, "like a rushlight or taper" through the window. Later still the mother one night, going into the room to pull down the blind, turned to go to the door, and over the bed saw a dim hovering light. She went downstairs in considerable agitation, and exclaimed to the members of her family the hope that nothing had befallen Jack. The mail was eagerly waited for, and in the meantime neighbours saw the dim light in Jack's room. A few weeks later news reached the family that the captain died at Singapore of fever about the time the corpse-candle appeared in his room. 2
Dig a bit, and you find stories again and again of corpse candles appearing away from natural phenomena — inside bedrooms, over deathbeds. But, as these things tend to do, they quickly become as apocryphal as they are fantastic.
We divine smudges on camera lenses. We read messages in light. We need light. Death makes us desperate creatures. I prefer the mad grin of a jack o' lantern, candlelight pouring out through carved vegetable eyes.
Of course, corpse candles are only one entry in a very large volume of Things That Make Precious Sense of Death.
If you're looking to conduct more research on corpse candles and all its cousins, you'd be interested in the following:
"Corpse Candle" is also a book by Paul Doherty.
1 Howell, William. "Cambrian Superstitions," 60-61.
2What can only be assumed to be a verbal eyewitness account. Reproduced at "Corpse candles and Phantom Funerals" — http://www.red4.co.uk/Folklore/trevelyan/welshfolklore/chapt14/htm
Sources & further reading
The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits
http://wintersteel.homestead.com/Corpse_Candles_and_Lights.html
V Wales, "Corpse Candles and Phantom Funerals."
http://www.red4.co.uk/Folklore/trevelyan/welshfolklore/chapt14/htm
For another good story involving corpse candles, see Mary Thomas' "A Man from Ysbyty Ystwyth sees a Corpse Candle": http://walespast.com/en/folktales/stories/?id=15 | 
