Fairie Fire

It was a cold night in early springtime outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on a road named Coal Pit Hollow. Me and my friend Dan were off to the local bar. We decided to stop and smoke a cigarette since he didn’t allow people to smoke in his car. As we stopped on that dark, twisty road, we began to notice these firefly looking objects moving around in the woods. Only fireflies are a greenish yellow when they lit up, these were red, purple, orange and yellow when they lit up. Now here comes the weird thing! They started moving closer and closer to us so we thought they were some kind of insect. I went to the car and got the flashlight. I shined it on one that had just lit up about four feet away. There was nothing there, no insect or anything else.... We started to get spooked since by now they had moved within a couple of feet. We decided to jump in the car and get the hell out of there. It seemed as if we had been surrounded by these little lights. We took a few people there who didn’t believe us and they saw them too. What these lights were, we still don’t know. Other stories have been told of that road as well. They were doing construction at the time, so maybe it was swamp gas (I hate that term) or something else perfectly mundane.... or maybe it was something supernatural... Whatever it was, it only lasted about three days and then the lights were never seen again.

Anonymous (10/12/97)

I have had a similar experience when I was growing up in St. Louis, MO. Back when I was about 12 years old, a local pharmaceutical company was offering 1 penny per firefly. Apparently there is a rare drug in the illuminating part of the insect which was being explored as a possible drug to fight cancer. All of the kids in my neighborhood pooled our efforts and earned enough money every week to get some ice cream on the weekend.

One particular night we were out catching fireflies, I caught a red flash out of the corner of my eye... I didn’t think anything of it until I saw it again. This time it was about 30 feet in front of me. I thought it was some type of rare class of firefly (kind of a mutation or something) and set out to catch it. The ‘insect’ (if that’s what it was...) would only stay lit for a second and would only flash once every 45 to 60 seconds (much slower than a normal firefly on a hot Missouri evening). I called over to a couple of my friends and they saw it too. We started to chase after it (thinking it might be worth more than normal to the drug company... we were big entrepreneurs!) and it led us towards the edge of a densely wooded area behind our houses. It was kind of dark, so we balked at going into the woods... Eventually we got our courage up and started in after it... About five or six steps in, though, we saw something that changed our minds.... The red light started flashing faster than before, and this time we saw not just one, but several.... maybe 5 or 6.... flash back in response. Also, instead of trying to elude us as it had been doing up to this point, the light seemed to be getting closer. In fact all of the red lights started getting nearer... Even though we were only twelve, all of us decided that this was highly unusual.... Not only had we never seen a red firefly before (much less 5 or 6), we had never seen one start flashing so dramatically different. We turned and ran (all of about 5 yards) out of the woods and back towards the houses.

After that night, we still went hunting for fireflies, but never into the woods after dark... We would sometimes swear that we had seen a red flasher off in the distance (like say 30 - 40 yards away), but we never again chased after one of these lights. Although we never got a good enough look at what might be making the red flash (unlike the above story, we never shined a flashlight on one... we never carried flashlights... they scared off the fireflies), it seems pretty unlikely that it was anything naturally occurring (unless of course red fireflies exist... I don't think so though...). The light seemed to be luring us into the woods and changed the frequency of their flashing once there... definitely not ‘swamp gas’ or anything else similar.

I am from Oklahoma, and we have these things which we call Spook Lights (exactly what was described in the stories). I myself have never seen them. But I have heard stories that they are supposedly the souls of dead children that have drowned, whether it be a swamp or a lake, and that they seem to frequent watery places. They are also know as Wil-O-the-Wisp or Wil-o-Wisp.

Jason (2/25/98)

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