Susan Hough, a seismologist at the United States Geological Survey (USGS), was scouring archives for information about a 7.3-magnitude earthquake that struck Charleston, South Carolina, in 1886. Her search brought her to a bookstore where she encountered Haunted Summerville, a collection of eerie tales from a small town just north of Charleston.
“It was the sort of thing you stash in the back of your mind,” Hough says. At first, she didn’t give it much thought. But near Halloween, when the USGS drew a connection between science and the supernatural in themed emails, she recalls, “that got me thinking — what about those actual ghost stories?”
The Summerville Light was a glowing orb seen by locals throughout the 1960s on a nearby abandoned railroad. Along these tracks, legend has it, a widow still searches for the remains of her husband, a railroad worker decapitated in an accident. The bobbing light that turns orange, green, and blue, is said to be her lantern.
Hough, ever the scientist, has her own explanation. She noticed the old accounts seemed consistent with a phenomenon that, although very much of this world, is hardly less mysterious: earthquake lights.
