Great Balls of Fire

There have been a lot of thunderstorms moving through the area lately. It's been pretty damn hot and humid for spring, and it all seemed to culminate last night with the biggest thunderstorms I've seen in a long time.

We had a whopper of a storm around 5:30 yesterday evening - it was thundering and lightning for awhile then all hell broke loose. Dave just got home from work and was in the other room when the entire room lit up - I happened to be facing the window and saw the most massive streak of lightning I've ever seen in my life - it looked like it was right across the street. A second later was a boom that hurt my ears, rattled the house, and knocked out the electric.

Power outages where we live are not an uncommon occurance - you can pretty much fart in the wrong direction out this way and knock the power out. Unfortunately dinner was in the oven, so it was pretty much ruined. We waited until the worst of it was over, then drove to a nearby Italian place to eat. Funny enough, 5 miles away from where we just had an apocolyptic storm, they didn't even get rain.

The power went back on about 3 1/2 hours later, only to get knocked out again at about 11:30 last night. I went to bed at around 10:30 and was enjoying the light show in the sky. It was really humid and foggy, and what I originally thought was heat lightning was the onset of another whopper storm. Cragar was terrified, shaking and crying because the thunder was so freaking loud. I was happy an hour later when it was finally over. Unfortunately we were still without electric.

No electric meant no air conditioning running, and in no time I was sticky and sweaty. Sticky and sweaty makes for very uncomfortable sleeping, so I got up, went out to the living room, opened a window and laid on the couch. A little while later I heard Cragar barking because he wanted to come out, too, but didn't want to jump off the bed in the complete dark. I went back to the bedroom with a little flashlight so he could see to jump down and he followed me out into the living room. All the barking made me pretty much awake again, so I settled down into the recliner to have a smoke and a glass of water.

Our recliner faces the front window on the north side of the house. Across the street is all wooded, going up a pretty steep hill. I was looking blankly out the window - after all, I couldn't see a damn thing since all the power was out - when I saw a bobbing white light across the street in the woods. It was about the size of the head of a flashlight, I guess I'd call it tennis ball size. It was white, bright, and at times had a little green glow around it.

I immediately went to the window - my first thought was that there were several robberies close to our area lately and I was afraid it may have been someone walking around with a flashlight. And who on god's earth would be walking around the woods at 2:30AM? I saw the light for a couple of seconds then it went away. I was wide awake at this point, staring intently out the window and looking for any movement that would indicate a person out there.

A couple of minutes later I saw the bobbing light again, this time a little higher up the slope, moving horizontally then quickly jumping up and back at an angle. This was no person - there's no person that could move like that. I rubbed my eyes and quickly reminded myself that it was not vodka I was drinking earlier, it was water. But I just saw some kind of goddamn light in the woods across the street (during a power outage no less) twice in the last ten minutes!

I settled myself on the loveseat in front of the window, resting my chin and forearms on the windowsill and waited to see if it would come back again. I was running all kinds of logical explanations in my head: Could it have been a reflection of lights from a plane? Not unless the woods harbor hidden mirrors. Fireflies? Too early in the season, and the light was definitely too big for a bug. Bats from the nearby cave? Unless they're special phosphorescent bats, not likely.

I was trying to forget about all the Twilight Zone and Outer Limits episodes I watched as a kid when I saw it again. This time it was down near the road, bouncing along, then all of a sudden shot up high - almost to the tree line. The Twilight Zone episodes were creeping up to the forefront of my brain again as I saw this motherfucking bobbing light appear and disappear for the next half hour.

Finally I needed to take action to convince myself I was not going crazy. I woke Dave up, feeling guilty since he had to be up in a couple of hours from work, and told him about it. He came out into the living room and looked out the window. I was telling him about it - it was a bobbing white light, the size of a tennis ball, moving in sometimes linear, sometimes erratic patterns, in the woods across the street. For awhile nothing happened. I was starting to feel like I was losing my mind, that maybe I was seeing some kind of wierd reflection, when it came back. It was down by the road, then shot up at a 45 degree angle to the treeline again. I immediately was like, "There! You saw that, right?" Dave agreed he did see it, then waited a little bit longer to see it again. Sure enough it showed up again. We both agreed that there's no way on this earth that could have been a person, there were no such things as phosphorescent bats, and I was not losing my mind.

Dave decided since it clearly wasn't human and since Cragar wasn't going ballistic, it was no threat and he was taking his tired ass to bed. About 15 minutes later I followed, after having seen it another two or three times. But I had been watching that light appear and disappear for over an hour and I wanted to know what the hell it was.

After all was said and done, I probably only got 2 or 3 hours of sleep last night. When I got to work I told my boss that I was so very tempted to just call in and say I wouldn't be there. Then I told him the story. He told me there's such a thing as "globe lightning" or "ball lightning". It's really rare, but that could be what it was. So I looked it up on the internet and after wading through stories of Spooklights and discarnate entities, I came across actual descriptions of Ball Lightning.

I'm convinced that's what it was. The weather conditions were perfect, and even though there are many different theories as to the origin of ball lightning, the massive lightning strike across the street earlier in the night could have provoked it. Hell, it could have been going on for hours without my even seeing it. If that lightning struck the ground, vaporized various minerals in the soil (and given that land sits on top of a damn cave, it's fairly mineralized), excited them into a plasma state - whammo! instant lightning ball.

The bit of reading I did on ball lightning never mentioned people seeing it over prolonged periods of time - usual accounts were 10-15 seconds. Although the times I did see the bobbing ball of light were around 10 seconds in duration, they occured repeatedly, and god knows how long it kept popping up after I went to bed.

Given its rarity, I'm absolutely pissed at myself for not whipping out the camera or video camera. I told another guy at work about it - he's heard of ball lightning but has never seen it - he was so excited and wished he'd seen it, too. And I'm sure the NOAA or other weather outlet would have been interested in a video if I had the brain power to actually tape it.

I guess I consider myself fortunate I saw something so strange and rare, and after I post this entry, I'm taking up residence in the front window to see if there's any more lights bobbing around out there. I seriously doubt it, but hey, you never know.