The 1955 Spooklight Expedition was over a long November weekend; no adults, just 16-year-old guys out to solve a mystery.  This 1997 Associated Press story explains the continuing attraction of the place: 

HORNET, Mo. (AP) – On those moonless Missouri nights when it gets darker than dark – darker, some would say, than the inside of a cow – things can get pretty spooky along a rugged stretch of road.

    That's when the Spooklight is likely to make its appearance.

    On some nights it might rise slowly out of nowhere to illuminate a broad swatch of farmland.  On others it might simply waltz up East Highway 50 from Oklahoma, dancing across the gravel road that doubles as the state line.

    Or it could just run straight at you, vanishing at the last second, then reappearing a heartbeat later, as it sneaks up from behind to levitate around your shoulders.

    Whatever it is, just about everyone along this stretch of rolling hills and farms has a Spooklight story to tell.

 What the AP reporter fails to mention is that this road is also the local lover’s lane.  Teenaged boys love to take teenaged girls to scary movies (they cling, wonderfully), and we suspected the spooklight might have been conveniently exaggerated for such reasons.  We were the ghost busters, a noble calling.

       The first night, we didn’t see much until pockets of fog began to form near our observation post.  When a car, bouncing up the series of small hills, briefly illuminated one nearby fog patch and then another, it looked like the flitting-around version of the spooklight.  None of the girls we knew would have been fooled for a minute but, with a willing suspension of disbelief, it was a lively ghost.

       The spooklight was more commonly seen in the distance, when looking west down the long straight country road, which went rolling slowly downhill over a half-dozen hilltops to a minor river, with a long flat stretch farther to the west.  On that distant plain was the famous Route 66 (since demoted to Highway 50).  A long straight stretch of that highway aligns with the east-west spooklight road, suggesting that the spooklight is only the distant headlights from the eastbound traffic.  But line-of-sight posed a problem; the topographic maps made it look as it the intervening hilltops would block the headlights.

       The next night was clearer, and we got the telescope in place well before sunset.  As dusk faded, we saw a spooklight emerge, straight down the road, hovering somewhat above the still-backlit intervening hilltops, fluctuating in intensity and often disappearing.  Our scout car drove miles west toward the spooklight, shining signal lights back in our direction at each hilltop.  No fog that night, so it looked as if there were two versions of the spooklight.

       Over the two-way radio came word that our scouts could easily see the lights on Route 66 across the river, and from the hilltop where we could see them.  And through our high-power reflecting telescope, we could now separate the spooklight into some component parts:  a vertical string of blurry lights surrounded by a luminous fringe, like the moon has on a humid night.  When our scouts reported eight cars on Route 66, we could see eight spots within the shimmering spooklight.  When they saw three, we saw three.  And so it went all evening.  We even saw brake lights flashing at one point.  When the spooklight seemed to loom larger for a few minutes, it was only because there was a long line of cars waiting to pass a slow-moving truck, many miles to the west.

        Authoritative maps could be wrong!  (Valuable lesson, that.)  We could indeed see all of the way west from the spooklight road in Missouri to Route 66 in Oklahoma, thanks to our elevated location and the straight line of sight from clearing for the road.  In the daytime, this view is hidden by the horizon haze and humidity.  Though the spooklight is said to date back to before cars were invented, fires in the flatland should produce a similar spooklight – and fire is still used to clear the fields for the next planting.

       Young Scientists 2, Ghosts 0.  Our ghost-busting expedition was written up in the Kansas City Star as a nice feature with photographs.  (Needless to say, as you can verify by searching for “Missouri Spooklight” on the web, a good ghost story never dies, no matter how often it is disproved – there are too many reasons to keep it going.  Indeed, the web has only spread its fame and ice cream vendors will surely converge on the scene and form a Spooklight Chamber of Commerce.)