Halloween Countdown 2018, Day 29
Oct. 29th, 2018 11:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eldritchhobbit
Here is a bit of spookiness for your day, 19th-century Iowa style.
“Jack o Lantern Lights”
The strange Jack o Lantern Lights in Iowa were always a mystery to me. They seemed to move thru the air, about ten feet above the earth. It was a soft light red glow and moved slowly.
People naturally had all kinds of ideas about them. Some thought they were spirits or symbols, others that they were some sort of life from deep in the earth. Some tried to follow them expecting to be led to some strange spot, where old Spanish or Indian treasure lay hidden. They were a good sign or a bad sign according to the one who watched them. It was an unearthly glow but this was party because of their unusual motion. People would say they were nothing but an overworked imagination but they were real to me. I can only explain them as pockets of luminous gas which escaped from some of the coal shafts and floated away. They would appear and disappear. But they remained more or less a mystery.
- Oral History of Abram C. Hardin, recorded by Harold J. Moss for the Federal Writer’s Project of the U.S. Government, 1938. Hardin saw the lights in Iowa, where he lived until 1875. Quoted from A Halloween Reader: Poems, Stories, and Plays for Halloweens Past, edited by Lesley Pratt Bannatyne (2004).
no subject
Date: 2018-10-30 01:36 am (UTC)*hugs*
no subject
Date: 2018-10-31 12:22 pm (UTC)*hugs back*