Can atheists believe in ghosts?

Last Sunday at around two o'clock in the morning, me and my girlfriend were watching television in my grandmother’s house when we decided we would go outside to smoke a cigarette. It was somewhat cold so we decided that we would go out to the car and smoke our cigarettes there.

In the car I drove about half a mile down the road to a car park just off the village church. The church itself (pictured above) is fairly small and dates back to the thirteenth century. On its grounds there is a graveyard of a little more than 40 square meters in size.

We got out of the car and stood around smoking our cigarettes when, looking over the wall of the car park and into the graveyard, I noticed a pale blue light glowing gently from behind one of the large gravestones at the back of the cemetery. I pointed this out to my girlfriend who then noticed the light herself. We assumed at first that it was some sort of graveyard light which was on the blink. There was no rhyme or reason to the flicker of the light - it would glow for a few seconds before fading away almost to nothing. Then the glow would reappear, the brighter it got the stronger the colour blue was within the light itself. It would continue glowing for a time before fading to nothing – sometimes going straight out, other times slowly fading away. It was coming from a spot about 25 meters away from where we where standing.

After what was probably several minutes the light went out and didn’t reappear. We didn’t stick around as we were both somewhat unnerved. We had also finished our cigarettes and it was turning into quite a cold night.

I visited the church and its burial ground this afternoon to try and get an idea as to what we might have seen. I thought it may have been a light on a tombstone; perhaps a lamp that was on its last legs, the resulting inconsistent glow being the bulb in its death throes.

Looking around, however, I saw nothing apart from headstones in varying degrees of ruin. I came to the conclusion that the light had been coming from behind a group of gravestones in the newer part of the cemetery where the graves are fairly recent – from the year 2000 onwards.

As I looked around the area where we had seen the light, however, there was no sign of anything that might have omitted a glowing blue light. (I would also add that these were normal, run of the mill cigarettes we were smoking).

As a proud sceptic when it comes to all things "supernatural", I'm completely baffled as to what we saw.