The Spooklight Background

Filed under: Fascinations | By DrHGuy | July 29, 2006 at 7:21 am

[This post is a follow-up to yesterday's Spooklight Story]

Growing up in southwest Missouri, I absorbed random ambient information about The Spooklight, coming away with a confused mix of fact and fiction, categories which were most often impossible to distinguish. The internet, however, has changed all that, greatly multiplying the amount of information and confusion.

In any case, The Spooklight was regarded by my cohort as a quasi-interesting, how about that? phenomenon, the significance of which was more or less equal with my hometown’s status as the birthplace of George Washington Carver and of much less import than the chances of that year’s high school basketball team in the Christmas Tournament. We were certainly aware of it, would occasionally trot out the story when friends from out of town would visit and conversation lagged, and were vaguely proud of it, but The Spooklight was strictly no big deal.

It never, for example, achieved the notoriety of Area 54, crop circles, or the Bermuda Triangle. In retrospect, it seems odd that hypothetical explanations of The Spooklight never, to my recall, invoked UFOs and aliens. Even now with the flood of data released on the internet, theories postulating an association between The Spooklight and UFOs are relatively uncommon. Some web sites, in fact, list The Spooklight as a cause of false UFO sightings.

There has never been a report of The Spooklight harming anyone,.

The History

Almost unanimously, the earliest stories of The Spooklight are attributed to the Indian tribes in the area in the 1800s. Often the specific date of 1836 or 1866 is listed as the first sighting.

The first printed account, depending on ones source, appeared in the Kansas City Star in 1936 or in a publication called the Ozark Spook Light in 1881.

Names
The Spooklight is also known as

The Ozark Spook Light
The Hornet Ghost Light
The Joplin Ghost Light
The Devil’s Jack-O’-Lantern
The Tri-State Spook Light

Description

Timing
The Spooklight appears almost every night, most frequently between 10 PM and midnight

Appearance

Most often described as a “ball of light”
Orange is most frequently mentioned color but red, blue, green are also reported
The light is very bright even when it appears to be far away
The light is most often viewed as a single globe but may split into two, three, or more balls of light
A 1983 investigation by the Ghost Research Society described the light is diamond-shaped, with a hollow center

Movement

The orb floats and weaves between the sides of the road & travels from east to west along the road
The light has been known to enter cars and buses
It dodges people chasing it.

Location

Spooklight Road is eleven miles southwest of Joplin, Missouri, just past the village of Hornet, in the area where Missouri borders Oklahoma and Kansas. The light is most commonly described as being visible from inside the Oklahoma border looking to the west.

Legends

The Spooklight has been said to be

The torch of a beheaded Quapaw or Osage Indian, searching for his head.
The spirits of a young Quapaw couple who were in love but forbidden to marry because the man did not have a large enough dowry. The couple eloped and were pursued by a party of warriors to a cliff, where they leapt into Spring River to their deaths.
The spirit of a miner, decapitated in a mining accident, carrying a lantern searching for his head.
The spirit of a Confederate sergeant killed by cannon fire, who is searching for his head.
A miner searching for his children kidnapped by Indians.

Explanatory Theories

A 1946 study by the Army Corps of Engineers concluded the phenomenon was “a mysterious light of unknown origin,” a non-explanation which appears to be, to this day, the consensus assessment of The Spookight.

The most popular explanation appears to be that the light is the results of reflections from car lights on nearby roads, including old Route 66, deflected by heat rising from the hills. The most popular retort is that The Spooklight was reported long before automobiles existed or the pertinent highways were constructed.

Another frequently voiced hypothesis is that the light results from will-o’-the-wisp, the name given to the emission of light that caused by the decay of wood and organic materials. According to reliable sources, however, the light given off by will-o’-the-wisp is not as intense as that reported from The Spooklight.

There have also been theories that the light arises from glowing minerals in the area, which would not explain the mobility of the light.

Another hypothesis is that the light is formed by electrical fields in areas where earthquakes and ground shifts take place.

One scientific methodology that appears to be employed with surprising frequency for the exploration of the nature of The Spooklight is shooting at it with a rifle. By all accounts, however, these attempts have had no effect on the light.

The Museum

The “Spooksville Museum” was opriginally owned by Leslie W. Robertson. It contained photographs and a collection of accounts about the light. There was also a viewing platform. Garland “Spooky” Middleton, who operated the Spooksville Museum in later years. Spooky carried a variety of refreshments and would rent binoculars and telescopes that were set up on the viewing platform. Upon Spooky’s death, the building the area was bought up by residents who closed the museum.