The ritual history aside, this is a time for spooky stories, and there's a great (and true!) one in my family involving my wife Jeanette and her father, Ron. The story begins on a clear, warm summer night in the early 1990s when Jeanette was just a teenager. After her parents had gone to bed, she settled in to watch some late-night television. With the darkness of the room and the lateness of the hour, she felt as though she and the flickering screen were the only ones in the whole house. Even so, Jeanette began to perceive that, despite the seeming emptiness of the house, she was not alone. While the hair on the back of her neck stood and her heartbeat thudded in her chest, she began to see a ball of light hovering in the upper corner of the living room picture window. It was bright white, to the point of having a cold, bluish tint. According to Jeanette, it looked something like this:
A slight glimmer shivered through this sphere of light and it began to move, slowly and deliberately, across the exterior of the window. As Jeanette watched in silent shock, questions rippled through her mind. Could it be a car headlight from the distant road? Could it be someone holding a flashlight, possibly looking for a way in? Instantly, though, she knew the answers to each question: the light was too bright, close, and slow-moving to come from a car, and too high in the air to be a flashlight from a person. Seconds seemed to become an eternity as Jeanette sat on the couch staring at the light until she began to feel as though it was staring at her, almost as if it wanted to tell her something. As difficult as it was to believe, she felt as though the glowing ball was intelligent and purposeful. It wanted something.
Sheer terror finally imbued Jeanette’s limbs with strength and she overcame the paralysis of fear to race headlong back to her room and hide under the covers of her bed. Whether due to fear or disbelief, she said nothing the next morning of her experience, nor did she broach the subject for years afterward. The tale of what she saw that night did not surface until years later, when she was home from college visiting her family. After a night of reminiscing, she suddenly found herself describing the glowing ball, how deliberately and slowly it moved, of how it seemed purposeful, thoughtful, and, not least of all, frightening. She partly expected her parents to laugh or smile or perhaps make a joke. Instead, once the story was over, her father Ron looked a little pale. It turned out that he, too, had a tale to tell.
It happened when Ron was also a teenager. Alone in his room one night, he felt as though something was watching him, even staring at him. As he turned, there inside the room with him was a glowing ball of pure, white light. It hovered above, looking – he, too, felt as though it was looking – down at him like a beaming, glaring eye. After a moment of indecision, Ron ran from the room and raced outside to look up toward his window. He had been on the second floor and wondered if something outside was casting the light into his room. From below, though, he could see no source, no explanation for the sphere of light, nor could he think of any reason why it had appeared. By the time he returned up the stairs to peer cautiously into his room, it was dark inside. The glowing ball had gone.
As a teenager, Ron was also hesitant at first to talk about what he had seen. Would anyone believe him? Would his friends laugh at him? Could it all have just been his imagination? Time went by and Ron stopped thinking about his strange encounter.
A few years later, Ron and some of his friends were visiting an older man who claimed to possess psychic powers. Amid questions about the future, both in general and particular to each of the young, the supposed psychic suddenly turned to Ron and said, “You’ve been visited, haven’t you?” Taken aback, Ron could only furl his brow and squint at first. The psychic continued, “Something came to you, didn’t it?” Ron then related the story, about seeing the sphere of light floating in his room, the feeling of being watched, and the unlikelihood of an outside light creating the glowing ball. “That was a spirit,” the psychic concluded. “It came to you to tell you something. It has a message for you, and it will come back some day in the future.” After Ron was finished, he and Jeanette sat dumbfounded, wondering if, years apart, they had actually seen the same – well, they didn’t know what to call it. An entity? A spirit? An apparition? With so much unknown, they decided to label the experience and the story in a descriptive way, simply calling it “the glowing ball.”
There is a fair amount of paranormal literature out there on "glowing balls," or "orbs" as they are frequently called. One body of thought claims they are spirits and that the size and color are significant to the identity and disposition of the entity. Sometimes the orbs are enormous and fly through the air, as a sighting a year ago from Siberia claims in the video below.
Of course, there are plenty of potential non-paranormal explanations. For orbs that appear in photographs, lens or camera problems can account for the images. (Check out these orbs caught in photos to see if you agree.) In other cases, people have suggested that ball lightning could explain mysterious glowing orbs, though in some ways ball lightning is just as mysterious.
Whatever you think accounts for such sightings, I'm still brought back to the shared experience of Jeanette and Ron. What could it have been? The spookiest part of the whole tale, to me anyway, is how the experience passed from father to daughter. I wonder sometimes, as I say good-night to our boys, will it come back and visit the next generation?
Happy Halloween!
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