ANOMALOUS LIGHT PHENOMENA
What is often called ALP (anomalous light phenomena) is commonly reported around the world. Regarded most often as signs of fairies or ghosts in European and Asian traditions, these earthbound mystery lights are among the most commonly reported sights at haunted locations. Like ghosts, they seem site specific, associated with particular areas that often have historic, religious, or geological peculiarity.
Two of the most prominent contemporary paranormal scholars started their careers in search of the answer to the UFO phenomenon, whose early peak was in the 1960s. British authors John Michell (1933–2009) and Paul Devereux found levels of complexity to the matter. Michell noticed general paranormal connections to UFOs, including the witness experience. People either witnessed the lights when they were suspiciously close to ancient sacred spaces or when the lights themselves were above these features.
Devereux backtracked on earlier reporting and reinterviewed witnesses cited in media reports. He noticed that a lot of things first reported as UFOs may not have been the classic sky lights presumed to be extraterrestrial vehicles, and that the eyewitnesses may have been reporting something different altogether. He concluded that a different type of phenomena was getting lumped in with UFOs, the confusion likely caused by news stories written by hasty and disbelieving newspaper and TV reporters. Many so-called UFO witnesses were describing more terrestrial types of lights—a European version of the Iroquois witch lights. Devereux decided that most of these “Earth Lights,” as he calls them, come from the natural energies of the earth. He separated them into categories:
Ball lighting. This is a many-colored nexus of light that manifests, cavorts, and then escapes. Once thought to be paranormal, ball lightning has been recently accepted as a real physical phenomenon. It often shows itself inside enclosed spaces like buildings or airplanes.
Will-o’-the-wisp. These mysterious lights seen at night or twilight over bogs, swamps, and marshes were personified in the British Isles as Will of the (lighted) Wisp, or sometimes Jack of the Lantern. Will (or Jack) was fated to wander the world’s lonely places with his woeful searchlight till the Judgment Day. The decay of organic matter and the subsequent oxidation of phosphine and methane in the air is one explanation for these lights.
Earthquake lights. Nicknamed EQLs, these strange lights manifest near the surface of the earth just before seismic disturbances. When tectonic plates grind beneath the surface, they create natural electrical charges, called piezoelectricity, which have been photographed and videotaped. It’s like the spark set off when steel hits flint. Though EQLs weren’t recognized by seismologists until the mid-1960s, Charles Fort (father of American phenomenalism, 1874–1932) listed appearances of them in his books as early as 1919.
The witch lights reported in Iroquois country include all three of these forms. Some act like natural ball lightning, starting in one place and moving irregularly to another. Others haunt marshy ground, and still others just might be the EQLs of Devereux’s third classification, trooping about the Onondaga Formation and many of the geological faults that underlie upstate New York. There are also witch lights in folklore that don’t fit into any of these categories. These the Iroquois might know better.
Like Walt Disney turning a house mouse into Mickey, folklore personifies natural phenomena, giving them character and personality, and spinning them into stories. Even if you believe that this is what has happened with the witch lights, regional traditions of sightings could also indicate some kind of metaphysical energy about sites or regions. When witch light appearances permeate a place, this is regarded as a sign of many spirits, as if there were once a battle or an old tradition of occultism.
THE HILLS OF ROCHESTER
Western New York has been Seneca country for at least a thousand years. Before the Seneca’s arrival, other Native Americans lived here, including communities of Algonquin on a couple of Rochester’s damp hills. The Algonquin’s heyday was probably during the European Middle Ages, around the 1200s and 1300s. It’s fairly certain that they were driven out or absorbed by the Seneca. We may never know exactly where any of the clash points were. But sites linked to battles and bygone populations attract supernatural folklore everywhere. It was no different along the Genesee River. For the Seneca, the five Rochester hills made a zone of spirits.
One of them, Oak Hill, has been leveled off and made into a country club. Highland Hill and Cobb’s Hill are recreation spaces today. The other two, Pinnacle Hill and Mount Hope, are the most interesting from paranormal perspectives. What do we do with pieces of land no one wants to live on? Sometimes we give them to the dead. This was the case with both hills.
First named Mount Monroe, Pinnacle Hill is the highest point in Rochester and just might be the object visible from Buffalo on the northeastern horizon at the end of Genesee Street in Joseph Ellicott’s (1760–1826) 1804 city plan, which is very likely Masonic. A lawyer, surveyor, and city planner, Ellicott’s name has surfaced in connection with mysticism many a time. (A prominent artist, lecturer, and self-described “urban shaman” in Buffalo, Franklin LaVoie has this and many other innovative theories about local landscape.) Pinnacle Hill hosts a church, park, St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Cemetery, and legacies of witch lights.
Mount Hope by the Genesee River may have been even more powerful. The Seneca didn’t cross the hill or the marshy area below it after dark. Even the white settlers drove carts and wagons far out of their way to avoid it. The much-storied Mount Hope cemetery has a huge late population, hosts of ghosts, and several proverbially haunted regions.
Strange lights have been reported at night about Mount Hope, floating, drifting, and hovering. Several buildings at the nearby University of Rochester are thought haunted, though the ghosts may be related to more recent events. Even the campus newspaper has reported various supernatural sightings over the years, not the least of which
