Mysterious ghost fire

Lao Han is a farmer in western Hunan Province, who is also diligent in his usual farming work, with a family of three, his wife and son. My son works in the county town and returns home on weekends. This day happened to be the fifteenth of July in the summer, the old man's head from the field has been busy in the evening, on the way home just passed a cemetery, because the twilight is approaching, the surrounding black and dirty, the old man's head suddenly found a blue-green flame appearing on the graveyard, a flash, suddenly appeared, very strange. When the old man saw this scene, he immediately felt creepy and quickly fled home. Who knew that this fire would still run with people, and if you ran it, the old man was frightened and desperately accelerated his pace. At some point, the turquoise flame disappeared, and the old man's head approached the house. When he got home, his wife asked him why he looked flustered, as if he had lost his soul. The old man replied, "O ghost! Ghosts! The wife saw that the old man looked so flustered, it didn't look like he was pretending, so the next day he asked the Taoist priest in the village to draw a few charms and paste them on the doorstep of his home.

It was the weekend, the old man's son came home, saw the rune paper at the door, and then asked the old man. The old man told his son what happened the night before, and the son smiled and said, where is the ghost, the "ghost fire" you see is actually a natural phenomenon that can be explained scientifically.

In ancient times, people were more feudal and superstitious, and when they saw this mysterious flame, it was called "ghost fire", so what was the "ghost fire"? In fact, like most animals, the body contains a lot of phosphorus, and after death, due to the decomposition of the corpse, a gas called phosphine is generated.

This gas will bubble up to the ground, and since the ignition point is very low, it will automatically burn up when it encounters air, but this fire is usually small and emits a blue-green cold light, only flame, almost no heat. The temperature in the summer is generally relatively high, and it is easy to reach the ignition point of phosphine gas and the phenomenon of "ghost fire". And because the burning phosphine will flutter with the wind, when people pass by it, they will float with people, as if "following" people. Therefore, when we see some uncommon natural phenomena in our daily lives, we should not think in the direction of feudal superstition, but should believe that science can make people wise!