Local members of Mensa try to shed light on Four-State legend
By Max McCoy
Globe Staff Writer

The invitation was irresistible.

A group of area Mensans — members of the international high IQ society — were going to investigate the Spook Light. Would a reporter and perhaps a photographer like to accompany them? It wasn’t that the group intended to solve the mystery, explained organizer Debbie Christenson of Pittsburg, Kan. It was aiming instead for a little intellectual fun.

6:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 18

Pizza Hut, 2802 S. Main St., Joplin

Around a table covered with topographic maps and yellowed newspaper clippings, the six Mensans are busy chatting about mysteries. It is a diverse group, with ages from 27 to 69. Their occupations range from graduate student to a researcher for a local law firm. Christenson, however, a 50-year-old accountant, is the only woman.

They engage in the sort of animated conversation you would expect from a group of geniuses. The talk isn’t about ghosts or goblins but bona fide scientific enigmas. Example: the coelacanth, a fish thought to have died with the dinosaurs until one was caught in 1938. Or the double-slit experiment, designed to solve the physics conundrum of whether light is particle or wave. Of course, says Mark Rountree, it’s both.

Rountree describes the classic experiment: Shoot single photons through a double slit and the collective result is an interference pattern of light and dark bands on a screen behind. This proves that photons act like waves, at least while they’re traveling through the slits, but the photons also strike the screen, which means they have a fixed position and are therefore behaving like particles.

The spooky part, Rountree says, is that each individual photon must “know” about the interference pattern in order to choose which slit to go through, since the pattern is built up by the passage of one photon at a time. Are you with him so far?

No matter. What counts, says Rountree, 48, a computer network support consultant from Pittsburg, is that the experiment shattered Newtonian concepts of a clockwork universe. The implication is that everything in nature exhibits this wave-particle duality and that nothing in nature is certain.

It seems a fitting introduction to a search for a ghostly light that, according to a century of eyewitness accounts, seems to have a mind of its own.

Ghost lights

The first documented sighting of the Spook Light is often given as 1886, when it supposedly drove homesteaders from their cabins just west of the tiny community of Hornet. Until recently, in fact, many newspaper accounts still referred to the phenomenon as the “Hornet Spook Light.” Old-timers called it “ghost” or “Indian lights.”

Paranormal explanations for the light range from the restless ghost of a murdered Osage chief to the spirits of a pair of star-crossed lovers. Witnesses, however, present a remarkably consistent description of multi-colored lights that float eerily about, split into smaller lights, and sometimes appear behind observers — or on the hoods and fenders of their cars. “All one has to do to see it is drive along the road slowly or stop,” according to an enthusiastic 1935 article in the Kansas City Journal-Post. “At times the light appears to stand still at a distance of about a quarter of a mile. Then it will creep slowly toward the onlookers until it gets up as close as what seems to be 100 yards. . . Alternately, it turns three or four different shades of red, yellow, green and white.”

In the 1940s, celebrated folklorist Vance Randolph recorded a similar first-hand account in “Ozark Folkore and Magic.”

“Sometimes it swings from one side of the road to another, sometimes it seems to roll on the ground, sometimes it rises to the tops of the scrubby oak trees at the roadside, but it never gets more than a few feet from the road on either side. I have seen this light myself, on three occasions.”

In 1933, the section of Route 66 from Commerce to Quapaw was completed, just a few miles to the northwest of the Spook Light area. Skeptics attributed the lights to car headlights on the new road, or to a beacon at the Miami airport. “But the old-timers laugh at all such explanations,” Randolph wrote.

Headlights

Although the original sightings were on the Missouri side of the state line, by the 1940s the light had moved across the line a few hundred yards to a lonely gravel road in Ottawa County, Okla. This location is now know as the “old” Spook Light Road.

In 1942, a group of students from the University of Michigan reportedly spent two weeks camping in the area and studying the lights. Their research methods even included “shooting at the lights with high-powered rifles” — which offers more clues to mid- 20th Century thinking than natural phenomenon — but they failed to solve the mystery.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers got into the act in 1946, when soldiers from not-so-distant Camp Crowder surveyed the area and tested “caves, mineral deposits, highway routes, and every possible explanation.” They came away baffled, according to some reports. Others said the engineers attributed the phenomenon to automobile headlights.

In the 1950s, amateur sleuth and retired Army captain Bob Loftin tackled the mystery. By this time, the light had moved a mile south to its present location, “new” Spook Light Road. Together with Dr. George W. Ward, who was described somewhat mysteriously in contemporary tourist publications as “formerly with the U.S. Bureau of Standards,” Loftin conducted a series of tests using car lights on Highway 66 and observers in the Spook Light area. The phenomenon, they said, was caused by the refraction of light passing through layers of air of differing density or temperature. Also, they said, the road is 200 to 250 feet higher than roads to the west, which created an ideal viewing platform, especially in winter when the trees are bare.

Critics of the refraction theory were quick to point out that the light was seen for decades before the invention of the automobile.

By 1960, the light had become such a popular local attraction that residents along State Line Road were complaining to reporters of the noise, constant traffic, and petty crime. By the 1970s, some of those same residents were complaining of drunks and dopeheads.

The free Spook Light Museum, owned and operated by Arthur P. “Spooky” Meadows and later by Garland Middleton, offered the curious a convenient place for a soft drink or a game of pinball when the light was reluctant to show itself. The museum once recorded 271 visitors in a single night in the early 1970s, and Middleton continued to be its bow-tied “curator” even after a knuckle-busting scuffle with a thief during a robbery attempt.

For three years in the early 1970s, Dr. John W. Northrip, a physics professor from Southwest Missouri State University at Springfield, visited the area with his students. He concluded that rising heat from surrounding hills was refracting light from nearby Interstate 44 (built in the 1960s and five miles closer than old 66) and making it seem to dance and hover. Northrip died recently, but he conceded to an Associated Press reporter in 1997 that he didn’t have an explanation for reports of the light jumping on cars.

In 1977, a researcher named Kevin D. Randle, now a prominent author on fringe subjects, visited the area on behalf of the North American UFO Organization. About this time, a spate of UFO sightings were also linked to the area, and Middleton — the museum curator, remember? — was often quoted by reporters as describing an object “as big as a house” that had flown low over the museum.

Earth lights

The zenith of Spook Light notoriety was the Dec. 2, 1982, broadcast of the NBC program “Real People,” which featured a segment that had been taped on location. Among those featured was Herb Schade, a physics instructor at Crowder College, Neosho, who believed the light was caused by car headlights.

In 1986, an industrial laboratory technician from Tulsa named Keith Partain came up with a new theory. There were two types of sightings: the most common type was indeed caused by vehicle lights from I-44, but there was a rarer form that made up most “classic” sightings. The real sightings, Partain said, are inversely proportional to the 10- to 11-year sunspot cycle. When the cycle is low (as it was in 1986), he said, “radiation is allowed to enter the atmosphere and energize gases to form balls of lightning.”

Other theories include: swamp gas, subatomic particles, an unknown but luminous property of the tripoli mined in the area, gas or electromagnetic energy from underground lead and zinc deposits, and more recently, tectonic strain theory. The tectonic strain theory comes from Canadian researcher Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist and geologist at Laurentian University, and offers a general explanation of “earth lights” — the term now in vogue by fringe researchers. The theory is intriguing because it seeks to explain why eyewitnesses to earth light phenomena are prone also to report simultaneous occult encounters, often in the form of ghosts or angels or UFOs.

Laboratory experiments have produced multi-colored lights that float and dance when granite is subjected to the pressures found along earthquake fault lines. Also, Persinger says, the electromagnetic forces that produce the lights have a direct effect on the temporal lobes of eyewitnesses, often inducing feelings of awe or religiosity.

Earth light phenomena are found around the world. The most famous American example is the Marfa Mystery Lights of West Texas, and eyewitness descriptions seem remarkably similar to the Spook Light. The Apache Indians are said to have believed the lights were stars dropping to earth, at least according to the local chamber of commerce; white eyewitness accounts date to 1883; and explanations range from St. Elmo’s fire to (of course) car headlights.

8:06 p.m. Sunset.

The Mensans are en route in Rountree’s rather battered but spacious Chevy Suburban. After a week of 100-degree temperatures, the weather has turned cool — 73 degrees — and the National Weather Service forecast calls for partly cloudy skies tonight and a 30 percent chance of rain. The group is divided on whether the forecast bodes well for a sighting or not.

The clippings suggest, however, that chilly or rainy nights when the road is relatively quiet are best. The worst times are warm summer nights.

8:30 p.m. New Spook Light Road

After reconnoitering as far north as the I-44 overpass and Five Mile Creek, the group arrives on New Spook Light Road. It was somewhat harder to find than some of the members expected — after all, the Spook Light Museum has been gone for years. Garland Middleton, the curator, died in 1984.

The only landmark worth mentioning is a big yellow double-arrowed highway department sign that warns motorists of the eastern terminus of New Spook Light Road. We’re about 12 miles southwest of Joplin.

9:06 p.m.

As it gets darker, the traffic increases. The attention of the group is focused to west, over a series of low hills, where the light is said to appear. The only distraction is a distressing howl in the distance, and the group is split on whether it belongs to a fox or an owl.

10:31 p.m.

“Look at that!.”

Behind us, in the tops of the trees to the east, is an unearthly orange glow. Although it is obviously behind the trees, it is difficult to tell just how far. “It’s the moon,” says Virlyn Gazaway.

The glow becomes brighter, and filtered by the leaves of the trees, it seems to dance. Then, abruptly, it disappears.

“Man, did you see that? Incredible!”

But disappointment follows close on the heels of excitement: The waning moon, nearly as bright as a full moon, reappears above a thick bank of low clouds. This time, it’s unobscured by leaves or branches. “Told you it was the moon,” says Gazaway.

1:05 a.m. Saturday, Aug. 19

The witching hour has passed without notice. One of the group is asleep in the Suburban, and the others are scattered up and down the road. Suddenly, a cars barrels down the road toward us. As it passes, the driver shouts: “Man, there’s a highway patrol car coming!”

It is actually an Ottawa County sheriff’s vehicle that seems unnaturally white despite the red dust. The deputy lowers his side window.

His name is Joe, but he won’t give his last name and cites a departmental policy that only the sheriff can talk to the press. He expresses surprise that the group hasn’t seen a thing.

“I saw it just a couple of nights ago,” the deputy says.

What did it look like?

“Just like a light,” he says and shrugs.

Not long after the deputy drives off, the group calls it quits for the night. Their disappointment is evident, but they make plans to meet again, perhaps the following weekend, for another attempt.

“This is a challenge,” Rountree says. “This is something I don’t understand, and I’d like to figure it out. . . But maybe not right away.”