Ghost Light

I’ll share with you this little story, which might sound like pure fantasy, but I’ll stay true to the facts as faithfully and precisely as I can.

It was close to midnight, and my uncle Abel and I were getting ready to work in my grandfather’s cornfield. The property spanned nearly fifty acres of crops; right at the northern edge stood the house where we stayed during harvest season. We had only one combine harvester and a tractor to pull it. We’d been told to start working at night so we could finish the entire field by daylight. It might’ve looked like a big farm, but the truth was we didn’t have much money, so we tried to cut production costs wherever possible. Once the job was done, my grandfather would pay me enough to cover my expenses for the semester.

I was sixteen, and I felt particularly nervous that night because there was something eerie about the atmosphere—no moon, no wind, and an unsettling silence, broken only by the sound of the tractor and the harvester. There wasn’t a trace of urban life within sixty miles—no distant noises, no lights, not even from a road. The only illumination came from the two headlights of the tractor, which barely reached about a hundred yards ahead, and the faint glow from the house lights that barely touched the nearest rows of corn.

Before getting started, I stepped out onto the porch to get some air and adjust to the chill. As I stood there, staring up at the sky, I heard a sharp clinking noise, like a small stone hitting the wooden floor beneath me. Instinctively, I looked down, and in the dim light I thought I saw a small, smooth reddish pebble. I crouched to pick it up, but when I got close enough, to my surprise—there was nothing there. I ran my hand over the floorboards, searching, but found nothing. As I straightened up, I caught sight of something darting quickly across the field. It had no color, just the outline of a dark shadow—like the blur of a bat flitting through the night.

I took several deep breaths, trying to calm down. I wanted to call my uncle, but no words came out. After a few moments, I forced myself to think rationally to shake off the fear, and came to a satisfying conclusion: “The sound on the porch must’ve been caused by some brightly colored beetle. They’ve got hard exoskeletons that can make a sound like that when they hit something. I didn’t see it afterward because it probably flew off—and that’s what I saw moving out in the field.”

Even though I was still uneasy, my uncle’s presence was reassuring. He was an older man with gray hair, a kind voice, and a perpetual smile. He carried himself with the calm confidence of someone wise and dependable. Realizing this steadied me, so I went back inside to find him and start working. When I walked into the house, I saw him sitting thoughtfully in an armchair in the living room. As soon as he noticed me, he stood up briskly and said:

“Well, son, let’s get to work!”

Once aboard the tractor, we took the first row of furrows to begin the harvest. My job was to make sure a side chute collecting the corn cobs didn’t get clogged, spilling them outside the storage wagon. If it did, my uncle would stop the tractor, and I’d jump down to clear the jam before we carried on.

It was around three in the morning, and I was feeling good—only a couple of hours left until sunrise, and we’d already cleared about one-sixth of the field.

That satisfaction vanished suddenly when the tractor died completely—engine, lights, everything. Darkness swallowed us whole, and that suffocating silence returned, roaring in my ears. My uncle didn’t say a word. He just grabbed a flashlight, climbed down, and started checking the tractor. I stayed on board, staring out into the field.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, on the left, I thought I saw a small red dot floating in the air—like the ember of a cigarette burning in the dark. At first, I couldn’t tell how far away it was. I focused harder, and soon the red dot had grown to the size of a baseball. I called out, terrified:

“Uncle Abel! Uncle Abel! Abel…!”

By the third shout, he climbed back onto the tractor and said, a little annoyed,

“All right, what’s going on?”

Frozen with fear, I just pointed with my left hand toward the red sphere hovering over the field. When my uncle saw it, it was already the size of a basketball—or at least that’s how it looked.

We both stared in silence. Then, the sphere began to move—slowly—toward us. My heart was pounding so hard I could barely breathe. I saw my uncle fumble with the tractor’s controls; within seconds, the machine roared back to life. He turned one of the headlights toward the glowing orb. It began darting faster, side to side, in zigzags, as if it were dodging the beam. Then, in a swift, almost invisible motion, it rose about fifty feet above us, right in front of the tractor.

My uncle switched off the headlights, aimed them again toward where the sphere hovered, and then, suddenly, flipped them back on. A powerful beam hit the orb square in the center—and it exploded before our eyes, scattering red, yellow, and green sparks like fireworks, with a sharp screeching sound. When it faded, a single red point—just like the one I’d seen at first—moved quickly back toward the part of the field it had come from and vanished in the blink of an eye.

My heartbeat began to steady, but I still couldn’t say a word. My uncle looked at me and, with his calm smile, said:

“Don’t be scared, son. That was just a will-o’-the-wisp. When the sun comes up, we’ll go to the spot where it appeared and dig up the treasure that’s buried there…”