A Ghost Story. A True Story.
Hovering above the deciduous and pines in the blue dark of a North Carolina night. An intense bright without cast. A light as only a light.
Moving in its rolling stillness. Organic, alive, this felt true to us both in the first moments. Our voices mute, our senses engulfed with a sudden wondering.
And it stayed above the trees for seconds that felt an hour. Then began to move along the line of pines. Consciously adjusting space and place, gently upwards and downwards, caressing the treetops without a touch.
The trees it seemed to know. The land. And the river and the night.
And it stopped. Nestled in a low nook between the great deep green palette against the rising horizon. Looking at us looking at it.
With its kind of eyes. An ancient awareness of our smallness of being and our desire to be by ourselves within the nightscape. Our wanting suddenly overwhelmed as trespass.
And it moved with a slowness from the nook and rose higher still and its bright rolled in both directions, with an outer and an inner pulse center focused. The size of a campfire round at middle, the edges soft sprawled, the glowing only diffused at the very ends of its place. And then it was gone, a gentle disappearance.
I felt without weight. Lost the shape of myself folded in the folding canvas on my camping chair. As if I was without bone, merely of water and of blood without vessel.
I spoke first, without breath. Asking M the simple ask. And there was a very long pause as we were both looking and waiting.
And she said it was something that knew us and knew the people that had come before us and the people before them. And knew the first people who brought all the generations. And knew the land and the river and the night.
It was the eve of the great eclipse of 2017. We had traveled to Totality. To the far west of North Carolina, staying in an old tiny cabin in an older campground to sprawl far from the crowds to watch the sun fall black behind to turn the day into a night.
And late on this eve, we took our chairs into an open field to see the stars. Low in the valley, surrounded by the ancient Pisgah mountains and forest. We could hear the quiet of the French Broad, the oldest river, many say.
If not the oldest, one of the three oldest. It is this old, this way of the water. And one of the very few in all of the Northern Americas that carves its path northward.
And there are so many who have seen the light as we saw the light. Some speak of the blue ghost fireflies, and others tell tall tales and lies of Cherokee maidens and don’t forget the aliens and UFOs. So much has been said, so much has been told about this light.
I do not know what to tell. Only to say that we know this light. Saw this light.
Hovering above the deciduous and pines in the blue dark of a North Carolina night.
1. Cover photo design by Author. From a Nathan Anderson photo, Unsplash.
2. The cabin we shared along the French Broad River. Photo by Author.
3. The campground had many of these odd scarecrows through the grounds. The field behind is where we saw the light. The proprietor went quiet when we asked about the light. Then told us it was probably fireflies. That's my photo, too.
© Copyright William Hazel, 2024
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