By Joe Woody
I have a list of things that bother me out in the woods, especially when I’m by myself. The list has shortened over the years as I’ve gotten more used to what the mountains throw at you when you’re chasing trout in the high lonesome. Widowmakers still make the list—look them up if you don’t know. So do the silent hikers who won’t speak when they pass, yellow jackets, and the occasional wood knock when the night is too quiet. Most of the time I can explain the bump-in-the-night sounds. Not always.
Here’s a story that might have an explanation…
My buddy Barry Holcombe and I had hiked about four miles down the Upper Deep Creek trail to a camp site called Poke Patch. It’s one of the more remote stretches you can reach in the park, roughly four miles from Highway 441 and well past the day-trippers. We fished hard through the afternoon, the water clear enough that the trout looked like they were hanging in air. We set camp early, ate cold, and turned in. My tent faced down the trail. Barry’s was a short walk uphill. It was June, the kind of night when the creek keeps talking long after dark.
Around three in the morning a tree came down close enough to wake me. I sat up in the bag and listened. Nothing else moved. I stayed still for a minute, then looked toward the trail even though the rainfly blocked the view. That’s when the light showed up.
It came up the path as a single, steady orange glow. Not a flashlight. Flashlights jump and carry that cold white of LEDs. This one moved smooth and stayed bright the whole time. It reached my tent, slid along the side, and the inside of the tent took on an orange cast strong enough that I could see the outline of my water bottle. It circled once, close enough that the fabric lit up, then drifted off the way it had come. No blink, no fade, just gone. I lay there a while longer and eventually went back to sleep. I didn’t say anything to Barry in the morning. Some stories make you sound like you’ve been alone too long.
Barry had stepped out of his tent around the same time. He told me the ground was covered in lights that stayed on instead of blinking. The whole forest floor looked lit from underneath. I filed that away and we packed out, fishing a few lower pools on the walk. On the drive home the orange light kept sliding past the inside of my eyelids.
Back home, I looked up continuous-light fireflies in the Smokies. The search led me to the blue ghost, Phausis reticulata. The males fly low and slow through the understory in June with a steady glow that can read orange through tent fabric. The females stay on the ground, wingless, lighting up to call the males. Upper Deep Creek is one of the few places in the Southern Appalachians where you can see them in numbers. The timing matched. The place matched. Barry’s description of the ground lights matched the females.
I sat with that for a while. It’s a clean explanation, cleaner than most of the stories people tell about lights in these mountains. Still, the light I saw had been bright enough to color the whole tent, and it had circled like it was taking a look. The books say the males search low and steady. They don’t mention them investigating a campsite.
Weeks later, watching the ordinary fireflies pulse in my yard, I still hadn’t decided exactly how to tell it. I can call it natural history and watch the wonder drain out of someone’s face. I can leave it as something that happened in the dark on Deep Creek and let the listener decide. Both versions sit true enough. The mountains hold beetles that light the night without blinking. They also hold places where a man can still be surprised by something he wasn’t told to expect.
I eventually texted Barry the short version and the research. He answered: Figured it was something like that. Still weird, though.
That about covers it. Next June the blue ghosts will be flying again above the last switchbacks of Deep Creek, steady and silent, looking for the lights waiting on the ground. Whether every orb in those woods reduces to the same answer is a question the beetles don’t seem interested in settling. I saw one of them, or something that behaved like one of them, and the creek kept talking either way. That’s enough to keep the memory clear.
If you want to hear me tell the rest of it, including a little more about what Barry saw that night and why the timing mattered, you can watch the full story on my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0T-DKKmQw. I’d be glad to hear what you make of it.
If you get a chance to fish Deep Creek in June, keep an eye on the trail after dark. You might see something ordinary that doesn’t feel ordinary at the time. The wilderness still has a few of those left.
Joe Woody is Co-Publisher of The Angler Magazine Great Smoky Mountains with his wife Debra. He is an Army Veteran and a self-proclaimed “Adventure Angler.” You can usually find him wandering around Western North Carolina telling fishing lies. He is also a baseball nut and a crazy FCS Football fan. He has a Bigfoot magnet on the back of his truck.