Ghost Lights : Addicks, Texas
It was the mid-1960s, gasoline cost 19-1/2 cents a gallon and every teenage boy in Houston had a car with a big V8 engine. A good place to go drag racing was out in the country on Addicks-Fairbanks Road, Patterson Road, Jackrabbit Road and FM 1960. These roads are within the city of Houston limits now, but when I was young, they were w-a-y out in the country.
After watching the races or chased by the police, we would go to Addicks Dam, which had been built to provide flood control for Buffalo Bayou in Houston. This was a very spooky place to party, but we were young and fearless. You parked along the back roads and waited, and soon you would see orbs, strange mists and blinking lights in the sky.
One night in particular, four of us parked and walked down by the dam. We sat down on a blanket to watch the stars and talk. We were getting antsy when suddenly, goosebumps broke out all over my body and I shivered althought the night was warm and muggy. Round blobs of white, green, surrounded us and blue that floated along the ground, rose and then disappeared. We jumped up and tried to touch them, but they appeared to change position so we could never quite reach them.
As the evening progressed, the activity of the blobs increased and these translucent streaks of white, yellow and orange lights flew through the air tracing arcs, and loops, as the designs you see when you wave sparklers, except there were no sparks. Next, a mist that was low to the ground moved in. With mist and the globes and streamers of lights, it was eerie. What was even stranger was that the cicadas, an ever-present sound in Houston, stopped their serenade when the fog rolled in.
We sat there, round-eyed, looking at the lights and the fog and each other for a long time. I shivered again. Then I noticed there was no sound; or, if there was a sound, it was below our range of hearing, like a radio playing softly in another room or the wind sighing through tall grass. Before anything else happened, I decided to we should leave. I was spooked.
We drove home in an exhilarated state, all talking at once, over each other, excited, as we had not been since we were children. We were glad to get back to the freeway and city lights. By the time we were close to home, we were laughing about the lights.
The next day, we told our families and friends about it. We were told it was swamp gas. Swamp gas was the standard explanation for anything out of the ordinary in the 1960s. See a UFO? It was swamp gas. View a ghostly apparition? It was swamp gas. Watch strange lights in the sky appear overhead? Swamp gas. Yeah, right.
A few years ago, I viewed the famous Marfa Lights. Compared to the phenomena in Marfa, the lights at Addicks were more numerous and varied. I did not see any streaks of lights or mists at Marfa. While the Marfa Lights were definitely spectacular, they did not leave me with the feeling I had seen something supernatural. No goosebumps, no shivering.
Since that day, I have wondered about those lights at the Addicks dam. I did discover that at least one and more likely two cemeteries were lost when the Addicks Dam was built. Are the blobs and streaks of light and the unexplained mists the remainders of those lost souls? I do not know. I just know they were not swamp gas . . .
Tags: Addicks, Texas, swamp gas, buried cemeteries, Jackrabbit Road, Patterson Road, Farm Road 1960, Addicks-Fairbanks Road
