The Min Min light over the Min Min Hotel graveyard

The Min Min Hotel stood on the old coach road between Winton and Boulia, in western Queensland. It was a pub and mail change on Warenda Station land, with a small graveyard behind it. Today, says Boulia Shire Council, nothing remains except large areas of broken glass.

Legend gave the place a lurid past of a brothel, murders and corpses "tossed into the backyard". The records do not support it. Its licensee from 1915 was Agnes Evelyn Hasted.

The witness was a stockman whose name has not survived. He was riding from Warenda Station to Boulia. One version has him coming from Lucknow Station instead. At about 10 pm, on a somewhat cloudy night, he passed the hotel and its cemetery.

"I saw a strange glow appear right in the middle of the cemetery," runs his account as retold in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1947. The glow grew to the size of a small watermelon. In Richard Davis's telling, a ball of light rose from among the graves. It hovered as if getting its bearings. Then it darted towards him.

He spurred his horse toward Boulia. He looked back several times. The light was still following. It kept with him to the edge of town. Then it was gone.

Around midnight he burst into the Boulia police station, gabbling about being chased by a ghost. In Davis's version, the local constable calmed him and took his account. The Herald's version is less kind. The sergeant did not believe him, and "the whole town ragged the unfortunate man about the spook he had seen." No police record of the night has been found.

Even the date drifts. Most retellings say 1918. Davis says 1917. Others say about 1912, or the 1920s. Newspaper reports point to a hotel fire in early 1924, which would mean a 1918 rider passed a working hotel, not ruins. Davis himself doubts a horse could cover about 100 km in two hours, and the link between the stockman and the light's name has not been substantiated.

Others saw the light too. Henry Lamond, manager of Warenda Station, met one on the Warenda Road around 1912 and wrote about it in Walkabout in 1937. It was a "bulbous ball", too "green-glary" for acetylene, that passed him about 200 yards off and faded away. Lamond's horse was quite unperturbed.

In 2003 Professor John Pettigrew of the University of Queensland offered an optical answer. The Min Min light, he argued, is a mirage. A temperature inversion, a cold and dense layer of air near the ground, bends light from sources over the horizon, sometimes tens or even hundreds of kilometres away. Early stationary lights might be campfires. Later moving ones might be car headlights. In a field test, six observers watched the headlights of a car about 10 km away, behind higher ground, appear as a Min Min light. Skeptoid later argued that a common superior mirage fits better than the Fata Morgana Pettigrew named. Marsh gas, bioluminescent insects and a reflected grass fire have also been proposed.

Boulia held its first Min Min festival in 1976. The Min Min Encounter centre opened in 2000. Sightings have continued, including the Parsons family on the Boulia to Winton road in 2015. The light now stands beside the Marfa lights and the Hessdalen lights among the world's great ghost lights. The stockman's own words still lie in old newspaper pages, waiting to be read again.