Texas Spirits hit the road last weekend for a field trip to see the ghost light of Bragg Road in Saratoga, TX!
Bragg Road is this straight, 8-mile stretch of dirt road lined with trees on both sides and swamp on the other side of the trees. The road is just barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other going opposite directions IF one of the cars is stopped and pulled over to the side as far as they can go.
The reports are a glowing ball -- maybe the size of a tennis ball or a volleyball -- that can change colors from pale blue to yellow to greenish white, that shoots down the road, sometimes darting in and out of the trees, and sometimes even passing into and through cars that happen to be on the road. The ghost light can be differentiated from passing car headlights (about which I will talk in more detail shortly) by the fact that it moves up and down and sideways, varying in speed. The ghost light might, according to reports, zoom down the road toward you, darting in and out of the treeline, then pause maybe 15 feet in front of you, hover there for a minute or so, then shoot off faster than lightening, disappearing up into the night sky.
The backstory is less interesting...
See, whenever an area -- anywhere in the United States, like, anywhere -- with a ghost light, the legend is always one of 3 stories:
1. A railroad engineer/conductor was beheaded, and now he travels the tracks, carrying a lantern, looking for his head.
2. Some young lover was meant to meet some other young lover at a specific place, often so they could run off together and elope or something. But the other young lover was killed, and thereby failed to make the rendezvous, and now the one young lover wanders the area still, searching for his/her soul mate. (I don't remember what the specific size/shape of the ghost light is attributed to... maybe it's the young lover's ghost carrying a lantern for the search.)
3. There is something called the Will-O-The-Whisp that has something to do with unbaptized babies or something like that.
(I'm at work, so I can't be bothered to do the research to refresh my memory, lol.)
But wherever you are in the U.S., if you go to a place with a ghost light, you will get one of the first two back stories as "historical fact" to explain the ghost light. (I don't think people really go in for the Will-O-The-Wisp theory anymore.)
Well, the Bragg Road Ghost Light just mashed-up the first 2 stories -- just to cover all their bases, I suppose. ;P
HOWEVER...
The fact that people employ an age-old, oft-duplicated urban legend or folk tale as back story to explain a phenomenon DOES NOT negate the existence of the phenomenon. It just means that human nature is that people feel a little safer with weird stuff when they have a recognizable story to explain it. (It's similar to our need to name things and categorize them, even if the categories are as random as "normal" and "paranormal". It's simply a Human Thang.)
Making the Bragg Road Ghost Light more intriguing is the fact that Paula, founder of Texas Spirits Paranormal Investigations, ACTUALLY SAW THE LIGHT! :D
So you KNOW I was excited about this investigation!
[Quick Note: Please don't think that I blow off research and background in general. If I were making an official report or writing a chapter in a book or something, I would be much more thorough. But since this is a blog entry, I'm being much less formal. I'm just trying to convey the experience of this weekend here.]
More intriguing, still, is the fact that John investigated Bragg Rood, too, at a different time, was not there for Paula's experience, and did not experience the ghost light.
So two of the people whom I look up to as investigators have opposing experiences with Bragg Road! And I get to investigate it for myself now!!! :D
Stephanie and Mike picked me up from my casa at 10am, which was a really nice start to my Saturday morning. Then we hooked up with Jesse, Paula and John, and I rode out to Kountze (where we had hotel rooms booked, though Bragg Road is in Saratoga) with Paula and John. This is where I got to hear their past experiences investigating there, and then I got to talk their ears off about different paranormal stuff I usually don't have an opportunity to ask their takes on.
When we got to Kountze, we checked-in and got to meet our cheerleaders for the evening: Paula's sister had brought some friends to investigate Bragg Road with us! I call them "cheerleaders" because, at first, they talked to us as though we were celebrities, lol. It was a nice ego-boost. ;) It was also cool that these non-investigators were going with us because I would get to gage the investigator response to anything that happened against the lay-person response (for lack of a better way of describing it). In other words, when a door slams by itself in an abandoned asylum, normal folks run away, and investigators run toward the slamming door. So it would be cool, investigating Bragg Road for my first time, to have 2 different perspectives through which to view whatever we all experienced out there. (It's like 2 different sets of data gathered from the same experiment, or a scene in a movie shot from two different cameras at two different angles to the action.)
As it turned out, I ended up getting 2 shots at Bragg Road.
Phase 1:
It turns out that Bragg Road -- or "Ghost Road", as it is locally known -- is something of a hang-out on Saturday night. We spent several hours watching head lights make their way slowly down either side of the road. There were times when the lights, on either side, were so distant that the stretch of road we were on was really, really dark (except for the moon, which shone extremely bright with no street lamps or buildings around).
It was really cool, too! I got a kick out of walking up and down the road in the darkness, hearing something on the other side of the trees from time to time, imagining that I was going to catch a glimpse of Bigfoot disappearing deeper into the woods. (There were no reports of Sasquatch sightings, but a guy can hope, right?)
The heavy traffic during Phase 1 turned out to be quite useful. Car headlights and swamp gas (literally, swamp gas!) are two of the go-to debunk theories for the Bragg Road ghost light. The road lies between stretches of swamp, and the road lies between 2 stretches of highway. So seeing what headlights on the road looked like -- particularly as they looked when they were at the ends of the road -- was really informative.
So Phase 1 lasted a few hours, and really wasn't the slightest bit spooky, but was fun. And it gave me a nice sense of the road. A "feel" for it, if you will.
Phase 1 ended after a few hours of nothing happening and our guest investigators, having learned of a near-by cemetery and an old local legend about a hotel that burned down, decided they wanted to go explore (possibly) more fertile paranormal territory.
Jesse and I, and two of our guest investigators, spent quite some time wandering around intersection of Bragg Road and Old Bragg Road, looking for signs of at least a foundation where a hotel could be, even if it burned down decades ago.
No luck there.
We also swung by Sutton Cemetery for a peak. (You can't investigate Texas cemeteries after dark unless you have permission -- Texas cemeteries are off-limits to the public after sundown -- and we didn't have permission.
I believe it was around 1:00 am when we all got back to the hotel.
When we got back to the hotel, I stepped outside for a smoke, and reflected on the night. The whole day had been a lot of fun! It was very cool!
When I got back inside, I found that Jesse had been looking for me. Was I interested in going back to Bragg Road?
My response was something akin to "Hells yeah!"
Mike had work stuff he needed to do, so he and Stephanie stayed at the hotel. And Paula and John had investigated the site before, so I suspect that had something to do with their choice not to go back out tonight.
So the party for Phase 2 was Jesse, 3 of our guest investigators and myself.
The guest investigators, it turns out, BROUGHT FOOD, which they shared! :D Tasty sandwiches and muffins, and even brownies! :) So we ate a bite before heading back out to Bragg Road.
Paula let me borrow her car for the return trip... poor, silly woman. It's a stick-shift, and it's been years since I owned a stick-shift, but I didn't grind her gears too badly. ;P (I'm inserting this part of the story just to torment Paula, should she read this entry, lol.)
Phase 2 was when things got interesting...
Along the 8-mile stretch of road are approximately 4 niches where you can pull over and park or turn around. The road gets really rough at the north end of the road, and Paula's car rides low, so for this second trip, we intended to stay on the south half of Bragg Road. So we pulled into the first niche and parked.
The moon had disappeared now. All the traffic had cleared out, taking their Saturday night adventures elsewhere, apparently. So, as far as we could tell, it was only the 5 of us on Bragg Road now. The road was almost pitch black, except for the stars directly above us.
We started off walking north down the road.
We were, maybe, a quarter of a mile away from where we had parked when we saw a tiny pale-blue light down at the south end of the road, where we had entered it. The tiny blue light quickly split into 2 lights: headlights. A car was coming down the road toward us.
Bragg Road creates a sort of optical illusion -- things seem closer than they are. I speculate it's because we -- American, 21st Century human beings -- are simply not accustomed to looking at a straight road a mile or more longer. We've grown up seeing straight roads, but they never expand 8 miles! And it's 8 miles of trees, so there are no buildings or street lights to tell your brain "That's about 2 blocks away". The visual references we usually have are not provided here.
So -- thanks to all the traffic traveling up and down Bragg Road during Phase 1 of our investigation -- we knew it would be a long time before the car that had just entered the road would reach us.
Maybe 3 seconds had passed before we turned back toward the south end of the road and saw that the headlights had disappeared.
Well, that was odd, we all agreed.
There was nowhere the car could have turned into because there were no turns on the road, except for those 4 niches. Had they been traveling faster than most, and pulled in where we had parked Paula's car?
Jesse said, "Paula's car is locked, right?"
"Um... no." We were, as far as I could tell, alone on the road. I hadn't thought we needed to lock Paula's car.
So Jesse and I head back for the niche, flashlights pointed ahead of us. We weren't running, but we weren't strolling, either. Most likely, no one visiting the road this late was looking for trouble, and they hadn't been there long enough to make a thorough search of Paula's car, even if they...
Paula's car sat alone in the dark niche, unmolested.
There were no other vehicles in sight.
We shone out flashlights back down south, looking for evidence of the vehicle we had seen (we thought) pull onto Bragg Road. Some of the cars, earlier that night, would drive down the road with only their parking lights on. Since they we forced (because of the uneven dirt road) to travel so slowly, there was very little chance of a mishap. Others traveled with their lights off completely. Again, as long as they didn't drive off the road into the trees, it was unlikely there would be any trouble. Also, the trees lining either side of the road were so dense that it was impossible for a car to stray far. (They would have to pay to have the dent knocked out of their bumper, but that was about the worst likely to happen. There was no chance they were going off-roading from Bragg Road.)
But our flashlights didn't catch the glimmer of any vehicles on their way up the road.
That wasn't surprising, though, as out flashlight beams, while impressive, were not likely to reach half a mile, much less a mile down the dark road. But another thing we had learned from Phase 1 of the night was that you could trust your ears on Bragg Road. Even when a car was creeping up on us without its lights earlier in the evening, we could still hear the low rumble of its engine. Even when you can't see it, you can hear that there is a car somewhere around you.
But Bragg Road was silent, as well.
We discussed it, and the consensus was that the only logical possibility for a car to disappear was by backing out, only it would have taken the car longer to back out than the time it took for it to disappear. In all honesty, the car really couldn't have reached the niche in which we were now standing in the time it took for the lights to disappear.
It was a genuine mystery.
It wasn't anything like the reports we had heard of the Bragg Road Ghost Light, and we all agreed that the light looked like headlights.
Let's call this "Experience #1".
So, we decided to drive Paula's car north, to the next niche, and park there. This way, we could explore the road further north than we had been able to thus far tonight, or would be able to if we simply kept walking north from the previous niche.
Once again, we set out wandering northward.
I still hadn't seen the Headless Horseman or Bigfoot, but the walk continued to be cool.
One of the guest investigators, Donna, slowly became convinced she was seeing something up ahead. It looked to her like the orange "cherry" of a cigarette. Like, maybe, someone way down the road, standing there and smoking.
Or something.
She and I found ourselves walking a bit faster, unconsciously sort of racing to find out what it was that she could see and the rest of us could not.
But then Jesse made a point: If this thing were the ghost light or anything paranormal, we wouldn't be able to catch up with it, most likely. It would probably continue to recede further and further away, like the end of a rainbow. And if it were just a guy smoking, perhaps we didn't really want to catch up to him. He might want his privacy. there were a (very) few homes off the road (much farther down), and if it turned out to be a resident of Bragg Road, they might not appreciate a bunch of strangers pestering them at what now must be 3:00am. And if it were an optical illusion, then -- again, like the rainbow example -- there was a strong chance we would never catch up to it.
One thing that seems to prove true again and again is that paranormal phenomena doesn't seem to be "catch-able". If you chase it, you loose it. Every time. It seems -- not just from my very limited experience, but according to those who have years, and even decades, of experience in the field -- that if the paranormal wants you to experience it, it will present itself to you.
So Jesse, wisely, turned us all around to head back in the direction of the car.
We didn't talk much, so the profound darkness was joined by a creepy silence that you only experience when you're that far removed from the city.
As we walked, Donna, kept looking behind her. I did too for a bit. Since we were the only ones on the road, I could comfortably walk backward without worry of bumping into... well, anything, really.
We hadn't quite covered the (maybe) quarter mile to the car when we all saw a pale blue light, far in front of us, somewhere near the south entrance to Bragg Road.
We stopped and watched it.
It was a single light. This didn't look like car headlights.
The blue-white "ball" (for lack of a better description; we had no way of gauging how far in front of us it was) grew brighter, more intense, and turned yellow.
We murmured to each other that it was, indeed, a single light. This was not, as far as we could tell, the headlights from a car.
But still, we didn't have a clue how far away it was.
Then the bright yellow light became more intense, and green. It was sort of golden in the center, but the edges were clearly green. We all confirmed this to each other.
As the light grew more intense, I wondered it it was moving closer to us.
But it wasn't moving up or down, or sideways. It remained directly in the center of the road.
And then it was gone.
What the hell was that?
We ran to the car, hopped in, and drove as fast as we safely could toward the south entrance to the road. If it was a car, we wanted to be able to rule that possibility out.
It felt like it took us forever to get to the entrance!
The unfriendly road wouldn't allow us to move too fast, lest it vibrate Paula's poor car apart. Besides, if a car had decided to park in the middle of the road with its lights off, we could be right on top of it before we even saw it! (This had happened to Jesse and me during Phase 1, when we were on foot. A pickup truck, no less! Right there in front of us and we didn't see it until it turned on its lights and started up! Gave me quite a start.)
As we drove, I think I made a joke about who else was secretly hoping that the light appeared in front of us, passed into the car and just hung out with us for a few seconds. But that might have happened at some other time that night.
I was almost on the highway before I even realized we had exited Bragg Road. (Did I mention that there are no streetlights anywhere?)
I stopped, and we discussed what we had just witnessed.
The fact that we didn't pass -- or run into -- a car or truck meant that we had seen the ghost light, right? That was the reasoning of the guest investigators. It was reported to change colors and to simply disappear.
Jesse and I pointed out, though, that it was also reported to dart around the road (sometimes ducking into the trees), and be seen to disappear straight up into the air, or to the side. This light, as far as we could tell, remained perfectly still.
Besides this, I had a theory that might debunk what we had just seen...
The theory began as a way of explaining to myself how those headlights we had seen earlier might simply disappear the way they had.
If you look at a map of Bragg Road (like the one above (click on it to see the entire image)) you'll notice that Farm To Market Road 787 appears to head straight up into Bragg Road, then veers-off to form a sort of lower-case "y" shape. If it didn't veer off so swiftly, 787 would become Bragg Road.
Now, I know a little about the physicality of optics from my years making short films with my buddies -- as well as my study of special effects, my study of slight of hand and illusion, and my obsession with 3-D (even when you see 3-D naturally, with your naked eye, the perception of depth is still a sort of optical illusion, though a reliable one) -- and if my understanding is near accurate, here is what I believe we saw:
Experience #1 - Because of the darkness, the treeline and the distance from the south entrance to Bragg Road, we couldn't really know if the headlights we saw were on Bragg Road.
We might have seen a vehicle traveling up 787, but because it appeared to be between the treeline, it looked like it was on Bragg Road. Then when it veered west -- the way 787 does -- the trees blocked our view of the headlights and it, effectively, "disappeared" as far as we could tell.
Experience #2 - This is where my logic gets a little strained...
At first, the headlights in Experience #1 appeared to be a single light, either because the treeline blocked one of the headlights or because of the sheer distance from the entrance. Then the single pale-blue light seemed to split into two separate lights, revealing the source to be a vehicle.
For Experience #2, we were maybe a mile further from the entrance.
So is it possible that, at that distance, a pair of headlights might seem to our eyes as a single light? The light we perceive, at that point, is being forced through the treeline which, in effect, would be like forcing it through a cylinder of solid material.
Have you ever tried to shine a wide flashlight beam through a pinprick in a thick, black cloth? It looks like a star in the night sky. If you have a large enough light source and enough pinpricks, you can actually simulate a night sky. We did this back in theatre when I was a teenager. The effect isn't like you're getting a tiny sliver of the light radiating from the source, but as though all the radiance from the light source is forcing itself through that tiny hole.
The light seems to become brighter, rather than diminished. Focused.
So what about the color changes, though?
I can't explain this scientifically, but here's my theory: Assuming Experience #2 was a car, the headlights might have appeared blue-white when it was furthest away from us, and possibly traveling down a slight incline in the road. Then when the incline leveled out, the light became yellow and more intense. Then as the car got closer, that yellow light might have (and this is where my logic really strains) picked up the green from the leaves of the treeline that was focusing the beam of headlights into a single, intense ball of light for us.
That makes sense, right?
The explanation was really for Jesse's benefit, because our guest investigators weren't interested in debunking their cool experience.
After that, we headed back to the hotel because it was a little after 3:30am and we all had a long trip ahead of us in a few hours.
I rode back to Austin with Jesse in Stephanie and Mike's car (they live up north, closer to me, while Paula and John live WAY south). It was a fun trip! Even after a mere 4 or so hours of sleep, I didn't feel drowsy the whole way back!
So, just between you and me, here's my take on my Bragg Road experiences...
I don't really know how much water my "explaination" holds, scientifically. I don't know enough about optics to be able to even know where to start researching my theory to prove or disprove it.
Also, I don't know if the stretch of 787 just south of Bragg Road is long enough to allow a vehicle's headlights to do what I attempted to describe just now. I, stupidly and amateurishly, failed to note exactly how long Experience #2 lasted, and by now my memory is way-fuzzy.
I know that the light didn't move the way the light Paula saw moved. And the perfect stillness, centered-ness of the light we saw is more in line with my explanation. But I also have no idea how far ahead of us it was. If it were the Ghost Light and it were near the southern entrance to Bragg Road, might it not have been able to bob up and down, left and right and still appear, to us, to be standing still and centered? If it were that far away, might it not have been able to dart up into the sky, or sideways into the trees, without us seeing the tell-tale tracer of light that revealed which direction it went?
I'm not trying to make this paranormal, and I'm not trying to make it not-paranormal. I believe true skepticism questions both sides of an equation. I know zealot skeptics who will accept any explanation that points away from the paranormal, and I know zealot believers who will accept any explanation that points toward the paranormal. But as an investigator, I simply have to admit that I don't have enough data either way.
Still, I've got 2 interesting experiences under my belt! :D
Also, even though you're not supposed to enter cemeteries in Texas after dark, I might -- maybe -- have pulled out my digital audio recorder when we stopped by Sutton Cemetery and I might -- maybe -- have pressed Record, and so I might -- maybe -- have caught some voices that aren't supposed to be on the track I recorded. ;P
I still need to listen to it.
Tonight might be a good night to do that, huh?
HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!!
:D
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