The Hornet Spook Light (Devil's Promenade, Joplin / Tri-State Spooklight)

The light belongs to E 50 Road, known locally as "Spooklight Road" or "the Devil's Promenade". It runs west from near Hornet, Missouri, to the Oklahoma line close to Quapaw.

Legend places it on the Trail of Tears. The story of an 1881 publication called The Ozark Spook Light has never been backed by the document itself. The written record starts later. Late summer 1934. At the Idle-a-While Camp off Route 66, Clara E. Gordon wrote: "An orange-colored light appeared in the center of the road about three hundred feet beyond." In January 1936, A. B. MacDonald's Kansas City Star article carried it to a wide audience.

Witnesses describe a flickering ball "ranging in size from a caramel apple to a Halloween pumpkin." Mostly orange. Sometimes white, red, green or blue. It "spins, hovers, zigzags, and dances down the center of the road." Margaret Tuller, Newton County home economics agent, noted that "The two lights are always one straight above the other."

Then the close encounters. Louise Graham of Galena, Kansas, remembered a bus ride. "The light perched on the rear window as though trying to get in the bus. We were scared half to death." Ryan Scheuermann was in a car with four others. "We saw it from a distance and before we knew it, it was on the hood of the car." Bill Mizer recalled: "The first time I saw the light, my hair raised several inches from my scalp, and I had a hard time keeping my hat on my head."

In 1936, Logan Smith of the Neosho Times was already arguing for car headlights. Then 1946. Major Thomas Sheard, post signal officer at Camp Crowder, and Col. Dennis E. McCunniff worked with Kansas City Star reporter Charles W. Graham. A car about 10 miles west flashed its headlights. Observers at Hornet saw the light appear "exactly as the car turned its headlights on and off". The verdict: "nothing more than car lights".

In 1955, eight Kansas City investigators with a 3-inch telescope saw "as many as seven" lights. Around 1960, a Carthage high-school student, William Underwood, used spectroscopy and found an incandescent source consistent with car headlamps. In 1965, Robert Gannon of Popular Mechanics brought in University of Arkansas professors. Prof. Jean Prideaux saw paired lights. In 2015, Allen Rice and the "Boomers" concluded it was car headlights and taillights.

The mainstream view is refraction. E 50 Road lines up with Route 66 roughly 10 miles west, across the Spring River valley, and a temperature gradient over the river bends the beams. Others proposed swamp gas, will-o'-the-wisp, ball lightning and "earth lights". Paul Devereux included the Hornet light in Earth Lights Revelation (1989). Folklore tells of Quapaw lovers who "joined hands above the Spring River and leaped to their deaths".

Promotion muddied things. The museum telescope had a deliberately reduced aperture. A widely repeated quote crediting the Army Corps of Engineers with "mysterious light of unknown origin" has no known primary source. Skeptoid's verdict: "there is no evidence, other than dubious verbal anecdotes, that anyone has ever gotten up close to it."

Arthur "Spooky" Meadows ran the Spookville museum from the 1950s, and his son-in-law Garland "Spooky" Middleton followed. In 1962 a Tulsa man shot at the light and got five days in jail plus a fine. Pixar's Mater and the Ghostlight is said to be inspired by it. The light keeps company with the Marfa Lights and the Brown Mountain Lights. People still drive out to E 50 Road to wait.