Mike Conley's Tales of the Weird: I am back with missing heads and UFOs

After a two-week hiatus, it is great to be back writing about the weird and unusual tales that folks tell each other either around a campfire or on the Internet. I would like for you to consider two strange tales, one about an old legend that is to this day unexplained and the other about some UFOs that appeared over England just a few days ago.
One of the most famous ghost stories in North Carolina is the legend of Joe Baldwin, the railroad conductor who lost his head in a train wreck in the late 1800s. For many years, folks would gather around the tracks at Maco Station near Wilmington after dark and watch a weird ghostly light swinging back and forth. They said it was the ghost of Joe Baldwin looking for his missing head.
Summerville, S.C. has a similar legend only this one is about a railroad conductor's grieving widow. The tale goes that many years ago a woman in Summerville had a husband who was a conductor and he often worked nights for the railroad. At midnight every night, people would always see the woman waiting by the tracks with his lunch and a lantern. But one tragic night, her husband did not come home. The railroad workers told the woman that her husband's train had wrecked and he was killed in the accident. Like Joe Baldwin, her husband was beheaded in the crash, according to a Web site.
The poor man was laid to rest with a proper funeral but his widow could not accept the fact that he was gone. So at midnight, the sad woman would go down to the tracks with her lantern and walk up and down, waiting for her husband to join her. She continued this nightly ritual until her own death.
And to this day, folks in Summerville, S.C. say she is still waiting for him. They say that if you walk down to the railroad, just before midnight, you will hear all the sounds that are usually heard on a summer's night. Sounds like crickets chirping, frogs croaking, car noises and the wind blowing. But at the stroke of midnight, the sounds suddenly stop, as if someone turned them off.
Then you will see it. The weird light will dance its way down the tracks. And if you stay put, the light will come after you. One person wrote on a Web site that the ghostly light chased his mother and their friends when they went to see it. The mysterious lantern even left a dent in their car.
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During the holidays, some people in northern England thought they were seeing an armada of UFOs. But it turns out they were mistaken.
The mysterious lights in the sky seen over northern England prompted a flood of phone calls to media outlets during the Christmas and New Year's Day holidays, according to a Web site.
"The UFO sighting is the hot topic around here at the moment," said Tony Clynch of Barrow, England. "Everyone keeps asking each other if they saw the lights."
Deborah Wilkin reported she saw two lights on Christmas Day from her home in Urswick. "They were hovering in the sky for about five minutes and then they moved and just went," she said. "It was the most bizarre thing I have ever seen. They were absolutely fantastic."
But the North West Daily Mail, a newspaper in northern England, reported recently it heard from a woman who knew the truth behind the lights in the sky. "I saw the letter in the paper and had a bit of a chuckle to myself when I read it because I knew straight away that people had seen our lanterns," said Andrea Hodgson, 36.
It turns out that Hodgson, her husband and their wedding guests released 50 orange, candle-lit Chinese lanterns into the sky at a reception on the evening of Dec. 27. The lanterns were released in the area where people had reported seeing the UFOs. They floated in the air and burned for 10 to 20 minutes. Hodgson said the lanterns were biodegradable and just disappeared after a short while.
But UFO expert Sharon Larkin is not so sure. "One possible explanation is that they could be Chinese lanterns and they are popular at the moment," she said. "It is early days yet, but I am not ruling out any possibilities."