Will-O-Wisp
I'm having a good time writing here, so here's another interesting (scary in an unknown and abysmal kind of way) story.
When I was 22 (2018) I started dating a really sweet guy (let's call him Mark) from Macon Georgia, USA. He was a southern dream, curly hair, played football in his highschool days, loved his momma, and was ROWDY. We were total opposites. I was a shy writer. I loved anything terrifying and spent most of my off time listening to creepy podcasts, scrolling the Books of Horror Facebook page, and haunting bookstores.
Well, Mark wanted to impress me. Mark was closeted and I believe it was our distinct differences that made him like me so much. If any of you guys know about Macon, Ga you know that it's a historic city and all the surrounding towns are little more than forests and old back roads dotted with houses. Well for our fourth or fifth date Mark picked me up in his '03 blue F150 after 11 PM (I was a waiter working closing shift) and drove me up to Forsyth, a little quiet town beside Macon. There was a little dirt road through the woods that had an old wooden bridge (I swear, an honest to God wooden bridge, Headless Horseman style).
The game plan was we were going to park his truck on that wooden bridge, listen to the creek underneath, drink a 12 pack of warm beer and he was going to tell me all his spookiest stories of his time running the hills and forests outside of Macon as he grew up. And maybe, if he was lucky, he'd get some by the end of the night.
He told me about how that bridge was haunted. He said that one time he parked there after a football game, drank himself to sleep in his old truck and woke up to handprints all over the windows. He told me that sometimes you'd hear women screaming out in the woods, but that you couldn't go help them because it was Mountain lions trying to lure you into the woods to eat you (and that some fisherman would tell you there were black Panthers out there too). He told me of the ghost of an old homeless man who'd drowned under that very bridge we were parked on. Told me about Whistlers -Native American legends of some kind of ghast or nature sprite that whistled. The closer the whistle sounded the farther away it was. He didn't know what happened if it got you, but he didn't want to find out (and over my wonderful and short years with Mark I heard them myself. The Whistlers, at least, are very real)
Mark did his job well enough that despite the alcoholic bravery I was spooked. I was shivering even though it was a muggy and humid late spring night. I wanted to go back to his room and laugh it all off with a colder beer and a warmer bed.
Right before we called it a night headlights came down the dirt road towards us. This was NOT a modern bridge (I have pictures of us out there somewhere I'll try to find) no guard rails, and only room for one vehicle at a time. While we prayed it wasn't a cop Mark drove forward and pulled off the shoulder of the road and we let the car pass, still anxious it was a cop (closeted and drinking on the road) we watched the car in the rearview drive over the bridge and disappear. Right as the tension let up and we were laughing it off I saw a light in the rearview and thought the midnight car was returning, but NO.
I have no other way to explain this than we were JUST parked on that single passenger bridge. There was NO ONE (to our knowledge) around and that a total of 4 minutes had passed since pulling off to the shoulder of the road. In the dead center of the bridge -right where we were just parked- was a single log smouldering and blazing on fire.
Half drunk and half terrified and anxious we got out to investigate and it was true. Right where we were parked just a few moments ago was a single rustic log burning. I vividly remember the log had cracks running all over it and the fire was coming from within it. As a southern boy myself I am no stranger to making campfires and I have never seen anything like this in my life and never have again. There were white hot cracks all over the log as it burned from within where there was previously no log, no fire and exactly where we were parked only minutes ago.
Mark toed the log with his boot and told me his folks taught him about Will-O-Wisps, some kind of something that haunted dense forests and used fires and lights to lure victims to God knows what, maybe to drown them, I remember him saying. We looked uneasily at the water, returned to his truck and floored it to his house. Where I assured him he had DEFINITELY impressed and terrified me.
I know this isn't some crazy wild ride of a story, but it's very true. If this gets any traction I'll try to dig up mine and Marks pictures as we spent many summer days on that wooden bridge over the years before he died an unfortunate early death. He died very young, very adventurous, and died right off that road with the wooden bridge. He was a hell of a story teller, because most of his spooky stories were real, or at least he thought they were and you never know what you'll find when you're out in the Appalachian woods after the sun sets.