Zombies, jack-o’-lanterns, and our spooky scary skeletons
On a recent fishing trip, Nate came across a bone-chilling sight. It was a salmon that seemed kind of… dead. Its skin was falling off, it smelled horrible, and it didn’t have any eyes. Turns out, Nate had stumbled onto a (barely) living example of a recent listener question: “Are there any real-life zombies?”
From mutant looking fish to the science behind mysterious lights that flicker in cemeteries, in this Outside/Inbox roundup the team takes on your Halloween curiosities.
Here’s the questions we cover…
Are bone conduction headphones better or worse for preventing hearing loss?
Can you eat those giant decorative pumpkins?
Featuring Daniel Teske, Rick Neitzel, and Richard Zare. Thanks to Amelia, Shaina, and Meg for their questions.
Our next roundup theme is all about the cold! Send us your questions and you might hear them on the show. Email outsidein@nhpr.org or leave a voicemail at 1-844-GO-OTTER.
ADDITIONAL MATERIALS
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service have a lengthy page detailing the horrors of zombie salmon. You have been warned.
The current pumpkin record-holder we mentioned was a recent upset! Congratulations to Ron Wallace in Greene, Rhode Island.
Hermann Hendrich’s 1901 painting, “Will-o'-the-wisp Dance.”
You can read Richard Zare’s 2025 paper presenting his microlightning theory here.
A movie showing a close-up view of two microbubbles of methane approaching one another and producing microlightning. This video captures a .2 second interaction, played 8000 times slower. (Courtesy of Richard Zare)
CONNECT WITH US
To share your questions and feedback with Outside/In, call the show’s hotline and leave us a voicemail. The number is 1-844-GO-OTTER. No question is too serious or too silly.
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CREDITS
Host: Nate Hegyi
Reported and mixed by Marina Henke, Felix Poon and Nate Hegyi
Produced by Marina Henke
Editing by Taylor Quimby and Justine Paradis
Our staff also includes Jessica Hunt
Taylor Quimby is NHPR’s Director of Podcasts
Music by Blue Dot Sessions, Ryan James Carr, Stationary Sign, and Mary Riddle
Outside/In is a production of New Hampshire Public Radio
Episode logo artwork adapted from “Will o' the Wisp and the Snake” by Hermann Hendrich (Public Domain)
Audio Transcript
Note: Episodes of Outside/In are made as pieces of audio, and some context and nuance may be lost on the page. Transcripts are generated using a combination of speech recognition software and human transcribers, and may contain errors.
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In, a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am Nate Hegyi here with producers Felix Poon…
Felix Poon: Hello,
Nate Hegyi: And Marina Henke…
Marina Henke: Hello, hello.
Nate Hegyi: So, Marina, you've gathered us here. I'm gonna let you take the reins.
Marina Henke: All right, yes. So I want to kick things off today by spotlighting what I'm going to call a deeply underappreciated Midwestern oddity.
Nate Hegyi: Okay…
Marina: Nate’s a Midwesterner, I'm a Midwesterner and very topical to this time of year… it relates to Halloween.
Nate Hegyi: Ooh
Felix Poon: Ooooooh.
Marina Henke: Nate, can you explain to me how you would describe the normal sequence of trick or treating?
Nate Hegyi: The normal sequence of trick or treating? Well, it's been a few years since I've done it. So, uh, I would say in the Midwest, it would be put on your costume, right?
Marina Henke: Uh huh.
Nate Hegyi: And then put on a big coat over the costume because it's freezing outside. Go run up to the stairs of a neighbor's house. Parents take coats off. Knock knock knock, trick or treat. Grab candy, run to the next house.
Marina Henke: Okay, this is good, this is good. I feel like Felix, you probably don't disagree with much of this?
Felix Poon: Wait, wait, wait. You… you wear a coat and then when you're at the door, you take it off, you get your candy and then you put it back on?
Marina Henke: Well it's cold!
Felix Poon: What a hassle!
Marina Henke: Well, cold or not cold, what if I told you guys that where I grew up in St. Louis, there is another step in this process
Nate Hegyi: Okay…
Marina Henke: And that step is before you get candy, you have to tell a joke.
Nate Hegyi: What?
Felix Poon: Oh, I like that. I like it's a more equal exchange!
Marina Henke: I cannot express how much this is what every single person in St. Louis does and knows to expect when you're giving out candy.
Nate Hegyi: Is that just like a St. Louis thing?
Marina Henke: This is mostly something that happens just in St. Louis. There are places in Iowa that this happens. And it seems to be a little bit of a fuzzy history, but that sometime right after the Great Depression, there was too many teenagers that were like causing mischief on Halloween night.
Nate Hegyi: Too many tricks, way too many tricks!
Marina Henke: Too many annoying tricks! They were knocking over fire hydrants, they were, you know, probably the equivalent of a modern day teenager tee-peeing a house.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Marina Henke: And so the idea was we're going to make these tricks actually contained by being a joke. The trick is the joke!
Felix Poon: That's the trick.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, I like that. Do you say the same joke every… every door?
Marina Henke: Yeah, you sort of pick your joke for the year.
Nate Hegyi: What was your, like, most popular joke?
Marina Henke: Mhmmm, man, again, it's been a while.
Felix Poon: Well, what if you came up with a joke right now on the spot?
Marina Henke: Um, what is ….a… polar bear that likes to suntan called?
Nate Hegyi: I don't know, what's it called?
Felix Poon: Yeah, I have no idea.
Marina Henke: Solar bear.
[MUX IN, Haunted Playhouse]
Nate Hegyi: Nice.
Felix Poon: Ohhhh!
Nate Hegyi: Today on the show, we are embracing the Halloween season. We asked you for your spooky, your scary, your creepy questions, and y'all delivered. We've got mutant looking salmon, bone chilling tunes, and a listener who wants a scientific answer to an unearthly phenomenon. That's after the break.
Marina Henke: You guys want another joke?
Felix Poon: Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Felix Poon: Always.
Marina Henke: Okay. Argon, the gas… it walks into a bar. The bartender, it says, “We don't serve noble gases here.” What does argon say?... It doesn't react. It doesn’t react!!
Nate Hegyi: That's good. That's good. That's really good.
Marina Henke: Cause it's a noble gas!
Nate Hegyi: I get it, I get it.
AD BREAK
Nate Hegyi: From NHPR, this is Outside/In a show where curiosity and the natural world collide. I am your host, Nate Hegyi, here with producers Marina Henke and Felix Poon. And we are here to answer your Halloween questions.
Marina Henke: Yeah, I think let's just dive in. I decided to go with the most on the nose Halloween question first.
Nate Hegyi: Perfect.
Marina Henke: So a listener named Amelia called in and asked…
Amelia: Hey, Outside/In, it's Amelia calling in from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I gotta know, are there any real life zombies?
Nate Hegyi: Ooh.
Felix Poon: Hmm.
Marina Henke: Now, I did have an immediate question to the question, which is like, what exactly is a zombie? Like, how would you guys describe a zombie?
Nate Hegyi: It’s hard because there are a lot of different kinds of zombies, right?
Felix Poon: Are there? I have no idea.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah! There is the very traditional, like Haitian folklore zombie, which I believe is a person who's kind of been taken over by a sorceress to just mindlessly do labor for them.
Marina Henke: Uh-huh
Nate Hegyi: Then there is, like “The Last of Us” fungal brain zombies.
Felix Poon: Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: And then there's the really fast infected zombies of the “28 Days Later” franchise. Sorry, I'm definitely showing that. I freaking love –
Felix Poon: – Yeah you watch a lot of zombie movies.
Nate Hegyi: Yes. Then there is the slow walking “Night of The Living Dead”, aka Walking Dead zombies, the ones that are going to eat your brains…
Marina Henke: Yeah.
Nate Hegyi: And then I think that's… I think that's all the zombies!
Marina Henke: Well, I will say, Nate, I remember that when this question came in, you actually said you were like, guys, I've technically actually seen a real life zombie.
[MUX IN, Mazamorra]
Nate Hegyi: I have! I have seen a real life zombie. So it was fall. I was fishing in southeast Alaska, and there was this salmon lying out on the rocks next to a stream. It stunk! Its skin was falling off…
Marina Henke: Ughh!!
Nate Hegyi: Literally. It had no eyes. And all of a sudden, it just started twitching...
Felix Poon: Oh my gosh.
Nate Hegyi: … and moving up and down and like, swimming. And I was like, “WTF.” And this Felix and Marina is what's literally known among biologists as a zombie salmon.
[MUX FADES OUT]
Marina Henke: I hate it, I already hate it.
Daniel Teske: So zombie salmon essentially are post-spawn salmon that are essentially eating themselves from the inside out.
Nate Hegyi: So that is Daniel Teske. He is a fish biologist with Alaska's Department of Fish and Game. And he told me that salmon are one of a handful of animals out there that act a lot like zombies.
Daniel Teske: It definitely depends on your definition of what a true zombie is, but there are some parallels that you can find in nature.
Nate Hegyi: Like for example, if your definition of zombie is that fungal infected zombie from that HBO show, “The Last of Us,” well, there is a very similar real world fungus that infects carpenter ants. It essentially overrides their behavior, makes them climb onto a plant, and then lock their jaws onto its stem. Then the ant dies and the fungus grows on the plant. But the Pacific salmon is probably the one that MOST resembles the classic Walking Dead Hollywood style zombie. Here’s the catch though. It’s not actually technically dead!
Daniel Teske: It looks very, very scary and ugly and can be quite shocking. And I can see why people would kind of parallel that with the Hollywood definition, because they do look like they're living dead, literally.
Felix Poon: Wait so, what’s happening here?
Nate Hegyi: It has to do with spawning. Are you guys familiar with how salmon spawn, by the way?
Felix Poon: Not really. No.
Nate Hegyi: Okay, great. So, salmon, they are born in a stream. Then they go out and they live in the ocean, the open ocean, for a few years. And then they return to that exact same stream to breed and die. And that return journey is unbelievably grueling.
Daniel Teske: And as part of that process, they completely stop feeding and they put all of their energy into reproduction.
Nate Hegyi: These fish are smashing into rocks, they are swimming upstream, they're dodging bears and eagles and fishing lures!
Marina Henke: I feel like at this point, if I was a salmon, I'd be like, “I'm good. We don't need to go back to the same stream.”
Nate Hegyi: I agree! And they're doing all this while they're no longer eating. They're just like burning their fat and their muscles and essentially like eating themselves from the inside out.
Felix Poon: It’s like in order to, to spawn, they have to run a marathon first.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah! And it's a marathon run on just their own body fat. But it gets even worse. Because they also get this huge hormonal spike of cortisol, which completely suppresses their immune system. So when they're cutting themselves on those river rocks, they can't really heal. Which means they quickly become infected, including by this one fungus that will attack the eyes, blind them, even … making their eyes fall out.
Felix Poon: What so is the fungus like taking over the fish?
Nate Hegyi: No, it's literally… it's not taking over the fish like the other fungus. It's literally like, you know, like when we get bacterial infections and everything else like that… their immune system is just compromised. It's shut down. So everything is just allowed to attack and like eat you up. And so they literally have like fungal infections in their eyes that turn their eyes all white and cloudy, and essentially the eyes fall out as they're swimming through, you know, these rocks.
Felix Poon: So they just look like zombies. They're not acting like zombies.
Nate Hegyi: Yes, exactly.
Felix Poon: All right. Sorry to be so technical.
Marina Henke: I got to say, I'm imagining like someone actually dressing up as a zombie salmon for Halloween and people's reactions being like, “Ahhh, too much. Too gross.”
Nate Hegyi: Yeahhh, “That's a little gross.”
[MUX IN, Patina, Ryan James Carr]
Felix Poon: That's your Halloween costume this year, right Nate?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, exactly. That's what I'm gonna be, a salmon. I’m gonna be a dead salmon for Halloween.
Marina Henke: Okay. Are you two ready for, um, I'd say a thematic pivot?
Nate Hegyi: Sure. Yeah, let's do it.
Felix Poon: Depends on the pivot.
Marina Henke: Well, it's going to require an embrace of some grace and some whimsy for what we constitute Halloween questions.
Felix Poon: Okay…
Marina Henke: We got a call from Shaina in Montpelier, Vermont, who got a pair of bone conduction headphones…… You guys get it?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. I mean, like, I get it, I get it, bones, skeletons, scary, Halloween.
Marina Henke: Okay, great. We're on the train. The train is rolling.
Felix Poon: Okay. Let's go.
Marina Henke: So after buying these headphones, Shaina had some questions. She called the Outside Inbox.
Shaina: I got them in part because I have a lot of hearing loss in my family, but I'm finding that I'm having to crank up the volume. And I'm wondering if the bone conduction is better or worse for hearing loss than regular headphones.
Felix Poon: When I first heard this, I was like, wait, this is a thing?! I had no idea.
Nate Hegyi: You didn't know about them? I remember I bought a pair of bone conduction headphones because I was on a big bike trip for work, and I needed to be able to hear traffic. They blew my mind. I was like, I can hear stuff! But then also listen to podcasts and music.
Felix Poon: Yeah
Nate Hegyi: It was great.
Marina Henke: I feel like the headphone technology has… it's moved past me. I'm in the ancient days because this is… I don't know this...
Felix Poon: I didn't either, which is why I was excited to take this question on.
Marina Henke: Okay. Tell us.
Felix Poon: Well, when I first looked into this, I saw a story about Beethoven that when he started losing his hearing, he attached a wooden drumstick to his piano and then held the other end of it between his teeth so that the sounds of his piano could be transmitted through his teeth and his skull to hear it.
Nate Hegyi: What?
Felix Poon: Yeah. So this story might be a little bit apocryphal, but the concept is valid. This is bone conduction. And thankfully they make bone conduction headphones these days, so we don't have to resort to biting on drumsticks anymore.
Marina Henke: Can you imagine?
Felix Poon: Instead of using your bone conduction headphones on your biking trip, Nate, you just hook it up to a drumstick.
Nate: [Laughs]
Felix Poon: But anyways, I spoke to Rick Neitzel about this. Rick is a researcher at the University of Michigan studying the impact of noise exposure on human health.
Rick Neitzel: Bone conduction headphones essentially bypass the outer ear and go directly into the inner ear by transmitting sound waves as vibrations through our skull.
Nate Hegyi: That sounds so intense!!
Felix Poon: So traditional earbuds. They sit just inside the ear canal in what's actually the outer ear. But bone conduction headphones are designed to press on your cheekbones in front of your ears. They work by sending vibrations along your cheekbone directly to this one part of your inner ear, called the cochlea.
Marina Henke: The cochlea. I've heard of that.
Felix Poon: So maybe you know that the cochlea is an extraordinarily sensitive structure, and it's especially vulnerable to loud noises.
Marina Henke: Is this the one that's kind of shaped like a shell?
Felix Poon: Yeah…. Rick says it actually looks like a snail.
Marina Henke: Ooh.
Felix Poon: So anyways, why choose bone conduction headphones? One advantage is that they allow you to keep your ears free, like Nate said, so you can hear the world around you. And Rick owns a pair himself.
Rick Neitzel: I use them to go exercise. I like to be able to monitor my surroundings, make sure I'm not going to be run over by a car coming up from behind me.
Marina Henke: Because you could hear a car if it was behind you? It still like it, doesn't it doesn't block ou?
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. Because essentially your ears are open because remember… the actual headphone itself is like transmitting sound through your cheekbones. So you can both like hear… it's very weird if you ever try them. You can both hear the music and you can hear everything else that's happening.
Felix Poon: I will say, once I learned about these headphones, now I'm seeing them everywhere. I was like, oh, that person's wearing bone conduction headphones. Oh, that person has bone conduction headphones too.
Marina Henke: My mind is blown.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, it's cool.
Felix Poon: But there are some downsides potentially. A couple features of bone conduction headphones might actually lead you to turn up the volume. For one, Rick says the sound just isn't as good, especially when it comes to low frequencies.
Rick Neitzel: So the bass just isn't going to be as rich and powerful as it is with an earbud or headphone.
Felix Poon: And then another issue with bone conduction headphones can come up in loud environments like a subway, for example. You know, the intent is to leave your ears free. But that, of course means…
Rick Neitzel: They are not going to protect you from that outside sound. And in fact, you're going to need to listen at a higher volume to overcome that sound.
Marina Henke: Yeah. So like subways passing me by, I hear that really loud subway AND I'm hearing the music I'm listening to.
Felix Poon: Right. So if you want to hear it, you got to turn it up, which is all gonna hit your super sensitive cochlea. So to answer Shana's question, bone conduction headphones, they're not necessarily better for hearing loss. And in fact, sometimes they're worse.
Marina Henke: You've taken me on a ride, Felix. I started this so excited. And now I'm less excited....
Nate Hegyi: Do you think that's why I have to listen to my headphones so loud? Is it because I used bone conduction headphones for so long, and I was just, like, blasting them?
Felix Poon: You do have some hearing loss, Nate.
Marina Henke: We all know it to be true!
Nate Hegyi: Uh. Huh. Yep.
Felix Poon: Well, thankfully, Rick has some tips for us, regardless of what kind of headphones we have.
Marina Henke: Okay
Felix Poon: So first thing your surroundings matter. Rick says it's safest to use bone conduction headphones in quieter places, not in subway stations. Maybe you're out on a trail, you want to hear the birds. And, if you are in noisy environments, Rick suggests maybe investing in a pair of noise canceling headphones instead. That way you can keep the volume low and still have a good listening experience. Rick points out that there's different apps and settings on your smartphones that you can monitor and track your listening habits that tell you if you're approaching unsafe volumes over time, as well as like automatically reduce loud sounds from your phone. And then a final tip is… regardless of what type of headphones you're using.
Rick Neitzel: Don't listen all day long. It's important for your ears to get a break.
Nate Hegyi: Well, we're all screwed then.
Marina Henke: We are wearing headphones right now.
Nate HegyI: – now.
Marina Henke: I did have an audio tip told to me that I do think could help people even that aren't, you know, wearing headphones eight hours a day, which if someone said whatever you're listening to, start at a volume where you can't hear it at all, and then start like turning it up. And the second you can hear it in a way that makes sense, that's the volume that you should listen.
Felix Poon: Yeah. Especially after doing this piece, I got kind of like paranoid about my own ear health. So I started doing that. Except I kind of went the opposite direction. I like started wherever my volume was and I went down until I was like, oh, I've hit a point where I can't really hear what's going on, and then plus like one volume to get it back up to audible again.
Nate Hegyi: I literally just did that right now. I went to my headphones and I was like, turn them down until I can't hear them and turn them back up just enough.
Marina Henke: And this marks the first time Nate has ever heard volume at an appropriate level. [laughs]
[MUX IN: Tilly’s Delight]
Nate Hegyi: Alrighty. We are gonna take a quick break. But first, for our next roundup, we are looking for questions all about the cold. Think snow science, arctic ecology, frozen food. You can leave us a voicemail on our hotline 1-844-GO-OTTER. Or you can email us. We love voice memos. Send them to outsidein@nhpr.org.
Felix Poon: Speaking of frozen foods, I'd like a question about TV dinners. So nostalgic.
Nate Hegyi: That's going to be in the show notes as well. Stick around.
AD BREAK
Nate Hegyi: Hello, hello. From NHPR, this is Outside/In a show where curiosity in the natural world collide. I'm your host, Nate Hegyi. We got producers Marina Henke and Felix Poon with us. We've talked salmon, we've talked bones. What do we have next, Marina?
Marina Henke: This next question we have, it comes from Amelia, who actually is the same person who asked the zombie question, and she wanted to know whether those giant pumpkins that you see during Halloween are edible. So first off, do you two… do you two know what I'm talking about?
Felix Poon: Yes, they give me the heebie jeebies.
Nate Hegyi: Really?
Felix Poon: They're just too big. It just feels uncomfortable.
Nate Hegyi: Well, I've always, I've always felt like whenever a vegetable grows, like, too big, it like loses its flavor. You know, like really big tomatoes just don't taste as good as, like, a tiny little cherry tomato.
Felix Poon: Yeah.
Marina Henke: You two are just… you're walking your way into the answer because what I can tell you is that these massive pumpkins, yes, they totally are edible. It's just that they don't taste that good.
Felix Poon: But wait who's eating Halloween pumpkins to begin with?
Nate Hegyi: Well you don't want them to go to waste!
Felix Poon: That's exactly what happened to them, though. They all go to waste!
Marina Henke: I know, and that's a tragedy because smaller pumpkins are more close to baking pumpkins, right? Either of these pumpkins, the seeds are really good. That's what I used to eat growing up during Halloween.
Nate Hegyi: Yep, same.
Marina Henke: But yeah, so, I mean, this does not just apply to these massive, scary, decorative pumpkins. It is also that weird zucchini that your friend gives you that's like, “this was the biggest one in my garden!” And then you cook it and you're like, this is so bad.
Felix Poon: They're pawning it off to you because they don't want it.
Marina Henke: So Amelia, yes, you can eat it. It's just not going to be that good. To hit that idea home… the current record holding largest pumpkin, it's actually 3,156 pounds, probably terrifying for Felix to imagine.
Felix Poon: Quivering just thinking about it.
Marina Henke: And later this year. It is not going to be fed to humans. It will probably just end up in a compost bin.
Nate Hegyi: That makes sense. That makes a ton of sense.
[MUX: A Cradle Song]
Marina Henke: All right, so our final Halloween question, it comes from Meg in Goffstown, New Hampshire. Here we go.
Meg: I've heard a lot about the folklore of the will o’ the wisp. I wonder if you guys could look into the science behind this superstition of the ghostly lights that lead us astray. Thanks.
Felix Poon: Wait, what is this?
Nate Hegyi: I've never heard of that before.
Marina Henke: So I had also never heard of these. But will o’ the wisps are these mysterious lights that pop up at night in bogs, swamps, sometimes over cemeteries. They show up in the folklore of lots of different cultures under tons of different names: swamp lights, ignis fatuus, even jack -o’-lanterns. For example here do you guys wanna see… they are in a famous painting. What do you guys see?
Felix Poon: This is a fun picture… I'm really drawn to the style of the artwork here. It looks like it was, like, painted or something.
Marina Henke: Okay, keep it going!
Nate Hegyi: Okay, so essentially we see, uh, two people…
Felix Poon: One is wearing red, one is wearing all brown…
Nate Hegyi: Yep. Staring off at these goofballs. Uh, in the far right that are all, like, kind of spirits… like…
Felix Poon: They're kind of dancing around a tree.
Nate Hegyi: Wispy ghost dancers, dancing around a tree as, like, the moon is just rising. It's actually a really cool image.
Marina Henke: Okay. Yeah. So it's a painting from 1901. It is called “The Will o’ the Wisp Dance” and it depicts a scene that comes up all over history. This is from the famous tragic play of “Faust.” If anybody knows about it?
Felix Poon: No.
Nate Hegyi: Nope.
Felix Poon: Unfortunately.
Marina Henke: Okaaaaay. Well, all this is to say will-o’-the wisps are so widespread across so many cultures there’s genuine good reason to believe there’s some scientific explanation for them. And it turns out that people have been looking for that answer for a long time. Including two names you might recognize. Thomas Paine and George Washington.
[MUX IN, Small World Reveals]
Nate Hegyi: I know both of those from history.
Felix Poon: Yeah.
Marina Henke: So I want you guys to picture this. In 1783, Thomas Paine and George Washington, they are dangling torches over a river while a group of soldiers right next to them are sort of mucking up the riverbed with these long sticks. There's bubbles bubbling up from the river, and then these torches, poof, they light on fire.
Nate Hegyi: Whoa!
Felix Poon: Huh?
Marina Henke: I heard this, and I did think, like, aren't they supposed to be founding the country? You know?
Nate Hegyi: Instead of mucking around in a river.
Felix Poon: This is important work. It's for science!
Marina Henke: Okay, Felix, you would have.... these guys would have liked you because they also said this is for science! Their theory was that the will o’ the wisps were caused by travelers' torches as they were walking through these places, igniting methane that was bubbling up from decomposing materials underground.
Nate Hegyi: Interesting.
[MUX fades]
Richard Zare: I'm not telling you that there's nothing to what people say. I'm just telling you it's not the whole truth.
Felix Poon: Oooooh, not the whole truth!
Marina Henke: Yeah. So when I started my conversation with this guy Richard Zare, he's a chemist at Stanford, I immediately realized I was like, oh, I am walking into somewhat of a debate here.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah.
Marina Henke: So Richard, he doesn't reject their hypothesis. He just doesn't think that it's the explanation for most of the will of the wisp sightings.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Marina Henke: And one of his reasons is because how would that hypothesis explain modern day sightings? You know, like Nate, Felix, are you guys using torches to get around?
Felix Poon: No.
Nate Hegyi: You guys aren't?
Felix Poon: Okay. Apparently Nate is. [Laughs]
Marina Henke: So Richard thinks that these lights could be sparked from a way more ubiquitous source than torches. He thinks they could be ignited by water.
Nate Hegyi: Whoa.
Richard Zare: We generally think of water as being neutral and benign. And here I'm telling you a paradox, that you can actually make a fire with water.
Marina Henke: So I'm not going to get us too deep into the finer details of chemistry. But to understand this, what you do need to know is something called the Leonard Effect.
Nate Hegyi: The Leonard Effect.
Felix Poon: Okay.
Marina Henke: What the Leonard Effect states is it says that water droplets, tinnnnny little water droplets carry a charge, right? And so a really small water droplet carries a negative charge, and a slightly larger water droplet carries a positive charge.
Nate Hegyi: Okay.
Richard Zare: And when they're close together, big electric field electron jumps.
Marina Henke: So the jumping of these electrons, right, between negative and positively charged droplets, it creates a spark. And Richard has given the spark a name.
Richard Zare: Microlightning! It's enough to actually cause a fire if you have a combustible gas around.
Nate Hegyi: That's crazy!
Marina Henke: Yeah let us think about that. Right. Like, lo and behold, what are places that have methane that is like kind of belching up from underground?
Nate Hegyi: Swamps and wetlands.
Marina Henke: And cemeteries, which is kind of gross.
Felix Poon: Oh.
Nate Hegyi: Oh. That's gross.
Marina Henke: So what's basically happening here is that the bubbles of gas are themselves the source of these teeny tiny water droplets.
Richard Zare: The gas bubble bubbles through, comes to the surface bursts, and that gives droplets, and you have sparks. And that spark sets off the gas!
Nate Hegyi: Cooooool.
Marina Henke: It is cool and it goes way beyond any creepy stories or even any of these late night experiments by these founding fathers.
Richard Zare: This also explains all types of other phenomena that people wonder about.
Marina Henke: I want you all to think about grain elevator explosions. And this one legitimately blew my mind. Richard thinks that there is good reason to believe that this could be the origin of life itself on planet earth.
Nate Hegyi: Whoa.
Marina Henke: Basically, there's no absolute consensus yet of what sparked Earth's first organic molecules forming. Do you guys want to guess what Richard thinks formed that spark?
Nate Hegyi: It's water?
Marina Henke: Yeah.
[MUX IN, Balti]
Richard Zare: This stuff, which first sounds like it's… I don't know, fun and trivial… may actually be profound.
Felix Poon: I guess it makes sense why, like, we're kind of spooked out by like death and decay because it does these weird things.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah. It also is like, it to me, explains maybe like the origins of spirits and things like that. Because if you've got like blue lights fluttering about over a cemetery, you're like, that's ghosts! And ghosts kind of look like that. You know?
Marina Henke: Richard said to me that sometimes this feels like it deflates the creepiness of these stories, but I actually think it's like… the science of this feels so perplexingly weirdly wonderful that I'm like, this feels just as creepy! Science is just creepy.
Nate Hegyi: Yeah, yeah.
Marina Henke: Like zombies are creepy and little snail bones are creepy.
Nate Hegyi: And water fire is creepy.
Felix Poon: In a very fun, delightful way, though.
CREDITS
[MUX IN, Haunted Playhouse]
Nate Hegyi: That is it for this week's episode of Outside in. Remember, if you got a question for our Outside/Inbox, or maybe a will-o’-the wisp sighting you want to report, you can leave us a voicemail on our hotline 1-844-GO-OTTER. Or you can email us at outsidein@npr.org.
Marina Henke: Okay. I have Halloween rapid fire questions for you two. Are you ready?
Felix Poon: Yes, I'll try my best.
Marina Henke: Favorite candy?
Nate Hegyi: Uh, Twix bars.
Felix Poon: Uh, Snickers.
Marina Henke: Do you pass out candy?
Felix Poon: No.
Nate Hegyi: No.
Marina Henke: Absolute Grinches!!
Felix Poon: Kids don't come here!
Nate Hegyi: I have three dogs! They flip out anytime someone knocks on the door. Halloween's like the worst.
Nate Hegyi: Remember, we are on Patreon. Become a member there for just five bucks a month and you'll get ad free episodes. We want to give a special thanks to Jeff Umbro, one of our loyal Ravens.
Marina Henke: Okay, fan of costume parties?
Felix Poon: Love them.
Marina Henke. Felix! That's surprising.
Felix Poon: My favorite, though, was yeah, when I was maybe in my young 30s, I hosted one and a friend painted skull candies on her faces. That was fun because like, no prep required.
Nate Hegyi: This episode was recorded and mixed by Marina Henke, Felix Poon and me, your host, Nate Hegyi. It was edited by Taylor Quimby, our director of podcasts and Justine Paradis. Our team also includes Jessica Hunt. Music in the episode is from Blue Dot Sessions, Ryan James Carr, Stationary Sign, and Mary Riddle. Outside/In is a production of NHPR.
Marina Henke: Okay. Last one. Best childhood costume.
Felix Poon: My mom made me a cat costume from scratch with a tail and everything.
Nate Hegyi: Dead hockey referee.
Felix Poon: Oh, that's a good one.
Nate Hegyi: My dad was really into doing face makeup and so he would like, he made me look all dead. And then he put, he cut like a foam hockey puck in half and stuck it into my forehead. It was amazing.
Marina Henke: Mine was Frodo, which I really can't wait to tell Taylor about.
Nate Hegyi: That's amazing.
Felix Poon: Tell me there are pictures of this.
Marina Henke: I'll do my best.
Nate Hegyi: Outside/In is a production of NHPR.