Witching Hour - Legends: The Detroit River's other jack-o'-lantern

Witching Hour - Legends Meet the Detroit River's other jack-o'-lantern. Old French families told of the feu follet, a swamp light that led travellers astray. In Hamlin's 1883 Legends of Le Detroit, it lures a man into a Grosse Ile swamp.

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Witching Hour is our nightly local history and folklore feature. Ghost stories and legends are retold as stories people tell, not reported as fact. Sources are listed below the story.

Tonight's Witching Hour is a legend, told as legend, about a light that old French families along the Detroit River said you should never follow.

The book

In 1883, Marie Caroline Watson Hamlin published Legends of Le Detroit, a collection of tales she said were handed down in the old French families settled along le Detroit, the river between Detroit and what is now Windsor-Essex.

One chapter, Le Feu Follet, is subtitled "A Legend of Grosse Isle." Grosse Ile is the largest island in the Detroit River. It sits on the Michigan side, across the water from Amherstburg.

The legend

The story goes that one August evening, after a sudden summer storm, a young man set out for home in the dark. He saw a bright light and followed it. The closer he came, the farther away it seemed, until he was stuck fast in a swamp.

In Hamlin's telling, he called for help until he was exhausted. His friends, out searching with a burning pine torch, finally found him when he fired his pistol and they followed the sound. Back home, one of the searchers told him what had led him astray: the feu follet.

This is a legend. Hamlin wrote it as a story, and nothing in it should be read as a record of a real night.

The odd part

Hamlin's own footnote in the book gives the feu follet two English names: will-o'-the-wisp and jack-o'-lantern. Merriam-Webster still lists ignis fatuus, the old name for that marsh light, as one meaning of jack-o'-lantern.

The feu follet was not only a Detroit River idea. The Canadian Encyclopedia lists will-o'-the-wisps among the common subjects of French Canadian legends. A November 1929 article in the Bulletin des recherches historiques, a Quebec history journal, describes feux follets seen on roads and near marshes, and the belief that people who ran after them ended up in ditches and marshes.

Even in Hamlin's tale, a skeptic in the room says the lights are only gas rising from swampy land. The woman telling the story is not convinced.

So tonight, when you see a jack-o'-lantern glowing on a porch, you are looking at a name that once meant something you were warned never to follow.