The Gurdon Light

Gurdon sits about 85 miles south of Little Rock, just east of I-30 on Highway 67. North of town, Missouri Pacific track once ran through swampy woods near an old cemetery. The line is disused now, partly removed. People still walk it at night, usually in small groups. They are looking for the Gurdon Light.

Friday, December 4, 1931. Section foreman Will McClain was killed on the line. Nobody saw it. The city marshal arrested Louie McBride, 38, a laborer on McClain's crew, because he was acting suspiciously. McBride confessed and led the marshal to the body.

McClain had been struck four times on the head. Once with a shovel, three times with a spike maul. A blood trail almost a quarter of a mile long ran into the swampy woods, as if he had tried to crawl away. McBride was electrocuted at the Little Rock penitentiary on July 8, 1932. Local tradition says the light appeared soon after.

In 1981 UPI reporter Damon Thompson recorded the description still used today. Yellowish white, sometimes bluish, it floats 1 to 3 feet above the track. About 18 inches wide and 1 foot high, shaped "like a medicine or rugby ball." It may turn around at one end of the track and later appear at the other, but it never comes very close. Others have seen it blue, green, white or orange, "bobbing around as if on a cord."

Martha Ramey saw it once as a child. "We kept on walking and walking until finally there was a light in front of us," she said. "It seemed like it was chasing us."

Bob Thompson, president of the Clark County Historical Association, saw "kind of a reddish, golden light." "You turn around and it is behind you." Billy Tarpley put it simply. "It shows up when it chooses to show up."

Mike Clingan grew up in Gurdon. In 1981 he was a 22-year-old physics graduate student, and he said he had seen the light "hundreds of times" in all weathers, and it "always holds shape." Clingan found no polarization, which he said ruled out a mirage. The light caused a slight deflection on a galvanometer, and he proposed a piezoelectric effect from crystals under the track, stressed by the New Madrid Fault. He reached no firm conclusion.

Skeptics such as Brian Dunning of Skeptoid favour headlights on I-30. Critics of that theory note that reports predate the interstate, and that the site lies more than 2 miles from the highway. Against swamp gas, believers point to a light that appears in all weather and holds its shape.

Folklore has its own answers. McClain's lantern, still moving along the tracks. Or a decapitated brakeman searching for his head, a stock legend Dunning notes at other ghost lights, among them the Bragg Road light in Texas.

Unsolved Mysteries filmed near Gurdon in October 1994 and aired the story on December 16 that year. Mysteries at the Museum followed in 2018, alongside Arkansas PBS and local stations. Today the tracks are a Halloween destination. The light has never been explained.