Occasional Flowers

One of the occasional gifts of wind and/or rain

What I cannot claim to have planted, neither can I identify
In the course of thirty years, this almost spectacular lily (?) flower has come up overnight, bloomed (lasting several days), and disappeared .  Once a friend identified it until (unless) it came again late in summer.  But after my Picasa files lost their classification, of my own devising, among so many thousand images I cannot find the earlier one, in whose caption ("title") or File Info (not come over from Photoshop!) the data for this plant is lurking.  What is worse, I cannot find it in Wikipedia.

Yet these are seen all over town in Baton Rouge, LA.

The current snapshots were taken on the last day of August.  I opened the back door to feed the cat, and, like red lamps that had shot up overnight, there they were, and I hastened to document them and, this time, post them in the blog, rather than just asking all my friends what they are.

I am, as you must realize, no gardener, but I am grateful for whatever I get.
And I thank anyone who can identify this (otherwise than as "firecracer") for me.