The Gurdon Light

A real, century-old unexplained light on an old rail bed

Gurdon, Arkansas, about 85 miles south of Little Rock, grew up as a railroad and timber town: a construction camp on the Iron Mountain Railway, completed in 1873, then a junction where lumber lines branched off toward Camden and the mills. Out in the woods beyond town, along a stretch of railroad that no longer runs, people have been seeing a light since the 1930s. It hovers above the old grade and bobs as if swinging on a cord, and witnesses have called it blue, green, white and orange.

The story most people tell is the brakeman's. A railroad worker fell into the path of a train one night, the train took off his head, and the light is his lantern as he walks the tracks looking for it. The skeptic Brian Dunning has pointed out that very similar tales are told of ghost lights all over the country, and that headless brakemen can hardly have been so common.

Gurdon has a darker, truer story too. In December 1931, William McClain, a foreman on the Missouri Pacific, argued with one of his workers, Louis McBride, over how many days McBride would be allowed to work; in the Depression the railroad had no more hours to give. McBride struck McClain on the head with a shovel and beat him to death with a spike maul. The light was first seen soon afterward, and many in Gurdon came to believe it was McClain's lantern still glowing by the tracks.

Explanations have never settled it. Some blame the headlights of cars on Interstate 30, but the site is more than two miles from the highway and the light was reported for decades before the interstate was built. Swamp gas does not fit a light that shows in every kind of weather. Others suggest the quartz beneath Gurdon gives off electricity under pressure.

The legend made the woods a favourite Halloween outing. In October 1994 the NBC series Unsolved Mysteries came to film a re-creation of the 1931 murder, and the episode aired that December; the light has since appeared on Mysteries at the Museum. The tracks are long out of use and the rails partly removed or covered, but the light still draws its crowds every October.