On Oct. 19th, 2007, user ionlylurkhere posted this thing on the now mostly defunct livejournal “ihasatardis”, which was basically a hub for Doctor Who memes.
I found it around 2014 back when I was still discovering the series and, realising a lot of links and images had died already, decided to archive everything I found funny on this blog. Saving “Ghostlight Explained” on my key was part of this attempt to save a dying part of the internet. Some friends on Discord asked me to re-upload it today.
I am not responsible for anything in there, please don’t shoot the messenger. I put the original credits at the end, and if the original authors are still out there, please make yourselves known, you magnificent people.
This shit is 60 screens long, so I’m putting it under a Read More.
Hell House had three bedrooms; the master bedroom that faced the street, the back bedroom, and the little bedroom, both of which faced the woods. The front room was where my grandparents slept, the back bedroom was my mother’s, and the little bedroom, or the red room as it would come to be called, was my aunt’s. She was around 2 years old when this started.
As my Papa tells it, my little aunt started waking up in the middle of the night very regularly. She would complain that ‘the red lights’ woke her up. As I have stated before, my grandfather was a fire captain and an ex marine, so after a week or so of this he decided to sleep in the room to solve the mystery of what was waking his daughter up. She was too young to articulate what she was seeing to him other than a ‘bright red light would wake her up.’
He laid down on the floor and waited while she when to sleep. At about 1:20a (which was always the most active time in Hell House) he was woken from brief slumber by a small, bright, red orb that he said flitted in from the window that faced the woods and started darting in circles around the room.
They never denied my aunt when she wanted to sleep in their room for fear of the light in the red room. I would become all too familiar with the red room myself… But that’s for another time.
In 1997 we went camping in the boot heel of Missouri with my Papa. So you can imagine the setting, imagine dense deciduous forests, rolling hills that were once mountains, deep valleys, and tons of small wildlife like chipmunks and squirrels. The summer was hot and humid. Sticky. There were 2 scary nights there at our campsite.
The first weird night was when the raccoons came. There were hundreds of shimmering raccoon eyes in the darkness, and as they god closer and braver my Papa moved us kids to the truck. But the real freaky thing happened on the second night. We all sat around the fire as night fell, when our camp was surrounded by shimmering green lights that rose from the ground to hover and dance at about adult chest height. They were lime green balls with shimmery sparkles around them. There were hundreds of them stretching back into the forest at all sides. It reminded Papa of the Red Room, so he felt in danger and put us kids in the truck again. I was both afraid and in awe.
It triggered a childhood obsession with researching orbs, will-o-wisps, and spook lights. I felt like they appeared so often in my life, and were so beautiful and widely experienced, there had to be something going on. While I sadly don’t yet know exactly what they are for sure, I have experienced such more malevolence in my life, will-o-wisps are a kind and lovely experience that does not ever send fear through me anymore. I appreciate them, but I am not pulled to figure them out anymore. They are a welcome mystery.
One of my mother’s favorite ghost stories is the Red Room, partially because of what her sister experienced, but mostly because of what I experienced when I was two years old, so this must have been in 1993. She was pregnant with my brother, and decided to spend the night with grandma, who had lived alone in Hell House for years. At that time, the red room had been repurposed as a nursery for me, and my soon to be brother. This was where I was laid down to sleep in a baby bed while my mom and grandma had coffee and chitchat at the kitchen table.
To mom’s surprise, I toddled into the kitchen at around 1:30a and asked her to tellthe bright lights in the room to leave me alone. Mom and grandma shared a terrified look and piled all of us into my mom’s van and we all spent the night in our first house, which had no paranormal activity at all, instead.
