Most people think I'm full of shit when I tell this story but I was fully conscious at the time and I was not under the influence of anything.
I was 13 years old at the time that I decided to try a little experimentation with electricity. It was 11:35 pm EST and I was huddled on my bed conspirationally. I had plugged a power cord for a broken boom box into the wall socket and had placed a four inch long piece of thin florists wire (that ubiquitous thin green wire) in either hole of the power cord. I held the power cord between my knees and held each piece of wire in my gloved hands. Because hey...I was smart and put on my winter wool gloves. Safety first. Slowly, I brought the twin wires closer and closer together.
Suddenly, a flash erupted from my hands. My lamp winked out at the sime time as the flash came from the filaments that I held. I instinctively closed my eyes as tight as I could. When I opened my eyes again, the lamp was back on and there was an acrid smell in the air. I looked down at my hands and saw...nothing?
The wires were missing. Soon I noticed that there were red wisps floating in the air in front of me. I would have assumed that the visions were residual images of the flash that more than likely burned my retinas. I reached out and wiped one from the air gingerly with my hand and looked into my fingers to see nothing. No residue. Only a thin black line where there once was a thin green wire.
I inquired about this phenomenon to my science teacher and although he did not have an outright answer, he did not call me a liar. To this day, I still don't know for sure. My hypothesis is that so much power was flowing through the short circuit I created that the wire was promptly burned away in a flash and the red apparitions that floated like sprites in my bedroom were the gaseous forms of the minerals which comprised my little filaments.