https://projectaquarius.mufon.com/w...wsclipping-Service-1992-11-no-280.pdf#page=19
This article begins on page 18, with these details:
- Headline: "There's no shortage of eerie tales to explain the Tri-State Spooklight"
- Author: Linda Walker, News-Record Staff Writer
- Newspaper: News-Record, Miami, Oklahoma
- Date: October 30, 1992
- Reprinted in: UFO Newsclipping Service, November 1992, pages 18–19.
Transcript of article:
There's no shortage of eerie tales to explain the Tri-State Spooklight
By LINDA WALKER
News-Record Staff Writer
News-Record, Miami, Oklahoma — October 30, 1992
Reprinted in UFO Newsclipping Service, November 1992, pages 18–19.
For a phenomenon that has yet to have a final, universally accepted explanation, there is one certainty about the Tri-State Spooklight: there's no shortage of tales and theories trying to explain it.
The tales and theories make great fodder for writers of books, newspapers and magazines, as well as for area residents.
Who wouldn't be a little fascinated about town of panicked residents or a decapitated Civil War soldier still trying to find his head? Who wouldn't begin to speculate about swamp gas or headlights from nearby Interstate 44?
Some might be content to be entertained with tales. But Tulsan Keith Partain believes the Tri-State Spooklight should be subjected to the same scientific and journalistic rigor as other phenomena. In his quest to do so, Partain recorded a book's worth of tales and theories and spent months seeking factual confirmation in official records.
Partain did not incorporate the common tales and explanations into his own Spooklight theory because he did not find enough evidence to corroborate them. He did, however stumble onto some interesting distortions and inconsistencies.
"Every time somebody picked up a typewriter, they made up a new one," Partain said. "Irresponsible reporters would get their typewriters out and they would just tippy-tap out a new version with no cross-references."
The fault lies with everyone, from researchers who failed to do adequate leg work to writers who were content to repeat old tales without trying to find their origin, Partain said.
While the setting for at least three Spooklight legends was pre-1900, Partain found no published accounts that mentioned the Spooklight dated before 1935.
• Hornet Panic.
Among the most written-about legends related to the Spooklight is the Hornet Panic of 1880 or 1886.
The Spooklight sighting so frightened residents in Hornet, Mo., that they packed and left. Another version attributes the exodus to deaths of two Indian children, which was blamed on the Spooklight. Still another version lists the death of livestock.
Based on Partain's research, however, "it never happened." Aside from modern-day newspaper accounts of the legend, Partain found no historical documentation.
"A mass panic like that, especially through the Tri-State Mining District, would have been major," said Partain, noting there were as many as 10,000 people living in the area over a century and a half.
"I even had a professional double-check my research. Same conclusion. No panic."
Partain also made another observation on the date 1886: add 50 and you get 1936, the year after the first known Spooklight accounts were published. Partain speculated the date 1886 might have been arrived at by someone listening to an old timer who casually observed that the light was around "50 years ago."
• Tale of the lost head.
Anyone who researches Spooklight files at Miami Public Library will find at least three newspaper stories mentioning an apparition who carries a lantern and walks the area in search of his decapitated head.
The ghost has been that of an Indian whose wife decapitated him in a fit of anger and of a man whose head was lopped off by three infatuated women after they found out he was a "three-timer." The most common version is that of the Civil War soldier, who was either executed or accidentally decapitated by a cannon.
Official records, however, do not verify such accounts, Partain said.
"There are good historians that can dig up anything else," Partain said. "Why don't we have the name of that sergeant, his squad, his regiment?"
• Indian Lovers.
Another tale contends the Spooklight symbolizes everlasting love between an Indian maid and brave. After their forbidden love was discovered, or their marriage averted by an expensive dowry, they killed themselves by leaping off a bluff overlooking the Spring River.
Partain found the first account of the lovers in a 1903 Chronicles of Oklahoma. It mentions no spooklight. He questions how the couple ended up nearly 10 miles to the east, over the state line.
"Things did get confused, there's no question about it," Partain said. "But there's no sense in perpetuating the confusion."
• Car Headlights.
Oddly, the first written accounts of the Spooklight seem to correspond roughly with the creation of Route 66 in 1933, Partain said. The building of the highway added car headlights, which became a common explanation for the Spooklight.
While headlights have muddied the picture and have often been mistaken for the Spooklight, Partain does not believe they can fully suffice as an explanation. The Spooklight should be seen from any direction, he said, not just from the direction of the nearby Interstate 44 or former Route 66.
• Independent studies.
The most commonly referenced study is one by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers from Camp Crowder, Mo., during World War II. According to some newspaper accounts, the group never concluded what the Spooklight was.
Partain's research, however, turned up only an investigation by the Signal Corps from Camp Crowder in 1946, not the U.S. Army Corps in Engineers. The study, which took place a mile north of Spooklight Road, showed how the "phenomenon" could be created with lights.
A theory that the lights are somehow caused by swamp gas, or methane, has also been proposed. However, Partain said no significant sources of methane have been located in the area.
• Location problem.
Many accounts of the Spooklight, especially those from Missouri, refer to it as the Hornet Spooklight or the Joplin Spooklight.
Partain was unable to verify any spottings over the Oklahoma state line in Missouri. Joplin and Hornet, like Miami and Quapaw, have been reference points to direct people to the Spooklight, but Partain maintains the phenomenon is indisputably located in Oklahoma.
Running west from the Oklahoma/Missouri state line, a road has been named for the Spooklight, but the real Spooklight is not confined only to that road, Partain said. The road became notable when Arthur P. "Spooky" Meadows built a museum at the head of the road.
Meadows, and later his brother-in-law, Garland "Spooky" Middleton, offered a night spot for teens, capitalizing on the Spooklight.
The club offered all the standard fare — a jukebox, root beer and a place to have a dance with a beau. For added thrill, the "Spookys" also offered a telescope and a wall of old clippings and photos.
"Spooklight Road is not special," Partain said. "I suspect it to be where old Spooky One just happened to be able to buy the building for the museum."
In fact, Spooklight Road is one of three parallel county roads that was once part of the original, winding Devil's Promenade Road, according to old topographic maps Partain located.
A Webster's Dictionary definition of promenade is "a leisurely walk for pleasure or display." As Partain puts it, "It wasn't named Devil's Promenade for nothing."
• Reporting Problems.
In addition to location and origination, the timing of the Spooklight has also been distorted.
From 1935 to 1959, published accounts said the Spooklight was a "frequent sighting." From 1960 to present, after a museum opened and more tour books listed the Spooklight, Partain noted it suddenly became a "nightly mystery."
If Partain's theory is correct, Tri-State Spooklight might more accurately pay a "decadely" visit.
By advancing his own findings, Partain is quick to stress that he does not want to offend the beliefs of others. He added that he would gladly hear ghost accounts with certain criteria and that he would welcome any published newspaper or journal accounts of the Spooklight before 1930.
"If we get the facts, we'll get closer to the real anomaly," Partain explained. "Tri-State Spooklight is many things. It's a rumor, it is distorted anecdotes, such as the Indian lovers, the automobile headlights and the real anomaly."
https://www.okhumanities.org/doccenter/bde3ab931bec48db9eef59f5952141fc?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Transcript of Article:
The Spook Light Mystery—Solved!
(Sort of.)
By Allen Rice
Photos by Bruno Maestrini and Elisa Herrmann
Oklahoma Humanities, Winter 2016, pages 29–31
Spooktacular adventures on a haunted Oklahoma backroad
On any given summer's night in northeastern Oklahoma, at least a dozen vehicles hug the narrow shoulder of an unremarkable country road nicknamed "Spook Light Road" or "Devil's Promenade," just a mile or two west of the Missouri border. The adventurous spill out into the road, others sit nervously in their cars, and everyone is gazing west down State Road E-50. There are no towns within miles, only dark sky and steep ridges of oak, pine, and hickory forest.
Suddenly, a glowing orb the size of a basketball appears over a hill a few hundred yards away. It hovers momentarily, then creeps toward the spectators. Reactions swing from curiosity to abject terror. It moves closer. And then it's gone.
That, ladies and gentlemen, is the phenomenon called the Spook Light, an enduring mystery also known as the Joplin Spook Light, the Hornet Spook Light, or the Tri-State Spook Light. It appears at random (on rare occasions and only on hilltops) as an eerie colored aura, glowing pale as a kerosene lantern or dazzling bright as a motorcycle headlight. Through binoculars it can also appear as a number of lights that split off and go in different directions. And don't bother chasing the light—it will simply vanish.
So what is the Spook Light? Theories range from the rational to the supernatural. Scientific attempts to explain the mystery have used all manner of instruments (light magnetometers, night vision cameras, negative ion detectors, and even Geiger counters) to attribute the light to swamp gas, mineral deposits, will-o'-the-wisps, ball lightning, tectonic strain, or other "logical" sources—to no avail.
The most popular and enduring explanation is more mystical: ghosts. One legend says that a young Quapaw Indian couple's forbidden love forced them to leap from a cliff to forever walk their tribal grounds by night in the form of the glowing orb. Another is that a local miner's family was kidnapped and he carries a ghostly lantern, looking for them night after night beyond the grave.
Equally interesting are historical records of various teams that have investigated the phenomenon over the last 130 years. In 1936, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter A.B. MacDonald of The Kansas City Star published the first recorded investigation of the Spook Light phenomenon, documenting oral tradition dating from the 1880s when it so frightened homesteaders in Hornet, Missouri, that they fled in terror. Perhaps inspired by MacDonald's article, a band of students from the University of Michigan camped out to solve the mystery in 1942. After two weeks of frustration, the students spent their last night firing high-powered rifles at the light. (Adult beverages may have been involved in that particular experiment.)
Spoiler Alert—The Mystery Revealed
My little ragtag team of investigators call ourselves "the Boomers." Where some guys' weekends involve hunting or fishing, the Boomers are out searching for great unsolved mysteries. Bigfoot in the Ouachita Mountains. Nessie in Scotland. Space aliens in Roswell. That sort of thing. We hunt for history and fish for folklore. On this particular trip, the Boomers were comprised of my friend (ex-student Christopher "Chris" Shaneyfelt) and my family (Michael "Fergie" Ferguson, James Cast, and Keon Canaday).
We began our adventure after midnight on a misty September evening, off to see the Spook Light for ourselves. At first, we saw nothing. We moved positions from the bottom of a hill to the top, and not long afterward the Spook Light suddenly appeared. We couldn't believe our luck. We didn't think we would see the phenomenon on our first trip. We were so excited that we stayed up until 4:30 a.m. and saw the Spook Light three more times.
Through binoculars I had a vague impression of a flashing yellow light (a caution sign?) seeming to emanate directly in front of the Spook Light. Later, the Spook Light changed from white to bright red to radiant blue (perhaps a police vehicle?). We jumped in the van and gave chase. As in all accounts of trying to chase the light, it disappeared. We drove several miles west and eventually found some flashing yellow lights near a train overpass. Could the car lights from this new road be the source of the Spook Light? Possibly. We were out of time, so further sleuthing would have to wait. In less than a day we spotted the light, speculated on what its source might be, conducted an investigation, and came to a conclusion. We just didn't have proof.
Flash forward to our second expedition a few weeks later on December 13, 2014. We returned, armed with cell phones, flashlights, binoculars, and three video cameras. On that chilly December day, Chris and I did some preliminary scouting. By dusk, Fergie had arrived with James and Keon and we parted ways. I drove my van to the westernmost hill on Spook Light Road. Fergie drove his little subcompact west, around a four-mile square of forest that lay between Spook Light Road and the town of Quapaw. He parked facing east on E-50 West, a road that lined up perfectly with Spook Light Road, and called me on his cell phone. This was our moment of truth. Facing west, we saw the Spook Light in the exact position everyone always sees it: below and to the left of a blinking cell tower. Even at maximum zoom, I could barely pick up the bluish-white image in the camera, but I began filming and narrating ad lib.
"I wish that light were brighter," I directed. The Spook Light grew brighter.
"I wish it were dimmer." The Spook Light dimmed, repeating the brighter-dimmer pattern on my command several more times. When I willed the light to change color, it immediately turned a pinkish red. The Boomers had replicated the Spook Light! How?
Fergie flashed his headlights on and off in direct response to my narration as I asked for the Spook Light to become dimmer or brighter. When I asked for the Spook Light to change color, Keon and James placed red translucent filters over the headlights, bathing the beams pinkish red. We demonstrated that we were controlling the Spook Light. So, against all odds, the Boomers triumphed in solving the Spook Light Mystery!
Chris took our amateurish film footage and my extempore narration and put together a twenty-two minute documentary of how we solved the mystery. On April 3, 2015, The University of Central Oklahoma sponsored a première screening of the film at a press conference open to the public. Seventy people attended and the reaction was overwhelmingly positive. Afterwards, we released the video on YouTube, where you can see it for yourself under the heading "Spook Light Mystery Solved!" (The video image of the light is admittedly blurry, but even the best of cameras mounted firmly on a tripod would produce blurry results if recording headlights from a distance of at least six miles away.)
Essentials of Time and Place
Despite its cool moniker, Spook Light Road is pretty ordinary. As Robert Gannon, writing for Popular Mechanics in 1965, noted: "The only thing that seems singular about this road is its remarkable straightness and the abundance of beer cans along its edges." But the Spook Light phenomenon has been researched and investigated dozens of times by award-winning journalists and teams of pedigreed scientists. The folklore travel guide Weird U.S. declared it "one of America's greatest mysteries." It seems counter-intuitive that, despite brilliant investigators with highly-calibrated equipment, the amateurish Boomers would be the team to finally solve the mystery. As it turns out, we only sort of solved it. Our subsequent research has uncovered that we weren't the first, and there are other "goings on" at Spook Light Road that may yet defy explanation.
As Chris and I worked on our documentary, we accumulated an inch-thick pile of print material on the Spook Light. Unbeknownst to us at the time of our expeditions, the mystery had essentially been solved not once, not twice, but three times in the past. A.B. MacDonald in 1936, George W. Ward in 1945, and William Least Heat-Moon in 2008 all argued that the source of the Spook Light was merely car headlights from E-50 West. In 1946, the Army Corps of Engineers performed the same flashing headlight experiment that the Boomers reinvented eight decades later. Unfortunately, the experiment failed when Army researchers got disoriented and sent the car down the wrong road.
But let history show that three researchers—Charles W. Graham in 1946, R.E. "Bob" Loftin in 1955, and Robert Gannon in 1965— did it all; that is, they theorized that the source of the Spook Light was car headlights, conducted the flashing headlight experiment to prove their theory, and succeeded in seeing the flashing headlights from Spook Light Road. As to why the Spook Light appears so rarely and why it can be seen only from hilltops, the trio came to questionable conclusions. They hinged theories on ground moisture and heat waves, relative humidity and temperature, and refractions through misty skies to account for the shimmering light—all similar to the "Refraction Theory" advocated by Kansas City scientist George W. Ward. What do the Boomers think? On misty nights, humidity obscures distant traffic and gives an eerie glow of otherworld mystery; but as far as we know, the Refraction Theory has yet to be proven or even tested. Our conclusions suggest two reasons why the Spook Light appears rarely and only from hilltops—time and geography.
The rarity of sightings is built into folklore tradition, which advises observations after midnight; sightings are thus rare because there is less traffic on E-50 West late at night. By starting our investigations at dusk, the Boomers caught the last of rush hour traffic, resulting in more Spook Light sightings. We looked through binoculars during the day and could see the cars driving in the distance.
Regarding geography—and why Spook Light observations occur only on hills—let us imagine two high towers separated by thick forest with treetops two or three feet shorter than the towers. Fergie is on top of the first tower using a flashlight to send Morse Code to me on top of the second tower. Chris, standing at the base of my tower, cannot see Fergie's flashlight because the beams are blocked by trees. In the same way, E-50 West "towers" as a long, downward slope running west to east and aligning perfectly in cardinal direction and altitude with the other "tower" of Spook Light Road. Fergie's car beams from E-50 West travel in a straight line above the forested valley, striking only the tops of the three or four highest hills on Spook Light Road. This is why the Boomers couldn't see the phenomenon until we moved to the top of the hill. It also explains why the light disappears as you chase it (another mini-mystery the three Spook Light research heroes didn't address). From a "tower" hill you can see distant car lights, which form the Spook Light; but when you walk or drive down the hill, the Spook Light disappears, now blocked by the hill or forest.
To their great credit, Graham, Loftin, and Gannon all clearly indicated that the source of the Spook Light was traffic from E-50 West and the two or three miles where it merges with Highway 69 (which they knew as Route 66). Surprisingly, none of them indicated the exact point along that route at which they conducted their experiments. This may seem a minor point, but traffic lights emanating from the eastern part of E-50 West cannot be seen from Spook Light Road. We know this because Fergie flashed his headlights at three separate points along E-50 West, where it starts at the westernmost part of the forest, and Chris and I failed to see the lights until we were at a strategic "tower" point. When we finally saw Fergie's headlights flashing, his car was parked just a few yards east of the intersection of E-50 West and Highway 137. Also of timing note, our experiment was in the dead of winter, when few leaves were on the trees to block the car beams; in summer, when leaves are full, the experiment would likely be successful only if Fergie moved west, further up the long ramp of Highway 137.
So allow the Boomers to put a fine point on it. In our experiment, Fergie's car was parked southwest of Quapaw, a few yards east of the intersection of E-50 Road and Highway 137, at these exact map coordinates: 36° 56.62´ N, 94° 47.227´ W. By putting a pushpin in the exact location of our experiment, and by explaining how increased foliage and the intervening forest could obscure the traffic source of the Spook Light from the easternmost parts of E-50 West, the Boomers helped validate the pioneering trio's conclusions—and carved a niche in the Spook Light saga for ourselves.
On Skeptics and Thrill Seekers
Why do so many media outlets and Spook Light aficionados continue to declare it an unsolved mystery? Even contemporaries of the earlier research trio rejected their findings at the time they were published. Why? Because seeing is believing. The Boomers fantasize about going back in time, handing each of the researchers a video camera, thereby creating a collage of filmed experiments as renowned as the 1967 Patterson-Gimlin footage of Bigfoot. Since Graham, Loftin, and Gannon had no video proof to back their claims, the impact of their achievements has been all but lost, even to one another. Each man seemed to think (much as the Boomers did) that he was the first to prove his experiment. Their argument—that all could be explained by traffic—got lost in the debate, becoming merely one of a dozen competing theories, the chief of which was ghosts.
Our video footage is admittedly technically underwhelming, but it is hard to dispute: a now documented source of light located exactly where the Spook Light always appears that responds to my voice commands. Skeptics need not take our video footage on faith alone. We didn't film a once-in-a-lifetime moment, like grainy footage of Bigfoot—it's reproducible. If critics doubt our claims (and they should), they can travel to our GPS coordinates and conduct their own experiment. Even better would be drone footage, shot flying along the Spook Light route.
Although the Boomers solved (or re-solved) the mystery of the Spook Light, other puzzles remain. For instance, how could old-timers have seen the Spook Light before the invention of cars? Our guess is that a lantern, bonfire, or other light source near Quapaw might have caused a similar illusion. It would be interesting to flash an antique lantern or create a small bonfire from the "tower" of E-50 West and observe it from Spook Light Road. Until someone films such an experiment, it remains a mystery.
An even bigger mystery is the long history of observers who claim that the Spook Light behaves in ways that no traffic lights could account for; namely, that the Spook Light rises up into the sky, that it appears in the east rather than in the west, and that it can move perpendicular from left to right or vice versa. Are these phenomena for real? Can they be explained? Maybe, and maybe not. The Boomers tend to be skeptical of patterns other than what traffic would account for.
We would love to be wrong about all this. The Boomers are always looking for the next great mystery. For now, we salute all the researchers and thrill seekers who have ventured out to an isolated stretch of farm road to catch a glimpse of something wondrous. The somewhat mundane, and arguably disappointing, answer to the mystery (that the Spook Light is merely traffic on the distant horizon) cannot detract from the fascinating illusion that the lay of the land and a trick of the eye impresses upon the human imagination.
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
ALLEN RICE was born and raised in Edmond, Oklahoma, and holds a Ph.D. in medieval and renaissance literature from Indiana University, Bloomington. He is a full professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma, where he has served since 1991. He is the recipient of several distinguished teaching awards and his publications include co-authoring Speak Your Mind: Arguing 21st Century Issues (2004).
ELISA HERRMANN is an Assistant Professor of Mass Communications at Sam Houston State University, where she teaches TV and Film production, specializing in screenwriting and editing. She is an award-winning independent filmmaker and screenwriter. elisaherrmann.com
BRUNO MAESTRINI is a multimedia journalist currently based in China as director of photography of the China Daily newspaper. He specializes in new media and has a special interest in portraying the local culture and daily life of the places he visits around the world. brunomaestrini.com
• The Astronomy Café. Spook Light writings, theories, and reports collected by NASA astronomer Dr. Sten Odenwald. astronomycafe.net (under "My Websites" select Weird Things in the Attic; scroll to Spook Lights)
• "Tri-State Spook Light Booklet," assembled by retired Capt. R.E. "Bob" Loftin for the now-defunct Spook Light Museum. Includes newspaper clippings, local folklore, and Loftin's account of investigating the mystery. inamidst.com/lights/spooklet (images of booklet at celticcaper.tripod.com)
• "The Hornet Spook Light," Troy Taylor, Unexplained America. Includes Taylor's commentary on visiting the area and turn-by-turn directions to the site. prairieghosts.com/devprom.html
• "Seneca's Traditional Spook Light," Lands & Lores video and blog. Filmmakers Bruno Maestrini and Elisa Herrmann interview Spook Light chasers who share local stories. landsandlores.com
