August 14, 2008
A Glowing Cigarette
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Joe Ely, Phoenix, Arizona, November 1966
This incident occurred when I was about 10 years old while my dad was
training race horses at Turf Paradise in Phoenix, Arizona. We had arrived
about a month before and moved into a brand-new apartment complex in
Phoenix. The layout of the complex was simple -- two one-story buildings on
each side of an open area with two apartments in each building. The place
was so new that we were the first family to move in, and one other family
moved in while we were there. To my knowledge, there hadn't been anything on
that site before, and the open area between the apartments was basically
sand and rock with rock berms on all sides where a bulldozer had pushed them
while clearing the area for construction. The rocks were mainly river
cobbles of metamorphic rock, as I recall, so the area must have been an
ancient, large creek-bed or river.
Anyway, the apartments were pretty nice, with a kitchen at the front just
off of the living room and a short hallway that led to two bedrooms and a
bathroom. I shared a bedroom with my 8-year-old sister. The bathroom was the
focus of this event, so I'll describe it briefly. The door to the bathroom
was directly across the hall from the door to the bedroom I shared with my
sister. The door opened inward to the right where a wall was; the vanity was
straight ahead as you entered. To the left along the wall facing you as you
entered was first the commode and then the enclosed bath/shower. The light
switch was on the wall just to the left of the door as you entered. I've
lived in many other places, and I don't think I could describe the bathroom
in any of them. This one was burned into my memory. At this point I should
add that my aunt had come out for a short visit and was sleeping on a cot in
our bedroom. My sister and I slept on bunk-beds, and, since I was oldest, I
had the top bunk.
My whole family usually turned in about 9 at night because my dad's day
started around 4:30 or 5 A.M. at the track, and I usually went out to help
until it was time to go to school. Of course, on weekends I spent the whole
day with my dad being worked like a rented mule. Life on the racetrack may
sound glamorous to a few, but it's really just a lot of hard work and the
occasional saddle-sore from being on horse-back for 4 or 5 hours straight
leading horses. One night, I would guess sometime around 2 A.M., I woke up
and went to the restroom. The door was standing open as usual, so I reached
up to my left to switch on the light. Before I could hit the switch, I was
kind of jolted awake by the site of a glowing cigarette ember in the
darkness right above where the toilet was (my mom and aunt both smoked at
the time). I quickly apologized, thinking my aunt had gone in there and
hadn't bothered to turn on the light. There was no response at all, but I
saw the cigarette ember rise about to where head-level would be for someone
sitting on the toilet, brighten as if someone took a drag on it, and then it
slowly lower back to its original point. There was no mistaking this as a
light from outside (no window in the bathroom, and all windows in the place
were heavily curtained) or an orb (which I think is just dust, anyway). The
casualness of the whole process set off alarm bells in my head because both
my mom and aunt were very modest people and would not have reacted to my
entry by simply taking a toke off of their cigarette. I had caught hell a
few times before when I had accidentally blundered in, and the yelling had
started instantaneously.
At this point I was pretty darn scared, but I had been raised to think
things through and not think "ghost" every time I encountered something odd.
We moved around the country two or three times a year, and I had lived or
worked in some pretty creepy old places (we were stabled next to an old
cemetery at the Fair Grounds racetrack in New Orleans twice), and my dad had
no patience for anything connected with ghosts. Anyhow, since I still had my
hand on the light switch, I quickly slapped it upward to see what the heck
was going on. Nothing. No light came on. I worked the switch up and down
several times, but nothing happened. Then I called out my aunt's name and
got no response. I called for my mom -- same result. Now I'm scared half to
death. I turned and ran back to my room, slapping for the switch on the wall
to turn on the bedroom lights regardless that my aunt was asleep in there (I
could make her out in the cot) -- again, nothing. Now nothing was making
sense, and I was almost petrified with fear. I looked back in the bathroom
and could still see the ember by the toilet. I knew it wasn't my aunt; I
knew that my mom would have somehow responded to me knowing that I had to be
scared, and my dad never smoked in his life. I also knew that what I was
looking at was absolutely a lit cigarette. No mistake. Then I noticed for
the first time that there was no odor from the cigarette. My mom and my aunt
used to smoke Viceroys, and they reeked badly (the cigarettes, not the
people). I guess I froze, because I didn't start yelling like a lunatic that
someone was in the house. It just didn't make any sense that an intruder
would come in and have a leisurely smoke on the john in the dark. I
scrambled back toward my bed grabbing a Louisville Slugger as I went, and I
climbed up in my bunk, stepping on my sister in the process. It was then
that I realized no one else had stirred. I knew I had made a good deal of
noise calling out in the hallway and climbing back into my bunk while
banging a ball bat against everything on the way up. And remember that I
stepped on my sister -- and she was singularly intolerant of such treatment
(one time, she waited all day long after some such slight to get a shot at
me with a Coke bottle when I went to bed). Once I had gotten back in bed, I
just huddled there watching the bathroom door in the dark and listening to
see if anyone moved. Nothing else ever happened, no one ever came out of the
bathroom, and I guess I fell asleep somewhere around 30 minutes after it all
started. It sounds like an odd thing to do after what had happened, but I
guess I decided there was nothing else to do but go back to sleep. The next
morning, my mom woke me up and chewed me out for having a dirty old ball bat
in my bed. The lights worked fine, and no one mentioned anything about the
incident. I asked if anyone else had noticed that the lights had been out
during the night, but no one had. I thought about asking around whether
anyone had died there, but I knew the whole place was new and nothing had
been there before, so I kept it all to myself. I guess the whole thing was
pretty light-weight for a paranormal encounter, but it was the first time I
had ever been through such a thing, and it made a big impression on me.