The Spooklight

A century-old, well-documented mystery light, still appearing

E50 Road runs west for about four miles through farm country in northeastern Oklahoma near Quapaw, just over the Missouri line. Locals long ago named it the Devil's Promenade. At night an orange ball of light is said to bob along it, anywhere from the size of a baseball to a basketball, spinning down the middle of the road, rising over the treetops and then retreating. Most people watch from the east, so the light has been tied to the hamlet of Hornet, Missouri, and to Joplin, and goes by the Hornet, Joplin or Tri-State Spook Light.

The City of Joplin's telling dates the light to the Trail of Tears in 1836 and to a first report in 1881, in a publication called the Ozark Spook Light. It says investigators including the Army Corps of Engineers found no conclusive answer, and it floats an electrical charge thrown off by shifting rock along a fault. The ghost stories vary: Quapaw lovers who leapt into the Spring River, a miner searching with his lantern for his missing family, an Osage chief hunting for his head.

The printed record points somewhere plainer. A stretch of Route 66 south of Quapaw runs east to west in line with E50, about ten miles away on the far side of the Spring River, and from high points on Spooklight Road the headlights of eastbound cars appear unexpectedly in the distance. A. B. MacDonald made the case in the Kansas City Star in January 1936. It has been shown repeatedly since, in 1946 by Thomas Sheard, in 1955 by a group from Kansas City, in 1965 by Robert Gannon and in 2015 by Allen Rice's sleuths, with fireworks, spotlights and flashing headlights on Route 66 seen by observers posted on E50. Gannon's telescope split the single light into car headlights that always came in pairs. The journalist Paul W. Johns found no mention of the light in print before 1926, the year that section of Route 66 was designated, and no evidence that the 1880s manuscript ever existed.

Chambers of commerce have promoted the light for generations, and Joplin's published a guidebook in 1955. In the 1960s a Spooklight museum at the east end of the road charged 25 cents for a look through a telescope aimed through a half-inch hole in the wall. The city's directions run from I-44 exit 4 south on Highway 86, along Route BB to its end, then onto E50; the darkest stretch is 1.5 to 2 miles in. Locals say the light shows best between 10 pm and midnight and shies away from big groups and loud sounds.