Spook Light

Spook Light Hill is a small area between Joplin, Missouri and Hornet. Here’s the story of the famous spooklight and how it got its name.

One dark and rainy night, a farmer’s daughter was driving home from her job in town. As she neared her house, she drove up a small hill. She was driving too fast for the wet weather and her car began to slide and she crashed into a tree. Unfortunately she wasn’t wearing her seatbelt and the force of the impact caused her to be thrown through the windshield.

The police and the fire department arrived and were horrified by what they found. When they tried to get her out of the car, they realized she was dead. She had been decapitated by the crash. Her body was stuck halfway through the windshield, but her head was nowhere to be found.

Police searched all over the area with flashlights, but they couldn’t figure out what had happened to her head. They decided to wait until daylight to search further. They broke the horrible news to her father who collapsed in tears.

The next morning, her grieving father returned to the scene of the accident to help the police search for his daughter’s severed head. But they never found it. They say her poor father had to bury her without her head. It was a closed coffin funeral.

In the years afterwards, her father became obsessed with finding the missing head. Every day, he searched up and down the road in vain. At night, he would come back with a lantern and search the fields around the area, hoping to find some trace of his daughter’s head. But to no avail.

The father lost all interest in life. He let his farm fall to ruin. He couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t live until he found the head. His health failed and he died soon afterwards, never having found his daughter’s head.

Since then, many neighbors say they have seen the light from the old man’s lantern still moving up and down Spook Light Hill at night. They say his ghost has been seen lurking in the shadows of Spooklight Hill, walking up and down, back and forth, still searching for that missing head.