The Curiosity Shop - Gurdon Light - Trip 6

Friday, Novenber 7th, we drove up to Arkadepthia, leaving home about 4:00. We stopped in Mt. Pleasant at Two Seniorita's Restaurant for a quick Tex-Mex meal and got to Arkadelphia about 10:00 p.m. With our former favorite bed and breakfast, Buckelew's, no longer in that business, we stayed at The Twin Oaks Bed and Breakfast. It was very nice too.

We got unpacked and added some clothing, for the evening was cold, and drove to Gurdon and out Sticky Road, Highway 182, to the Big Timber Demonstration Area where we parked. As we walked out on the tracks it was just before midnight. We walked in past the first trestle, past a set of power lines that aren't on my map. At that point we could see an occasioinal light behind us. It appeared red occasionally, usually white, and appeared to be over the tracks half way back to the freeway at most, maybe closer. The lights moved like fireflies, in short lines or arks. We saw nothing to the east. We walked back after a while, arriving at Sticky Rd. again at about 2:00 a.m. On the way we saw the lights for a while, then nothing, then the lights of the cars on the interstate.

Saturday we went to Ouachita Baptist University, where, I'd been told on previous trips, they had information on the Gurdon Light. Sure enough, they had a collection of newspaper articles on the light and they even had a copy of the 1931 article on the murder of Will McClain, whose ghost is associated in local legend with the light. The library also had a student research paper on the Gurdon Light written last year. Unfortunately these items are in the special collections secion of the library and that's closed on the weekends.

We also went to the Herderson State University library and found that they had a short video tape of a TV segment on the Gurdon Light. We watched it, but it didn't tell us anything new and it had no photos of the light.

After several other activities, a nap, and dinner Saturday we were ready to go out on the tracks again. We got there about 9:00 p.m. and had planned to stay about 3 hours. Again we came in from Sticky Rd. and as we started down the slope toward the first trestle we saw the same sort of lights in the east that we'd seen in the west the night before. They appeared to be maybe half a mile ahead. We started walking toward them. Linda tripped on a tie and her gloved hand slipped right through my gloved hand and she fell and skinned her knee. A few minutes after that it started to rain. Since we were almost a 30 minute walk from the car at that point we decided to turn around and leave. The rain stopped shortly, but we continued back to the car. We didn't have umbrellas or rain coats, so that was the best alternative. Altogether we were on the tracks about 1 hour rather than the three we'd intended.

After looking at the light carefully Friday night and thinking about what we saw Saturday, I have an idea about why we thought we saw what we did and why it didn't look like what I suspect it really was. Here's what I think.

When we were lookinng west Friday night we saw the tracks infront of us, appearing to converge in the dark at the botton of a notch in the trees at the horizon. Of course it's pretty dark and one only sees the tracks heading off to that notch in the trees. One doesn't see them get there. The lights appear substantially below the bottom of the notch, and so appear to be much closer than the interstate at the horizon. But I suspect that the interstate is below the bottom of the notch and it's the lights of cars and trucks viewed through leaves and branches that we saw. We were far enough out form the top of the first incline to see over it to the freeway when we'd passed the trestle. As we walked back the top of that slope got in the way and we saw nothing. Then after we'd reached the top we were close enough that the vehicle lights were clearly just that.

As for the lights to the east Saturday night, I think it was much the same sort of illusion. We probably hadn't seen them the night before because it was so late. Near the top of the first slope we could see over the rises in the track all the way to Highway 53. It's a straight line along the track. Again we could not tell where the highway really was vertically, and the bottom of the gap in the trees suggests that it's higher, and so the lights seem closer, than is actually the case. The fact that these lights are either white or red also makes one think that what we saw was headlights and taillights of cars.

So I think the reports that one can go out almost any night and see the Gurdon Light are not true. One can go out almost any night and mistake car lights for something much nearer and mysterious. The reports of melon to basketball sized globes of lights 10 to 50 or 100 feet from the observer are obviously another matter entirely, as is the story about a guy named Tom who found the light in the cab of his pickup truck after a failed attempt to find the light on the tracks. So we're planning to go back in the spring and try our luck again. Maybe I'll have figured out how to make out camera work in the dark by then. We'll probably take the video camera some binoculars or a small telescope for a better look at the lights like we saw this trip. I'd like to be sure that they are traffic rather than just having a strong suspicion. A global positioning system would be nice too for a better track map, but I suspect they're expensive. Maybe I'll check.