They were green, glowing and too numerous to count — and they were friendly. For all the time I’ve spent in the woods and fields at night, I’ve never seen anything else like them.

I am by nature a skeptic, which has served me well in my personal life and 45 years as a newspaperman, and have debunked at least two of our “ghost” photos from Gettysburg (although certainly not all of them).

But what these little green lights were, I have no idea.

I asked our friend Kevin, who runs the Gettysburg motel where we stay (intentionally putting us in rooms that are haunted) and does paranormal investigations on the side.

“They’re bugs,” he said. So I described their behavior and told him I’d never heard of bugs that act like this.

He thought for a moment, then sighed, looked off to one side, shook his head and said, “I don’t know what they are.”

I asked a Scoutmaster friend if he’d encountered anything like them.

He looked me in the eye with a wry smile and said, “I try not to think about them.”

I asked my friend Sid Evans from the Western Maryland Paranormal Society if he could enlighten me.

Sid said his research produced only one account that was anywhere close to what we saw and sent me an Internet link to it, but it wasn’t the same thing. He said our experience “is rather extraordinary.”

Each time we go to Spangler’s Spring, something extraordinary happens. I am as convinced as a skeptic can be that we have friends there, and that they have looked out for us on more than one occasion.

On my first visit, I was drawn to what appeared to be an archway formed by two trees above a gap in the foliage at the edge of the forest. The ground at this place was bare, so others had been drawn there before me.

I stood there probably 10 minutes, thanking anyone who might have been listening for what they had done, telling them they had helped to make our country what it is today — regardless of which side they were on. I said we were all Americans and added, “Welcome Home.”

I returned to my buddies, and as we were walking up a small slope to the road, I slipped on the wet ground, went down face first and was less than a foot away from getting a mouthful of blacktop when something I couldn’t feel stopped me from falling. Gary said I was stretched out like a ski jumper in the Winter Olympics.

The archway hadn’t been there since, but it’s not a figment of my imagination. My friend Mark has seen it, too. As some of the older American Indians say, some things are not here all of the time. By here, they mean here.

However, when we returned the last time, the headlights from our car showed the archway was here once more. This, I thought to myself, is going to be an interesting night.

We hadn’t walked 20 yards into the field when I saw the first of the lights in the grass. It was perfectly round, about the size of a pencil eraser and the same color and relative degree of brightness as the green light in a traffic signal.

When I bent down to see what it was, it faded away. Any insect big enough to make a light that size has to be big enough to see, but there was nothing. When I stood back up, it reappeared. After this happened three or four times, I decided to stop investigating them.

That’s when the Lady in White went past, maybe 10 yards away, and I called out, “Hello!” It’s the second time I’ve seen her. She apparently doesn’t like to be where the soldiers are and runs from them.

More green lights were spaced about three or four feet apart and appeared to form a corridor. I followed it to a place at the edge of the woods where Gary was surrounded by other lights and talking to ... anyone who might have been listening.

I stood there silently until he moved on, then took his spot and began to talk. More lights appeared in the grass and well off the ground in the trees and bushes.

One of them was not two inches away from my right foot, and it hadn’t been there when I arrived. Any bug that’s sufficiently aware of you to extinguish its light when you kneel down to look at it should be aware enough not to stay in a place where you can turn and step on it.

I unwrapped a cigar (Union and Confederate soldiers met to trade coffee and tobacco at Spangler’s Spring) and placed it under a bush in a spot that was no more than six inches away from one of the lights.

That light didn’t go out, and I got close enough to see there was no bug or anything else ... nothing but a tiny circle of bright green light.

As I was back-trailing the corridor of lights on my way to the car, it turned to follow the treeline, so I went with it.

Eventually, I came to the archway that was there, but then was gone and now had returned. A cluster of lights was waiting for me at the edge of the bare spot, as if to say, “You don’t have to go any farther,” and more were in the treeline and beyond.

I had decided not to visit that place because it was getting late and I didn’t feel like stumbling around trying to find it in what had become a really dark night — but wound up there anyway.

My friends apparently realized I wanted to go there, but was hesitant to do so, and showed me the way. So I stayed and talked to them for a while. When at last I said farewell and turned to leave, the lights began to fade and disappear. I saw no more of them on the way back to the car.

Gary also saw the lights, but Donnie and Krista walked through the same places and saw nothing. No lights are in any of the digital photos Krista took, even though they were bright enough to have registered.

Gary and Mark had a similar encounter several years ago at Sachs Covered Bridge. When they knelt to see what the lights were, they dimmed and went out. (They also took pictures, but no lights appear in them.)

As they watched, the lights formed a column and came toward them, then split into two columns and went around them on either side before reuniting to form a single column after they’d passed.

That’s when Gary and Mark scrammed.

From what I have read, the only luminescent insects in North America are big enough to see with the naked eye. None of them behaves the way these phenomena did, nor are their lights shaped the same.

Sid Evans told me that spirits often transfer feelings to us in an attempt to communicate their needs. It’s happened to me numerous times and is difficult to describe to someone else who hasn’t experienced it.

“The place you were being drawn to may have been something that they needed to show you for some reason,” he said. “It could be a number of reasons they were doing this. We’ve only just begun to scratch the surface of this phenomenon.”

It had been a long time since Gary and I last went to Spangler’s Spring.

Might be that somebody was glad we had returned and just wanted to visit with us.