Ozark Spook Lights:
Branson’s Big Lights
Branson, Missouri, is a little like a Phoenix.
No, not the city in Arizona.
The little city in the Ozarks has been through a lot. Like a lot of towns in the South, Branson earned its scars during the Civil War. The city also endured a horrible fire that scorched much of its historic downtown area about a century ago. The city, however, went from battlefield to playground and from the ashes of that horrible fire to a city of lights, crowds, celebrities, and music—and a lot of that music is country music. Despite the flash and excitement, Branson still shows the scars of its past in unexpected, unexplained ways, particularly in the form of ghost stories and haunted legends.
Branson and the Ozarks, as we will read, are inundated by stories of ghosts and spirits.
Celebrities who have turned the town into the new Nashville, lovers of great country music, as well as ghost hunters return from their trips to Branson with stories that suggest ghosts inhabit many of this musical city’s most famous locales.
Lee Prosser, author of Branson Hauntings, writes that while you’re visiting Branson to see your favorite country acts, you can also find some haunted locales to investigate. And it won’t be hard—Prosser said that the Ozark Mountains is a center for supernatural activity.
The roads in and out of Branson—the same ones that country and western acts have traveled for decades—are haunted, as are the railroad lines and the streams that roll off the picturesque foothills.
Some tourists head to the Branson Scenic Railway for a real train ride through the Ozarks. It’s a way of touching the past and viewing the rough and beautiful terrain of the Ozarks as visitors did decades ago. There’s another piece of the past they may encounter during their visit: ghosts. According to Prosser, the railroad’s depot is built near the super-haunted White River and is, in fact, the subject of several ghost stories. Witnesses have reported seeing the ghosts of a couple walking near the depot. While a romantic stroll around the depot isn’t unheard of, these witnesses say that the couple is peculiarly dressed in 1930s-era clothing. The ghost of a young boy has also been spotted in the vicinity.
There’s something else that spooks people about the Ozarks. In fact, it’s probably why everyone calls the bizarre lights that pop up in the region, “spook lights.” One of the most famous examples of these alleged spook lights is just a short distance—about a two-hour drive—from Branson. It’s so well known in Branson, because, depending on which way you’re headed into the town, your path may go directly through the haunted region known for this anomalous activity.
People in this area—and people who travel along the long stretches of road from Missouri to Oklahoma—claim to see large glowing orbs above the road. Sometimes, they float down the highway, like lost souls looking for a ride home. Other times they head right for the car. There’s at least one cabbie who claimed the spook light went right through his taxi!
If you’re a brave soul on your way to Branson and want to catch a spook light, your best bet, experts say, is to head down County Road E50, better known as Spook Light Road. The lights there demonstrate a range of behavior. Some witnesses have reported seeing the light appear—usually about the size of a basketball—and dance around in a more or less random pattern. But other sightings indicate that the light has some sort of awareness, maybe even curiosity. The light will appear and then float around. If the vehicle is parked, the light may even wander up to the hood of the car. It’s almost like the spook light is trying to see who is in the car, according to amused—or horrified—witnesses.
Several of those witnesses have gone on record in Mysterious Universe, a website that tracks bizarre Fortean occurrences and supernatural phenomena. Roberta Williams, a resident of Carthage, Missouri, said she was taking a late-night drive when she saw a spook light. And she’s no longer a skeptic. She believes it was a real thing.
“It was before midnight,” she said. “It was like a big, huge ball with a yellow glow and it went right straight through our car. I just screamed.”
Skeptics say there are natural explanations for the light show. Some say it’s ball lightning—a type of electromagnetic phenomena that’s similar to regular lightning, but tends to stay compressed and not spread out in bolts, the shape lightning commonly takes. Some say it’s gas escaping from the swamps and from the shale formations. Others say that it’s the lights from car headlights that is refracted in the moist Missouri air. A few believe that the lights are UFO’s—after all they do fly, they are objects, and no one can identify them.
Several researchers and groups of engineers have scoured the back roads and explored the forests in the area looking for an answer. They’ve pretty much come up empty. The US Army Corps of Engineers studied the area and never arrived at a satisfactory conclusion.
The ball lightning theory is difficult to prove because the phenomena is so rare that it makes little sense that a certain area in a certain state would produce it on a regular basis, researchers say, but nearby universities are still looking into the theory.
While scientists say they can’t explain the lights, folklorists and ghost hunters have lots of theories. One of the most popular legends about the spook lights is an American Indian version of Romeo and Juliet. According to the legend, a young Indian man and woman were involved in a clandestine romance. They were in love, but they both came from warring groups. The woman’s father found the two in an embrace and he—along with several other warriors—gave chase. The couple ran into the woods. They ran faster and faster, but the warriors and one angry father was right behind. The two never saw a cliff looming as they ran blindly through the thick brush. They fell off the cliff and died.
Legend has it that the spook lights you see are either the ghosts of the American Indian couple who still believe they are being chased, or, according to other versions of the legend, the lights are the spirits of the star-crossed lovers roaming the countryside, eternally lost, yet eternally looking for each other.
The persistence of the spook light legend tends to prove the veracity of the modern encounters. In fact, Seneca Indians who lived there reported seeing spooky orbs traveling around the countryside. So did early European settlers.
But another theory suggests that the spook lights have a much more modern and a much more otherworldly source. The lights are Unidentified Flying Objects—UFOs. The UFO theorists suggest that the crafts are using portals in the region as a way to traverse across the galaxies. This power portal theory may also explain why UFO sightings are more prevalent in other sections of the country, for example Roswell, New Mexico, the Hudson Valley, and Gulf Breeze, Florida.
The spook lights in Missouri, then, might just be another American UFO hot spot. But there’s a key difference between this region and the other UFO hot spots mentioned above. Sightings in places, such as Gulf Breeze and the Hudson Valley, lasted a relatively short period. In the Ozarks, however, people have seen spook lights buzzing around for centuries.
So it looks like this one is still in the mystery category.