"A great ball
of fire, big
as a pail"
Big as a pail?
Don't you love it? Would anyone describe a meteor that way today?
Mystery flared in the night skies over Traverse City 126 years ago, burning questions and awe into minds -- then and now.
This particular great ball of fire, big as a pail, "passed low down over town ... leaving a trail of fire 25 to 50 feet long."
It made a "rumbling noise, followed by an explosion that jarred buildings and was noticed by many who were unaware of the cause," the story said. "The streets were lighted a lurid red for several seconds and altogether it was a weird and startling sight."
The comet was gone, but that brilliant sky emerged in another local news item in the same December 1883 issue.
"The red sunrises and sunsets which have prevailed for the last week or two have occasioned much remark, the whole atmosphere seeming to be filled with the lurid glow like the light of a great conflagration," the story said.
I could smell it as I read that paragraph probably a year ago. I could taste it, another mystery of history. But I had bigger fish to fry -- lumber barons and passenger pigeons, Indian trails and treaties, old maps and photos -- and not a lot of time.
I added it to my "Oddities" folder of curious, eccentric and bizarre stories discovered while researching old newspapers for the Record-Eagle's 150th anniversary series this year that started in November.
Fortunately, true mysteries of history never die. Sometimes, if you're lucky, they just take a year to circle the sun and dawn anew on Christmas Day.
Have you ever Googled "lurid red sky?"
Have you ever seen Norwegian Edvard Munch's famous "Scream" painting of a human figure standing on a road holding his ears in front of a billowing blood-red sky?
Did you ever hear of the cataclysmic Krakatoa volcano eruptions in Indonesia during the summer of 1883 that threw clouds of volcanic dust into the stratosphere and was linked for months and years afterward to flaming twilights reported in Europe, New York and other places around the world?
I'm not saying that's where the Herald's flaring red sky came from in December 1883, and I'm not saying it isn't. I just try to imagine the night skies here in 1883. How dark, quiet and big they must have been, and how bright -- and maybe ghastly -- that sky was.
It fills me with wonder yet today, a burning ember of remember in a sea of scratched-up, black-and-white microfilm.
Columnist Loraine Anderson can be reached at landerson@record-eagle.com or 231-933-1468.
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