The Spooklight

An east to west stretch of Route 66, south of Quapaw, Oklahoma, is in alignment with a farm road called E 50, colloquially known as "Spooklight Road", about east of it, on the other side of Spring River. Due to this alignment, headlights of cars driving east on Route 66 are unexpectedly visible in the distance from higher elevation points along E 50; this is the cause of the Spooklight. The first to recognize this in print was AB MacDonald in a January 1936 issue of the Kansas City Star. This has been demonstrated repeatedly by experiments in which fireworks, spot lights, and flashing car headlights along Route 66 have been seen by observers posted on Spooklight Road. As with most other supposed ghost lights, storytellers have created mythologies about the Spooklight to purport that it existed before cars The Joplin Chamber of Commerce published a visitor guidebook, The Tri-State Spook Light, in 1955, and the Neosho Chamber of Commerce published its own tourist booklet in 1963. == Mythology ==

Numerous legends exist explaining the origin of the Spooklight: • Ghosts of two young Native American lovers looking for each other • Ghost of a murdered Osage chief • "Spirit of a Quapaw maiden who drowned herself in the river when her warrior was killed in battle" In the online lore about the Spooklight, it's often repeated that someone, possibly named Foster Young, published some kind of manuscript entitled The Ozark Spook Light sometime in the 1880s; this is asserted as a rebuttal to the distant headlight explanation, but no evidence has been produced that either the document or the claimed author ever existed. == See also ==