A fishing pole shot up, slapped one boy’s leg, and leaped into the water. “Wehooked it!” he cried. It seemed true. As if the witchy light were a swimming wizard who had snatched their line, it and their pole had started following its wake. The light took another bend under the water and came back, this time a bit slower. It shook the boat even harder, splashing in water and pitching one boy on top of the other. Then the unknown force let them go, and they paddled madly for the shore. The light headed in another direction and crept out of the water like an animal. The little fire on the bank started up again, and a shadow form beside it shook like a dog shedding water.
They hauled up the boat, left their catch, and ran to the nearest boy’s home, where they gasped out their story. The father listened impassively and at the end said, “Did you remember to bring the suckers for the cats?” His eyes twinkled above his pipe. He knew they had been teased by a witch light. Mojave-dry wit is an Iroquois characteristic.
ONONDAGA WITCH LIGHTS
Onondaga faith keeper Tony Gonyea is a prominent teacher, elder, and activist whose home base is the reservation near Syracuse. In 2004, I ran into him in a Syracuse bookstore, the legendary Seven Rays, and asked him about witch lights.
Tony started by recalling that he grew up in a home under a hill that was locally famous for these lights, a little like Ga’hai Hill near Salamanca. He disclosed few details, but conceded that some lights had been spotted there in living memory. “My brothers and sisters used to see them all the time when we were kids,” he said. Once they even saw one bouncing down the hill and crossing the yard.
Tony remembered the night that he and a friend had spotted a brilliant light sphere coming down the same wooded hill. It should have been zigzagging because of the dense trees, but its course was as fast and smooth as if it had been immaterial. It couldn’t have been a motorcycle with a single headlight, not moving like that through those woods.
Years later, Tony saw one of these lights, this one bright blue, on the same hill. An adult by then, he was walking home from work in Lafayette at the end of day when he saw it. He studied it as long as he could see it. Then it disappeared like a match burning out, and he took off running to the exact spot. He found what he was sure was the place, a clearing as naturally circular as if the trees had parted in their growth to leave a nurturing space. This would have been a spot the old-timers might have called “a Little People place.”
I pressured him for more details. I asked him why we only hear about the lights in certain hot locations. “I’d say the witch lights are all over the state,” he reflected. “People kind of pay attention to things at a different rate.”
A METAPHYSICAL CONTRACT
Generally good-natured supernatural characters like the European and Native American Little People love it when someone makes a kindly gesture toward them, and they will often dispense good fortune to the giver. Many sinister supernaturals, though, in world folklore can act against someone only after a similar overture. When the unsuspecting human being either offers hospitality to the supernatural one or accepts it in return, that exchange becomes the signature on a metaphysical contract. The gesture that seals the deal can be simple and surprising, but this stricture—the fact that an invitation must be made and accepted—is one of the few fixed protections we mortals have.
Also like the European fairies, the Iroquois Little People are sometimes associated with strange lights, usually different in size, shape, and behavior from the mistrusted witch lights. One must not be treated as the other.
The Girl Who Fed the Witch Lights
One family on the Tonawanda Reservation lived near a railroad bed by which they saw these ga’hai often on winter nights. They thought of them as no more sinister or conscious than supernatural wildlife. As a joke in the 1980s, another child told one of the family’s daughters that these witch lights were the Little People. The girl“fed” the witch lights, probably by leaving leftovers at spots outside the home where they had been seen.
The lights appeared more often and steadily nearer the house. The neighborhood was soon on edge. One night a neighbor called and told the girl’s mother to look out the kitchen window. She pulled back the curtain and was shocked to see a handful of the lights hovering five feet from the house, as if waiting for someone to open a door and ask them in for a meal. The closest light held a faint, hollow human face. This was an emergency.
One of their neighbors was a Navaho man people remembered only as Marvin. He had married a woman of the Tonawanda Reservation, and he must have seen something of the lights in his own native Southwest. For four nights he camped around the house of the girl who fed the witch lights—burning tobacco, offering prayers, and conducting ceremonies. He couldn’t keep the lights from their habits of favoring train tracks, hills, and winter nights, but they stayed away from this house after that. A worthy medicine man, this Marvin.
GHOSTLY WALKS AND PHANTOM HOSTS
The grandfather of one of my Mohawk confidants was a farmer on the Tonawanda Reservation. In the summers, he and his hands worked till darkness every day in his field near Judge Road. One July dusk, three of them were shutting off the machines in
