More than four centuries ago and we still talk of St Elmo's fire.'

It was like a ship going down in a stormy sea, surrounded by St Elmo's fire.

There was a blue glow crackling over his right hand, like St Elmo's Fire.

As the aircraft approached its target altitude, the St Elmo's fire effect on the windscreen returned.

Spears of St Elmo's fire flickered around the pivot.

It glared with the witchy green light of St Elmo's fire drifting over a swamp after a still, muggy day.

He thought at first that it must be static electricity, something like St Elmo's Fire, but it remained calm and steady and unblinking.

But couldn't that crackling hair have been nothing more than the electrical discharge that Keith called corposant, St Elmo's Fire?

The colour of the sky, the northern lights, St Elmo's Fire, and the blue of sexually excited frogs are manifestations of orgone, he wrote.

St Elmo's fire were also seen during the 1955 Great Plains tornado outbreak in Kansas and Oklahoma (US).

The end of the discharge came with an audible crack which jumped the carpet fibres to rigid attention, dousing them in a phosphorescent wash of St Elmo's fire.

Presently we were back to something very like the St Elmo's fire position, for the most widely accepted view was that they must simply be some new form of natural electrical manifestation.

In the reprints, the name of the job agency is changed to "Help-for-hire" and certain book titles were also changed (such as St Elmo's Fire becoming Deep Secrets).

A typical work of this period, St Elmo's Fire (1944; New York, MoMA), contains strange organic formations suggestive of underwater life.

Boys, you got to be ready in every dialect with every shape and form to hex the St Elmo's fires, the balls of blue light that prowl the earth like sizzling cats.

There was a confused shout of 'Fire I' from the soldiers below, and we could see clearly the vivid discharge of light which radiated from the blades like St Elmo's fire.

Fires as the group name "Uilab" (Bingo; Duophonic Records, February 1998), Ui and Stereolab collaborating on versions of "St Elmo's Fire"

A ball of St Elmo's fire bounced back and forth amongst the walls of the labyrinth like a demented pinball, then, with a crackle of static, it shot straight up and disappeared.

Barlow's coffin stood at the far end, propped up against the wall like a mummy's sarcophagus, and the crest on it blazed coldly in the light they carried with them like St Elmo's fire.

Maybe Keith and George had been right, and all that I had been witnessing around Quaker Hill tonight was St Elmo's Fire, or some other kind of scientific phenomenon.

While it shared similarities with St Elmo's fire, the glow experienced was from the impact of ash particles on the leading edges of the aircraft, similar to that seen by operators of sandblasting equipment.

The fellow next to me was talking know-all about St Elmo's fire to a partner who had never heard of St Elmo and didn't feel she had missed anything, when the first one hit the water.

Parr's song "St Elmo's Fire (Man in Motion)" was wheelchair athlete Rick Hansen's anthem, helping him wheel 25,000 miles around the globe and raising awareness and money for spinal research.

But the light which comes from Bobbi's eyes is swamplike and somehow dreadful ... there is something rotted about it, like the drifting glow of St Elmo's fire in a swamp on a hot night.

On the Gouveneur-Generaal Loudon, this phenomenon (known to mariners as St Elmo's Fire) was even more extensive, and the native crew 'engaged themselves busily in putting out this phosphorescent light with their hands.