"Haint Lights"

[ER]

In late childhood and my teens I lived next to an elderly Appalachian woman and I used to love to listen to her stories of residing in West Virginia as a child before World War Two, and one she'd tell me around Halloween involved something she called "haint lights" which she said people told her were the ghosts of Indians.

She said they'd see them on occasion walking home from church or town on dark nights, floating at a distance through the woods, sometimes above the trees, sometimes near the ground, sometimes moving about as fast as a person could walk, and sometimes zipping faster than a deer could run, but never did they come close to anyone, always they seemed "at a distance," even if the children chased after them.

She said usually the lights were pale white but other colors could turn up too, golds and oranges and even some that were rose-hued. This was before electricity was found in most homes in the countryside of West Virginia and there were no roads for cars that deep in the hills, and besides, her grandparents told her about seeing these lights when they were children.

I asked her how often she saw these and she said, "Maybe a dozen times."

I believe she was telling me the truth and have sometimes tried to figure out if there was a natural explanation, like swamp gas, but still to hear her lean close and tell me about "haint lights" and know she was as mystified by what she saw as I was to hear about it made for spooky fun stories.

I miss her.

[RCMerchant]

NO ONE WILL EVER KNOW.

Moohoohahaha....!

[Alex]

Possibly Will-o-the-Wisps?

[Allhallowsday]

"Haint" is an old-fashioned expression from "hillbillies".  You never hear it used in the northeast, I know the term from reading fiction...

[ER]

Yeah, she had a charming down home accent and a great vocabulary. She'd say "warsh" laundry, and "poosh" for push, and Sunday afternoons she called "long afternoons" and in one expression I liked, her father's sisters were called her "good aunts" and her mom's sisters were her "close aunts."

She'd use that expression about everyone's family, saying, "They're on my close side, not my good side."

I thought that was neat and still believe English needs a way to tell which side of the family relatives are on instead of uncle and cousin and aunt fitting each side and having to say, "my aunt on my dad's side."

Oh! And she called bodies of water" ponds," even if they were massive, like there's a fairly big impoundment near where we lived then, 3500 acres, and to her it was a pond, even though I think of ponds as small things in farmer's back yards and memorial parks and the like.

I'm glad I knew her.

She's also the one though whose funeral I've referenced, and how the genuine mountain holy rollers---literally, they rolled, I am NOT kidding, thrashed on the church floor---clearly didn't want my dad and me there deflining their Pentecostal service in 2011 and I think they truly believed everything they ever heard about the Catholic Church and did NOT like Catholics, even though I could have protested I was not much of one if at all. 

I was pregnant then and I got asked in this snide, knowing way "So how many Catholic kids you brought into the world now?" (Even though they seemed to have like five and more children per family.)

We got out of there well before sundown, depriving us of a chance to see a haint light.