Gurdon Light

Four miles north of Gurdon, Arkansas, an old railroad bed runs off into swampy woods. After dark, a light comes out of them — blue or green or a reddish gold, bobbing a foot or two above the ground where there's no electricity for miles. Locals say it's a dead man's lantern.

His name was Will McClain. In December 1931 he was a railroad section foreman working these tracks when one of his crew, Louis McBride, came after him over how few shifts he'd been given in the Depression layoffs. McBride hit him once with a shovel and three more times with a railroad spike maul. Both were found at the scene, still bloody.

McClain didn't die there. A quarter-mile blood trail ran off the tracks and into the woods — he had run. When they found him, he was still gripping his railroad lantern.

There were no witnesses. McBride gave himself away: acting strange enough to be brought in, he broke under questioning and then walked officers out to the body and the bloody maul himself. He was convicted and executed in the electric chair on July 8, 1932.

The light began showing up in those same woods soon after, and people have been seeing it ever since. Bob Thompson, who runs the Clark County Historical Association and has watched it himself, says the part that gets you is when it swells to the size of a baseball cap and you can see it swinging. These aren't ghost-hunters. They're local-history people who happened to be out on the rail bed after dark.

The railroad is gone now, the rails pulled up, so anyone who goes looking walks two miles of rotting trestles into the dark to find it. A Henderson State physicist named Charles Leming carried instruments out there and came back with nothing: no current, no polarized light. He has said one more thing, too — that some people claim they saw the light before 1931, before McClain ever carried a lantern down that line. If that's true, no one can say what they've been watching.