The Spooklight

It is better to be sincerely stupid than artificially intelligent.

I am standing on the Devil’s Promenade, waiting to see the light.

Folks have been flocking to this rural road since the early 20th century, when the apparition was first publicized. The Devil’s Promenade — also known as East 50 Road — borders Hornet, Missouri, so named because Route 66 commerce once made it buzz with activity. Now Hornet is a ghost town, and its ghost is the central attraction.

They call it the Spooklight. Stay past sundown, and a fiery orb the size of a basketball will float down the avenue, alive as an animal, chasing and taunting you. It has been spotted by everyone from Quapaw Nation elders to long-time locals in nearby Joplin to the US Army Corps of Engineers, which confirmed its existence as a “mysterious light of unknown origin” during World War II.

I had a list of things I wanted to see before America ended, fantastical things like accountability and prosperity and the Hornet Spooklight. I knew my odds were best with the Spooklight, so to the Devil’s Promenade I came.

The Spooklight lies near the intersection of three states: Missouri, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Their union is commemorated by a decaying plaque on a dead-end road next to a graffiti-covered tower showcasing love notes and obscenities.

I hopped on the plaque from state to state, knowing I wasn’t really on any of them: this was Quapaw Nation territory. These borders boasted centuries of bloody battles and now the land had been returned. The states converged like a dark triad, cracked concrete in a vacant lot.

You don’t need the paranormal to feel haunted in America.

There are many explanations for the Spooklight and no consensus. Some say it’s an illusion caused by rare minerals or swamp gas. Others claim it’s an angry Native American spirit (Quapaw Nation members dispute this.) Still others say it’s the battle residue of the white man’s wars or the Devil himself. What it is not is a headlight — the sightings predate cars — or a figment of the mind. Too many have felt its thrill.

I don’t mind feeling haunted. In fact, I seek it out: that’s why I was chasing the Spooklight. Hauntings are good because they evoke grief, and grief’s twin, love. Hauntings require memory and a sense of place. Hauntings require you stay human.

On a deserted lane where my phone got little reception, the Spooklight didn’t make me feel scared. It made me feel free. Free from a future designed by tech lords that is rapidly becoming our present, like a doomsday clock ticking backward. Free from contrived creations passed off as facts. Free from mass monitoring marketed as concern. Free from a search bar that limits inquiry by design.

You cannot autocomplete the Spooklight. It autocompletes you.

* * *

The Devil’s Promenade shows up on Google Maps. So do toponyms coined by assholes, like “The Gulf of America”. But no technology can track the Spooklight. It is immune from the surveillance state. It darts and dances around it, refusing to be defined or destroyed.

Spotting a mystery orb requires serendipity. The Spooklight cannot be summoned. You can only be in the right place at the right time, which feels good when you were born in the wrong place at the wrong time.

“I wanna go to the 20^th century,” I sung, a song I made up. “I wanna go home.”

I sought out the Spooklight to witness a genuine dubious sighting instead of the artificial dubious sightings vomited by my phone. I wanted to see the actual Devil’s Promenade, and know it was real, regardless of what I found there. Paranormal quests are notorious for fakes. But there is something grotesque about fakes made by robots devoid of whimsy and wonder, where the trickster is a tracker and nothing more.

AI is out to destroy emotion. It devours curiosity but its primary target is grief. You cannot grieve people and places that never existed, though you can grieve creations of the human mind: fiction and folklore. But AI replaces imagination with mechanical pseudo-innuendo, coughing up dreamworlds destined to be debunked. AI is designed to make you question the veracity of true tragedies, to view every tear as a ruse.

AI uses you and it uses strangers, scraping pieces of your skin and stitching them into an inhuman patchwork they use to smother your soul.

This is not collective consciousness, but collective anti-consciousness. The “woke mind virus” that tech lords rail against is a front for their actual fear: that you are observant, awake, and alive.

I won’t argue that searching for the Spooklight is a wise way to spend a night. But I would rather be sincerely stupid than artificially intelligent. I would rather kill time before time kills me.

* * *

At around ten, after hours of waiting, I saw an orb pulsing in the distance. It was small and I walked toward it, trepidatious. I didn’t know what state I was in: Missouri, Oklahoma? I didn’t know what state I was in: wistful, fanciful, full of shit?

I knew the next morning I would drive to Texas. My husband and I had stopped in Joplin for the night to break up the long haul between St. Louis and Austin, where I was headed for my book tour. Where people would ask me serious questions and have no clue I had spent the previous night tracking mythical fireballs.

I would arrive in Austin, which Silicon Valley had decided to colonize. I willed the Spooklight to appear because I would need excess weirdness to replace the weirdness that the tech lords stole.

We waited until stars filled the sky and fireflies flickered, those little deceivers. We drove the Devil’s Promenade every which way, because we had heard the Spooklight liked to chase cars, and we welcomed a celestial hitchhiker. When we approached civilization — the highway — we bolted as if it were contagious and pulled off on a bend in the road.

And then we saw it. An orange ball, rising like a jack-o-lantern over the earth, smug and grinning.

“The moon!” I exclaimed. It was so full it blocked out the stars and any rival source of light.

“We should leave, because the Spooklight will be intimidated,” I explained to my husband. “It can’t compete with that.”

My husband knew I was tired and looking for an excuse to end my paranormal quest with dignity, but he played along, even on the dignity part. We drove back to Joplin, my eyes on the moon.

I felt content, even though I wasn’t sure if I’d seen the Spooklight. I had a night free from other spooks — the spooks of the state, the corporate-government hydra — and that was enough.

The Spooklight didn’t care what I wanted, but gave it to me anyway. A guarantee of suspense. A chance at serendipity. A lonesome road that never got lonely, because we had the myths and the moon. If I can’t spot the supernatural, I’ll treasure the natural — while it lasts.

The Devil’s Promenade, they call it. But I knew there were no devils here. How could there be, when they’re all inside my phone?

* * *

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The Devil’s Promenade.

The phallic graffiti tower where three states meet.

Shockingly, we were the only people at this attraction.

The moon…or is it???