That Ball Of Fire

This happened in our old house in Cebu way back in the early 90's, and I was 12-14 years old then. We lived on a subdivision not so far from downtown area. Those years, we often experienced power-cut offs or brown outs, and most of those times are our beloved moments to play around like, hide and seek, pulis-dunggab, patentero, or sometimes just hang outside and watched the gloomy moon.

One brown out time, we were playing hide and seek, five of us hid on one vacant lot of the subdivision where some bananas and cassavas grew, it was 9PM, and the ground was a little wet because it rained earlier around 5PM. We were hiding on some dumped materials there when we noticed a small fire, small as a bulb, just across the street. We were thinking then, that maybe some other children were playing. Sometimes we put candle on snails, then let it crawl on the road, to scare people especially girls. Now, what we noticed on the small ball of fire is that it starts to grow, same like a burner flame or torch; so we decided to get closer. When one of us was close enough, it grows even taller and the base of it floats above our heads. At that moment, we were amazed, but at the same time a bit scared. Another fellow, my cousin starts throwing stones on it as it hovers on us. I see the flame became pale blue and its tail-like orange. When we start to yell to call out our other playmates, it then went up above us, circling, then burst into tiny flames then disappear! That's when we were really got scared and ran back to where our other playmates are.

The next day, we told some of our neighbors what we saw, and one woman said that there was a report of a dead fetus thrown in that place. We never played around in that area again.