Death Parade

I was asking my mom to tell me Nepalese ghost stories because I like listening to ghost stories and I wanted to get to know a bit more about our culture.

One of the stories she told us about was this parade of floating fire balls

For example this would happen when someone dies, and when it's dark a fire will appear on the street. This is like a fireball that's floating, and from afar it looks as if somebody's holding a torch (which would be the fire). Then more fireballs (like things) appear behind like there's a small group following the first like a march, then this group of fireballs increase and looks like a festival march where there's lots of them.

It kind of reminded me of the Japanese ghost festival, or something like that where the ghosts or demons come together and walk holding lanterns.

When hearing this story me and my sister were like "okay, decent story" but our mom was like "this story's true, I saw it." We didn't really believe her because this was an odd story.

Then she told us how somebody in her village died and a few days later the phenomenon happened, and her and her siblings watched the parade from their second floor balcony. And she described it to be really beautiful but scary.

Now, me and my sister were like, you saw it from afar, maybe what she saw wasn't what it really was. I couldn't believe her but kind of had to as she watched it with her brothers and sisters so more than one person was watching it.

A moment later my dad came and mom asked him about the story and whether he'd seen one because apparently every Nepali kid has seen such thing then he casually said "yeah, me and my friends always watched it when it happened".

I was so confused. Dad continued and said how it was kind of scary but he finished it off by telling the whole family that there's a scientific reason for it, like apparently scientists from Nepal discovered that a "gas" is created from the dead bodies.

But the scientific explanation didn't make sense to me especially how my Dad's explanation was so vague.

I hope I see this phenomenon when I go to Nepal, but is anyone willing to explain the "scientific" point of view because I'm all open to your point of view.