The Ball of Fire
From: Marie Jo Cantuaria (mariejopink25@yahoo.com.br) Story type: Ghost Location: Rio Negrinho - SC - BRAZIL Source: Form Submission Date submitted: Thu Jun 28 06:01:46 2007
The ball of fire
Well, this story I’ve got to tell you is not much about ghosts but about strange apparitions. It was told by my grandfather some years ago, and he’s not the kind of person who likes to invent stories or lie.
He’s a skeptical and very respectable person, that’s why I did not doubt about his story for a second; like all my cousins who heard the story. We all were amazed by it!
We were having an Easter celebration lunch at our uncle’s ranch, it was about 1998; and my grandfather spent the previous night alone in the ranch as my uncle pays him to take care of the cattle and the corn fields some days a week. It’s not a very big property and my Grandpa is kindda old but still very healthy and he loves to do this kind of job, so there are times on a week that he even sleep in the ranch.
The previous night, he was alone in the ranch. He said it was about 10 o’clock in a foggy night and he was about to sleep, when he had to open the front door to take a look in the cows that were making a lot of noise in the yard. They seemed to be disturbed and running towards the house, from the west portion of the land towards the house.
When he looked west where the cows were running from, he saw this ball of fire, not bigger than a basketball ball. It was coming fast from the sky, not falling down but flying really fast, about 3 meters high. The ball of fire just passed fast in front of his eyes and hit a pine tree near the ranch where the corns are stored. My grandpa said that the ball of fire didn’t burn the tree, but just started melting down like hot “ lava” ( the liquid that comes from the vulcains), I just don’t know the name in English.
It kept melting for about 5 minutes then all the fire vanished. As he didn’t have a lantern or fire for a torch, he just went to bed to go checking the next morning.
Well, when the morning came, my Grandpa woke up and got outside to look at the pine tree? When he approached the tree to look for the marks of fire in the tree and also the object that flew in front of him, he just found nothing! No marks on the tree, on the grass, nothing was there. No melting, no scratches, no sign of something that could have hit the tree in a fast speed the night before… whatever it was… my father just couldn’t get any evidence, but he swears he saw a flying ball of fire hitting the pine tree the night before!
My Grandpa says that this ball is what Brazilian’s superstitions call The Boitatá; a Spirit of dead animals or people that walks the Earth during the night in the shape of a ball of fire, and it can be yellow, green or blue. The Boitata legend has its origin in Africa and was brought to Brazil by African communities that were brought here as slaves and kept their culture and beliefs untouched by the white men. Scientists says that the Boitata is nothing more than the gas that comes out the land from decomposed bodies of animals and other organic material being decomposed, that may react with the oxygen and look like colored fire; but the point is: this thing was too fast and actually flying in the sky, and left no marks on the tree where it hit! So, what was that?? A spirit from the forest surrounding the ranch, indeed??