Valentine's Day: a time for the buying
and giving of Teddy Bears; the consuming of overpriced, themed
restaurant meals and copious amounts of chocolate; a time, in
general, for spending quality moments with one's significant other.
Since neither my roommate nor I had a
significant other to buy Teddy Bears for, we decided instead to go in
search of the Hornet Spooklight.
A spooklight, or ghost light, or ball
of light, or
ghostly-lantern-carried-by-a-headless-Indian-fellow-searching-for-his-head
is one of those strange phenomena that pop up here and there around
the country to provide entertainment for people wondering what to do
on any given Valentine's Day evening. The places they appear are
also handy for high schoolers looking to make out, as in “Hey,
baby, let's go down to [insert name of locale known for having a
ghostly light here] and see if we can spot it. Let me throw a couple
of six-packs in the trunk.”
Arguably, the most famous of these
inexplicable light shows is the one that can be seen near the town of
Hornet (which is near the town of Joplin, which is not-so-near the
city of Springfield) in Southern Missouri, right on the border
between Missouri and Oklahoma.
The first known reports of the Hornet
Spooklight were back in the 1830s. But the first documented sighting
was around 1880. Later still, the Kansas City Star published a story
about the spooklight in 1936.
What is it? Well, that's the
question, isn't it? People who have seen it -- and it appears
regularly, so the chances of spotting it if you happen to be in or
around Hornet, Missouri, on a cold winter's night between ten p.m.
and three a.m. are pretty good -- describe it as a glowing ball of
light between the twelve inches and six feet across. Sometimes it's
multiple lights. Sometimes the light weaves around, sometimes it
hangs out in your car, sometimes it orders out for pizza. Okay,
maybe it doesn't order out for pizza, but it's supposed to do all
that other stuff.
Lots of spooklight experts (I didn't
know there were that many spooklight experts to start with, so there
you go) hypothesize that the light is created by the refraction of
car lights from Route 66 and Interstate 44 which is just over a ridge
from the Devil's Promenade (that's the road where the spooklight is
most commonly seen -- and where, based on the name, I assume that the
Devil takes a nightly constitutional). Some think it may have
something to do with swamp gas, although the closest swamp is in
Louisiana. Others think the light may be caused by electrical
disturbances as a result of geological activity (ie: earthquake
stuff) going on underground. Still others believe that spottings of
the light may be associated with the consumption of too many
six-packs of beer.
My roomie and I, always on the lookout
for a good haunting/unexplainable ghostly phenom to check out, threw
some gear (SLR camera, HD videocam, flashlights, compass, digital
recorders, FLIR thermal cameras, kitchen sink, and a six-pack) into
the SUV and drove the 76 miles from Springfield to Hornet, following
directions I'd found after doing exhaustive research on the Internet
(motto: Helping to Locate Spooklights and Headless, Lantern-Wielding
Indians Since 1881).
After a few false starts we finally
found our turn (“Is that the road?” “Dude, I have no idea.”
“Didn't you just do exhaustive research on this thing?” “Yeah,
well, I may have been distracted by ads for Teddy Bears, chocolate,
and dating websites; give me a break. Oh, wait, there it is. Turn
there. Turn there!”). Our hopes that we had actually found the
right spot were bolstered by a sign that read, “Spooklight Taxes.”
Now, we never did determine if this was a place where Spooklights
could get their taxes done, or if it was talking about how “taxing”
looking for the spooklight was, but we figured that there was a good
chance you wouldn't put that sort of sign up on a road that wasn't
a place where you could occasionally spot ghostly lights.
Anyway, we set up
our gear, took some pictures, leaned up against the car for a while,
set up the gear in a different spot, leaned up against the car some
more, tried to determine if frostbite was setting in (winter nights
on the Missouri-Oklahoma border can be a bit brisk -- See “Little
House on the Prairie” for more details), and generally went about
our business of not seeing any spooklights.
We saw lights,
sure: lights from a cell phone tower, lights from Route 66, lights
from I44, lights from the few dozen houses that were around. But
none of these lights were doing anything interesting, and certainly
none of them were ordering pizza.
However, at one
point, while in the car getting feeling back in our arms and legs, we
heard a most supernatural sound: a wild moaning, braying, howling
cacophony of sound, almost like a pack of coyotes egging on a pack of
wild dogs.
Turned out that it
was a pack of coyotes egging on a pack of wild dogs; still, for a
moment there, we had hope.
Then we left.
But we'll go back.
The conditions might not have been right for a spotting. Maybe it
was too cold. Maybe the stars weren't aligned right. Maybe the
spooklight was scared off by all the equipment. Maybe there weren't
enough cars on I44.
Maybe there wasn't
enough beer.
*
The Surgeon
General's office has determined that hunting spooklights could be
hazardous to your health, particularly if you are pregnant, nursing,
or hope to become pregnant. You've been warned.
[Below: "Be very, very quiet, the author is hunting spooklights."
