Fires can leave ghost lighting behind

The problem of ghost lights remaining after the fire has gone is well-known for /lightning/, but I have seen it for other fires too. I had a big fire in a jungle and now that area is riddled with phantom light sources. This fire burned for many game days and I generally stayed out of the area until it had practically all burned out because of horrendous lag it caused, but it obviously gave many, many chances for this bug to manifest.

Caveat: While the fire finally finished burning its last few blocks in release 13w05b, the sites of the phantom lighting that still remain may be from while I was running earlier releases. Possibly months earlier, because I have no idea how long it's been since I last visited this part of the world.

(If you have an old world like mine, are there any established ways to force it to update a large area to catch glitches like these, or is the game engine supposed to do it automatically?)