Spook Light
an excerpt by David Williams from Indian Bingo, Ghost Road Press, 2006
I remembered the spook light from when i was a kid. My family would come down to Joplin from Kansas City every so often to visit our relatives and their friends, and I remembered going to see it, though that was a long time ago.
Not long after I turned twenty-seven, I’d been going with a girl I was supposed to marry, Wanda Peters, but things got broke off before the event. I didn’t want to get tied down yet anyway. She “just wasn’t sure we were right for each other,” she claimed a week before the wedding. So the hell with it. I quit my job and went to Joplin, passing the two-bit towns along the highway, and Wanda Peters swept out of my mind as if she were just another gas station, fire hydrant, or scratching dog by the side of the road. I drove eighty most the way and didn’t get stopped. I never wanted to think about Wanda Peters again.
It was a Saturday night I showed up at my Cousin Stella’s and her husband Arness’s trailer. They had a good sized blue one crowded in among a pack of others. I told them I was taking a vacation and asked if they minded putting me up a night or two.
The second night we went to a movie. The night after that we went to a spaghetti place where you could eat all you wanted. But the night after that Stella said to Arness, “Why don’t we take Lyle down and show him the Spook Light. He probably hasn’t seen it since he was a kid.”
I’d recalled it being a ball of light that comes careening down the road out of nowhere, but it was so far back in my memory I couldn’t remember if it was real or not. Stella told me that the road it travels on is a lover’s lane, though the name of it is Devil’s Promenade. She said people from all over drive their cars down to stare at the light, then sit there, making out.
“For one reason or another the Spook Light likes people kissing,” she said. “If people are kissing, it almost always glows.”
The three of us piled into the Chevy, with Arness at the wheel. It was the middle of July, the sky clear, the sun just going off the edge. Then we were driving on the interstate, the first stars beginning to pop through the sky that was still kind of purple overhead.
“The Light’s been here ever since there’ve been people to see it,” Stella told me, and I remembered some old stories I’d heard. “Our grandparents took a horse and buggy down to look at it when they were first going together. And there’ve been universities studying it, all kinds of scientists, photographers, and tv people over the years; it’s even been on Real People,” she said. “But no one can figure out what it is. Years ago it used to move all over the countryside, going up to people’s houses, illuminating them and all, but there’s too damned many farms with vapor lights for that now. These days it mostly stays on the road. Some people say it’s an Indian spirit. Others say it’s the ghost of a miner with his head-lamp on. Some people believe it’s from outer space. Everybody has to think for themselves what the Spook Light is,” Stella told me.
“Who knows what that Light’s about?” Arness started in. “It gives me the spooks to look at it. Sometimes it’s there and sometimes it’s not.”
We drove down the interstate a while, then turned off toward Seneca, continuing another five miles before we swerved to the right. We were on a black-top that took us out into the country. Where it dead-ended we took another right onto a bumpy gravel road full of pot holes and chunks of red rough rock I was afraid was going to puncture the tires. After a mile on that, we took a left where a dilapidated shack stood, then we were on Devil’s Promenade Road itself.
There weren’t any other cars around. The road looked like it belonged on the moon it was so rough. And it was as black a place as I’d ever been—thick Ozark trees hanging over the road as far as the brights could shine. We drove a mile before we pulled over, then Arness turned off the headlights, so there was nothing but the dark rolling over us.
I cracked my window, listening. You couldn’t see a thing, but you could hear stuff all right: all kinds of weird noises like we were in the middle of a Tarzan picture: bird screeching sounds, bug noises even louder; you could’ve sworn some were big as trees, whole armies of them swarming the bushes, clicking and hissing, rattling their horny heads. The three of us got out of the car and peered into the darkness.
“Sometimes it’ll just be a small glow,” Stella said. “Then other times it’ll turn into a yellow ball bigger than a bonfire and move right up to you.”
The three of us stared down the tunnel of darkness, when suddenly Stella begins whispering like she’s seen a ghost, like she’s all choked up and can’t swallow.
“There it is!” she let out.
It was a small red light, like a tail light, at the edge of the trees. I looked closer. It was like some little red ball swinging back and forth at the place the road dead-ended on the horizon. It looked to be about a hundred yards away, then it grew bigger, brighter than fire, turning yellow like a bonfire, then right when I thought it was going to move down the road up to us, it suddenly turned into a small red glow again, bouncing back and forth where the road narrows to a point.
“Jesus,” I said. It was the damndest thing I’d ever seen. I wanted to get right up to it. To touch it. I felt like I was seeing something, like I was having some kind of religious vision.
“We got to get up closer,” I said to them.
“Can’t get closer,” Arness said. “It can get close to you, but you can’t get close to it.”
“What?” I said, not believing him.
“That’s right,” Stella said. “For some reason, you can’t drive up to it. It’ll just go away. But I’ll show you. Let’s get in the car and see,” she said, so we all got in. She drove this time.
We kept the lights off and crept in the car toward the red ball that had shrunk down, tiny as a penlight. We drove another three miles towards it, but it always stayed a good hundred yards away no matter what. We kept seeing it, even driving through ravines, clusters of tree branches, over hills, valleys. It was always there. Nothing could block it, but then after the third hill it completely vanished.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where did it go?”
“That darned thing’s probably behind us now,” Arness said, sounding nerve-wracked, and sure enough it was. We all looked. There it was, brighter than ever, amber, looking as big as a cow. Then it started breaking up into smaller lights that went dancing, circling around the first. But a minute later there was nothing but darkness swallowing the road again. And it was like we’d seen a spirit.
We turned around and headed back. We didn’t see the Light again the rest of the night, but Stella and Arness and I chatted about it all the way home. I knew it was a power, a sign. I knew it was something you could believe in, better than church-going, better than Jesus, I thought. You couldn’t see Jesus or God, even if you prayed all night on a concrete floor, but you could see the Spook Light. You could sit right there and stare into it and almost touch it with your hand.
They asked me if I was all right when I went to bed that night, I was so excited, and I said I was fine, but I didn’t sleep till dawn. All I could think of was that Light. It took a hold of me, so I stayed in Joplin. The hell with Kansas City, I decided. Who needs it? The hell with Wanda Peters.
I had all the money I’d saved up fro getting married wired from the bank. And I wrote and told my parents I wasn’t coming back home. For I had decided I wanted to live near the Light.
That next day I went out there, found an empty shack at the turnoff onto Devil’s Promenade Road, and scouted around and found the old farmer who owned it. The place needed work. But I got it cheap: thirty bucks a month. When I told Arness and Stella, they said I was crazy. “What would you want to go live near that blasted Light for?” Arness asked. But I was set on it. So I worked day after day getting my place fixed up, but most every night I kept up, watching the Light, studying it every minute I could.
It turns out a lot of people came to see it. I was gonna make a museum out of my place. I needed to have some money coming in, and I figured it could be a gold mine. I’d write to Wanda Peters and let her know I’d made it, that I’d made up my own business, that I was a real business man. “Official Spook Light Museum” I decided to call my place, and I opened after four weeks of work. The front room was the museum. The back room had my bed. I got postcards printed up and found that some old man had written pamphlets about the light that he was selling down at the gas station on 43. I took Polaroids of the Light too, to sell as postcards, and sent one to Wanda, writing out the whole story of my success on the back. I sold soda pop, and rigged up a pair of binoculars you could rent for five minutes for a quarter.
The first week wasn’t bad. People stopped by and bought a few things. Scores of teenagers came poking in too, but they’d hardly ever let loose of a buck. It was mostly the older folks who’d buy a card or who’d want to rent the binoculars. But I was making do. The Light shone most every night, and when I wasn’t tending store I was staring at it, watching it change colors, shapes, move around, jump here and there along the road, but I couldn’t never get too close to it. It would fade away just when I thought I was going to reach it. Though every now and then someone would come into the museum and tell me a story about how it had come up to them, passed through their car, or glowed right in their face one time or another. And one woman said she saw it go through her car window, jump over the trees and turn into a pyramid, but I couldn’t get none of that, somehow, to happen to me.
After two months there was enough business to pay for the rent, but I was still losing money and soon I’d be flat broke, since I had to eat. I began talking to the Light after everybody had gone, for I wanted to know where it came from, and what I should do next. I was sure there was some kind of message it was trying to give. I told it I was going broke. I told it I needed more money coming in if I was going to honor it with the museum. And I began to think it could do anything.
I got the idea of putting a couple of ads in the paper: Official Spook Light Museum. Come and See the Famous Ozark Spook Light. On Devil’s Promenade Road: Pamphlets, Pictures, Postcards, and I had a map drawn up for people to follow.
Editor’s Note: This is one of the best connected-story collections you’ve never read. David Williams, a local Colorado jazz musician and writer, has taken characters from his own family history and then shaped them into imaginative fiction. The stories’ recurring characters are vivid and sweet and very human. This is the perfect choice for a bookclub.
