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Angel’s Glow — The Blessing That Caused Civil War Soldiers To Glow In The Dark
Fact, fiction, or supernatural?
The Battle of Shiloh resulted in 23,746 casualties from both sides over a brief two day engagement. Those numbers include 3,482 dead split almost evenly between the Union and the Confederacy. Shiloh would briefly be the bloodiest battle in United States history before being surpassed by other bloody affairs later in the war. It remains one of the worst days in US combat history.
After the battle, when thousands were lying wounded along the roads and in the camps of southern Tennessee something remarkable happened. When the sun went down some soldier’s wounds began to glow in the dark. Even more remarkable than that, the soldiers whose wounds were glowing were faring better than their counterparts. Something strange was happening.
At first, some people scoffed and called it superstition but the sheer number of wounded soldiers and the apparent glow quickly overrode that. The wounds were glowing but no one could figure out why.
Since the affected soldiers were surviving in greater numbers than those whose wounds did not glow the witnesses named the phenomenon Angel’s Glow. Surely this was something divine, a sign from God, that was touching the wounded.
What exactly was Angel’s Glow? Was it real? And if it was real, why did it occur?
Microscopic Lights
A pounding rain drenched the area in the days following the battle. Many soldiers sat in the cold, damp and mud waiting for medics to transfer them to field hospitals or permanent medical facilities. Mud and rain are not good conditions for wounded soldiers, but it was good for a specific species of bacteria. Over a hundred years after the battle in 2001, an intrepid student identified the cause of Angel’s Glow. Photorhabdus luminescens.
This special kind of bacteria is extremely rare and is connected to a particular kind of nematode. Those nematodes were present in the soil around Shiloh. The foul weather combined with the presence of these nematodes made conditions ripe for the multiplying of Photorhabdus luminescens after the Battle of Shiloh. Since the bacteria is bioluminescent it caused the wounds to…
