Earth Light in Norfolk December 13, 2014
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
This site has sometimes given space to earth light stories. This particular example is perhaps the best Beach has come acros read. The author is rather verbose – ‘the hours sped by on rosy wing until the humming tongue of the great church clock told all the drowsy Market-town that it was midnight’ – and he is telling a story at second hand: though the strange run of details suggests to Beach that this might be his own experience. However, the inferences about the light are simply fascinating. We are in East Anglia in the nineteenth century [142-143]:
With this cheerful story [about to murder a local Scotsman] fresh upon his mind the youth was pushing more briskly on, when he observed upon the further confines of [Se’mere] common a bright light, moving steadily along at a fair walking pace, with just such a motion as would be imparted to the light of a lantern by a person in search of something he had lost. It instantly flashed across his mind that it would be some farmer going to visit his stock, or possibly a man in search of the belated beast he had heard blundering round the pond, and yet he thought it so strange at such a time of night and in such an out-of-the-way place for an honest man to be jogging round with a lantern that he paused involuntarily, and felt come upon him a queer kind of impulse to bawl out and ask what was the matter, an impulse, however, he immediately conquered, and then he felt as strange a determination to keep silence, for he observed the flickering light had suddenly altered its course, and was now coming straight across the common, bearing down full upon him.
Often witnesses claim that earth lights seems to be intelligent. This kind of change of direction or perception of human company is given as proof.
The light now appeared larger, brighter, and in its motion more steady, not unlike the unexpected gleam of a chaise with lamps low, which you have a difficulty in taking your horse meet coming end-on towards you at night upon a solitary road, but in this strange light, the coming of which was now awaited, there was no nucleus nor any rays, only a moving space of bluish-white light. On it came, and in an instant was within a few yards of him ; he saw distinctly, within the circle of its influence, the half-withered yellow blossoms on the dusty furze bushes, the pallid blades of grass upon the ground, and the blinking sprays of heather; and then, as it passed him on his right, so near he could almost have thrust his hand into it, he knew it was useless to address it, for there was no man in it, no lanthorn, nor any human agency, only a body of pale light moving along swiftly, as if with invisible feet, upon the ground, and in dead silence! When the thing had passed him he resumed his journey, and having mastered a mile of road in ten minutes, stopped and lighted a cigar – a sedative much needed.
Note Se’mere is probably Seamere near Hingham in Norfolk. Other earth light stories: drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com
30 Dec 2014: First up is Bruce, ‘Here, in the USA, the best known lights of this type are the Marfa Lights in west Texas. There are enough tomes in print and on the web to fill a large library with various interpretations of what the Marfa Lights are. I’ve never witnessed the Marfa Lights, so I can’t give an opinion of them. Not far south of me, in the mountains of North Carolina, there are the Brown Mountain Lights. When I was a boy we used to drive the Blue Ridge Parkway on short weekend vacations. There is a pull-off on the Parkway where the the lights can be observed. My Grandfather and I used to park there, with many other people, to see if we could spot them. I have seen them twice. It’s more of thrill to spot them than being a frightening experience. Growing up in the Appalachians, you become used to the mirages that are caused by inversions layers. Due to the deep valleys the inversion layers can become multi-layered, making objects at a distance seem larger, smaller or distorted. Where I grew up at there was a ridge about 4 miles away. It wasn’t exceptionally tall, about 500 feet above the valley. At certain times of the year, normally winter and early spring you would occasionally look over that way and the ridge would appear to be three to four times that height. It would always occur as a fast moving cold front replaced unseasonable warm air. I’ve heard that Brown Mountain Lights are caused by such inversions, but the area is also above deep faults below the Smoky Mountains. Earth lights or inversion? I’m not sure. The balls of light I saw seemed to behave like phenomena I had the fortune to see later in my mid-teens, ball lightning. The latter rolled by me and few other kids as a spring thunderstorm was moving in. It behaved in the same way as the Brown Mountain Lights I’d seen, in a bouncing like movement, but this orange red ball of light turned in a counterclockwise rotation between roughly 3 and 15 feet above the ground. I was no more than 8 feet away from it when it passed me. There were few unusual things I remember about it. (other than it just being there) It started as very small orb of bright greenish orange light descending from a low dark cloud, no more the 200 feet above the ground and not much further away. It moved at about jogging speed in a straight line, but in a rolling up and down motion as it approached. As it came closer it turned to the red-orange color I mentioned above. When it passed me, my guess is it was between the size of a basketball and a small beach ball. It seemed to go from an ball shape to a disk as it passed,rolling about 2 feet of the ground. It then disappeared behind a dense stand of small hemlocks that was between the group of us and a parking lot, still on it’s straight course. Not more than 5 seconds later there was loud boom. That roused us from our gobsmacked state to go see what happened. As far as I could tell it did nothing. No scorch marks on the vegetation or the ground and no damage to the cars. One very unusual thing, out of the ten or so of us who were watching, only 4 of us remembered the ball of light. The rest only remembered the report from behind the trees. Again, for me, it wasn’t a particularly frightening experience. I’d read about ball lighting when digging into what the Brown Mountain Lights could be after seeing them a few years before. The first thing I thought when I spotted the thing was, “Cool, ball lightning!”. From then on I was busy watching it and making mental notes. The entire encounter lasted no more than thirty seconds. My take on why only a few of us could remember seeing it a few seconds later is that I) The others were so overawed by the thing that the boom brought them out of it with no recall of thing. II) The four of us who could remember the entire episode were experiencing a group hallucination. III) There was an explosion of some type and the four of us created a false memory. or IV) It actually happened the way the four of us remembered. I’ve stuck with the last since the incident happened. The other three guys were bright and level headed and our stories matched up. That let me know that it wasn’t a subconscious desire to “see” ball lightning on my part. Also, I’ve occasionally seen two of the three from time to time over the decades. After the “Hello’s” and “How are you’s”, the topic always turns to the great Ball Lightning episode of 1973.’ Next is Invisible, ‘Well, your earth light story was a bit of deja vu. This story was told by my grandfather. It was about 1910. He and his brother Johnny were roaming around the land where the Galion [Ohio] Golf Course now stands. They were digging for something [just what he never said] and they were up to their eyebrows in the hole when they saw a lantern bobbing across the field. Johnny kind of squinted at it and neither of us could make out who it was that was carrying the lantern. Well, we both scrunched down in that hole and waited for the man or whoever he was to walk past. And he did, but when he was close enough for us to see who he was, there wasn’t nobody there! It was just a light bobbing along by itself. Johnny got so scared he got up out of that ditch and ran the three miles home.” Thanks to both!
