Background for everybody but Anthracite: In this GQ thread about mysterious phenomena, someone mentions “spook lights.” “Spook lights” are weird little balls of light that appear in certain places throughout the country (and probably the world) and move about as if guided by some sort of intelligence. The best examples of these are the Marfa lishts, found outside Marfa, TX and the Hornet Spook Light, outside Joplin, MO. For more information, see this very old GQ thread.
Anyhoo, in the strange phenomena thread, someone expressed an interest in going to Joplin to see the Hornet light. I adivsed,
Anthracite responded to this by saying,
So, Anthracite, and anyone else who cares, here ya go.
It was my first year at Ozark Christian College, late fall. This would have been November, 1992. I had made various trips out to the spot to see the HSL and had had no luck. I had been warned repeatedly that the HSL doesn’t appear every night, and that it comes and goes unpredictably on nights when it does appear.
We drove out to the spot as the sun was setting. Let me interject here that the directions to the sight are quite complicated and involve tricky turns that you have to look out for. Anyhoo, we drove out to the spot and found what he thought was as good a place as any. We were at the the top of a hill. Below us the road went down into a little valley and then back up again. The top of the next hill was probably 100-200 yards away. We stopped and we waited. And waited. And waited some more.
After about an hour and a half, we lost interest, so I turned around on the spot, making a textbook five-point turn. No sooner had I put the car back into first gear then one of my passengers in the back seat said “There it is!” We got out of my car and looked back, and sure enough, there was a little ball of light.
Since it was dark and we were at least a hundred yards away from it, it would be difficult to say how big it was. I’d say it looked like what someone carrying a lantern would look like from that distance. It had about the same color as a lantern flame, too: sort-of dull yellowish-whitish. (And no, it wasn’t a lantern, because a lantern would have illuminated the person carrying it, and this light did not illuminate anything.) It hovered on the right side of the road, a few feet above the ground, and then slowly traveled to the other side. It dipped slowly downward on its way, reaching its lowest point in the middle and then climbing back up to the left side, making a sort-of upside-down parabola. It hovered on the left side of the road for a while and then repeated its journey back, making another parabola. It did this several times before we determined we’d seen enough, and drove home. It did not follow us.
Despite several trips back to the spot over the next several years, I never saw it again.
Now, for questions you may be wanting to ask me:
1) Did you go see it any closer? If not, why not?
No, we didn’t go see it any closer, for two reasons. First, one of my fellow adventurers was a girl who was really quite freaked out by the whole thing and sat in the car not looking at it while the rest of us watched the light. Second, fearing that the light was the result of some sort of electrical discharge, 100-200 yards away was as close as any of us wanted to get to it.
2) Were you afraid?
The girl was (see above), but the rest of us were not really afraid. More like, fascinated with a strong desire not to get any closer.
3) What do think it was?
No idea. Theories abound (see the very old GQ thread linked to above), but few of them make sense. It wasn’t lights from I-44, as I-44 is miles away, and the HSL has been around since the 1890’s. I don’t think it was swamp gas, as the area we were in was definitely a forest and not a swamp. Maybe something to do with fault lines. There are mountains in southwest Missouri/northeast Oklahoma, so there may be fault lines down there. I don’t know. IANAGeologist.
4) How do you get there?
No idea- I’ve long since forgotten, and as you can see from my profile I no longer live in Joplin. I know that, coming out of Joplin, you make a series of five or six turns on roads that get progressively worse. If you look in the very old GQ thread linked to above, you’ll see a couple of other links to sites that may or may not have directions. If all else fails, run a google search under “Hornet Spook Light” and you’re bound to come up with something.
5) Anything else you’d like to tell us?
Just to be careful. The HSL location is something of a hangout for teenagers to make out and drink, for liquored-up rednecks to drink and shoot, and for angst-ridden goths to come and, uh, be goths I guess. I’ve heard rumors that these types (rednecks and goths, that is) get kinda testy around people who they think are “trespassing” and that fights are not uncommon. I didn’t see any of it, but there it is.
So here you go, Anthracite. I hope you enjoyed my long story. 
