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Crossett, Arkansas: The Ghost Light That Wouldn’t Die

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The Booger Lights Project: Crossett – The Old Light

This is Part I of the Crossett story.
Part II will appear on 1 October 2011.

The first experience I had with ghost light phenomena was at Crossett, Arkansas.  The Crossett Light had a reputation of being finicky with its appearances that year, but we took the chance and got a rare show.  That night started a lifelong fascination with ghost lights.  I have seen many light phenomena since that time, but none have truly compared to that night when I was ten and first saw the Crossett Light.
The tale behind the Crossett Light is similar to many railroad light legends, involving the decapitation of a rail worker in a tragic accident.  However, in this case we have names assigned to the key characters.  This with a couple other minor variations makes the story a fraction more believable.
Shortly after the town of Crossett was founded, a young couple lived out by the siding at Bovine Station a few miles north of Crossett.  David, who was fresh from WWI France, and Rose Marie were a happy couple and he hopped the freight to Crossett as many did in those days to ride back and firth to work.  One night David slipped on the way home and the inevitable decapitation occurred on a trestle near Bovine.  David was buried sans head in the cemetery near the station.  Poor Rose Marie went a little off the deep end.  She spent her days and nights searching the tracks for her husband’s head until she had her own rendezvous with an oncoming freight.  Some speculated that Rose Marie’s demise was no accident and she was buried beside her husband, a little worse for wear but otherwise intact.  As a suicide Rose Marie was doomed to unrest and haunts the tracks between Bovine and Crossett where she continues the search for her husband’s head just as she did in life.

Photo from Leslie Knod’s Crossett Light Website
It is well known that the Crossett Lumber Company established the town that bears its name in 1899.  While official city histories tell of happy workers and local landowners who leapt at the chance to unload vast acreages of timberland to the Oregon-based company’s purchasing agents, accounts written closer to the period tell a different story.  These writings tell of owners persuaded to sell by less than ethical means and workers paid in tokens and script worthless anywhere but the company commissary.  The tents and later houses that the mill workers rented from the company did have running water and electric lights unlike most of rural Arkansas at the time. However, the mill cut the power promptly at 9:00 PM every evening no matter the weather.  Still, the Crossett mill never lacked willing workers.  While the conditions in Crossett and similar mill towns sound harsh by today’s standards, they were almost dream-like compared to other areas across the post-reconstruction South.
The Missouri-Pacific line that linked Crossett with the main line at Monticello was completed in 1912.  For more than seventy years the rails moved timber to the mill and forest products to the outside world.  It was some time after completion that someone first noticed the light down the tracks.  Tradition says it was 1919, about the time of Rose Marie’s apparent suicide.

Because of fires that often swept towns in those days, records and local newspaper archives don’t go back much further than the 1960’s.  The oldest extant local article about the light is dated 1964.  However, sources from that time speak of the light as being a phenomena more than fifty years old at the time.  According to secondary sources the Crossett Light was mentioned in Life magazine in the 1940’s and the first known picture was published in a Louisiana newspaper about that time.  Both of those sources have proved impossible to trace.  In 1976, the Houston Chronicle ran a UFO-related story about the Crossett Light.  In an interview with then MUFON deputy director John Schuessler, he speculated that the light was definitely not of extraterrestrial origin.  Charles Allbright of the Arkansas Gazette (and later Democrat-Gazette) devoted several of his Arkansas Traveler columns to the Crossett Light over the years.  And in 1994, Georgia Pacific, who now owns the Crossett mills, ran a feature on the Crossett Light in its Growth magazine.  Today, the Crossett Light is a marvel that stays clear of print media, but is an internet and YouTube spectacle.

Many observers described many different characteristics of the Crossett Light over the years.  Predominant of Old Light descriptions is that it occurs as an orange ball of fire or that it resembles “a kerosene lantern glowing in a window in the distance.”  However, other descriptions differ, with one man who lived near the tracks describing the light as having a “pure white center with an outer edge of royal blue” and another saying the light pulsated from white to amber to gold with occasional bursts of bright red.  All pretty much agreed that the light on the tracks changed in color and brilliance.  They also agreed that misty moonless nights were best for viewing and that the light was not a nightly occurrence.  Sometimes months would pass without a sighting.  People would wonder if the phenomenon had ceased. Then, the light would show itself once more.

Crossett Lumber Engine #4 Circa 1923 GearedSteam.com

The Crossett Light was well known to appear in the ditch beside the tracks and drift or dance across the tracks to the other ditch before winking out.  Other times it would pause over the rails to bob around and oscilate in color and brightness for up to ten minutes at a time.  If the viewer remained where he was, the light would usually appear again, closer to his position with each appearance until it eventually crossed behind him.  However, if the viewer tried to approach the light, it would disappear and the show was usually through for the night.  At times the light grew bright enough to illuminate the railroad right-of-way and the surrounding woods.  On other occasions the light was known to travel straight down the tracks above the rails, appear in adjacent woods and fields, or even chase viewers.  However, there is no record of the light ever harming anyone in its 60+ years residence on the Missouri-Pacific tracks.

Many amateur investigators sought to explain the Crossett Light over the years.  All came up short typically blaming the usual suspects: miraculously mobile luminous fungi, gas from nonexistent swamps, and in particular headlights from Highway 52 six miles to the north of Unity Road.   Those skeptics who embraced the especially onerous headlight theory refused to take into account that when the Crossett Light first appeared cars were less common than ghost lights in Southern Arkansas.  Even after cars became commonplace, the light refused to correlate its activities with traffic and sometimes remained absent for months while cars crossed the tracks regularly.
Probably the first attempt at what could pass for a scholarly investigation of the Crossett phenomenon was conducted in ad hoc fashion by graduate students at Yale University’s School of Forestry.  Crossett was on the forefront of forestry research and the Crossett Company planted the first southern pine plantation in an effort to keep a steady future supply of timber for its mills.  As plantations grew in popularity, Crossett was the natural place for Yale students to do research and refine this new branch of agriculture.  Yale established a summer camp for grad students less than a mile from the Unity Road crossing.  Starting in the late 1940′s and continuing until the camp closed in the 1960′s, the tradition grew among the students and teachers of trying to fid the source of the Crossett Light.  The yearly classes repeatedly tried to correlate the light with traffic using observers at multiple points armed with radios, but failed with each attempt.
In 1962, Duke University’s cutting-edge parapsychology lab grew intrigued by the stories coming out of the Arkansas woods.  However, a local writer who desired that the source of the light remain a mystery dissuaded their investigation plans.
That writer’s opinion was not uncommon around the area.  Most locals didn’t want their light explained away.  The Crossett Light was the otherwise peaceful mill town’s only claim to fame until Barry Switzer coached the Oklahoma Sooners to the NCAA football championship.  The fact that most source materials capitalize the name of “The Light” as a personal pronoun only served to further illustrate Crossett’s affection for its own personal mystery.

The Crossett Light Viewing Area Circa 1936

To view the old Crossett Light, prospective observers had four choices.  The first and most common was to park at the Unity Road crossing that existed near the present Wal-Mart Supercenter and walk far enough down the tracks to avoid light contamination from the cars crossing the tracks behind them.  Second, viewers could park at the crossing on Ray Lochala Road.  Third, and sometimes most productive was the Malloy Road crossing.  Fourth, light hunters could try the Highway 52 crossing near the Crossett airport and walk north along the tracks.  Regular observers often said that the airport site was the least productive because of the distance from the area where the light most often occurred.

The Demise of the Crossett Light
In the early 1980′s, Missouri-Pacific announced its intention to remove the tracks that the Crossett Light frequented.  This news caused an instant uproar around the community.  One of the first organized efforts to preserve a ghost light sighting area sprang up overnight as locals expressed the opinion that though the tracks might belong to Mo-Pac, the light belonged to the people.  In the end the preservation effort proved futile.  The railroad pulled up the tracks and threw up earthen berms to prevent travel along the old rail bed.
For several years after the demolition of the tracks, many people believed that Missouri-Pacific had finally extinguished the Crossett Light.  The Light itself would have the final say in the matter…

Thornton Austen is the author of Blood Knowing
from Arkansas Traveller Publishing
© 2011, Thornton Austen

ghost with lantern

 

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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 1st, 2011 at 1:07 am by resurgam3191 and is filed under Ghost Lights, Legends. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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