Tis the season to be spooky

The weather is turning a little cooler, the calendar is creeping toward my birthday (October 25th) and all the vegetation that is left after this debilitating drought is slowly turning from green to gold and dropping to the ground. My thoughts turn toward Halloween costumes for my family of five, yes we all dress up together, children's Halloween parties for our moms group, my husbands birthday party, and preparing for winter on the farm. I hate feeling like the grasshopper that sang all summer, so we begin stockpiling hay, grain, and stall bedding. We clean out the messes in the barn and fix any fencing that has gone all summer but wont make it through the winter. We cut firewood and collect candles for the inevitable power outages where we will be stuck with no heat, water or power. But even with all the work to do, this is my favorite time of year hands down. And it's not just the chill in the air, bringing out the kids long sleeved shirts and snow boots, or the heavier meal plans in the near future, but the ghosts that really get me.

Last night on a coveted mom's night out, we went in search of the infamous Spook Light. In general terms, a spook light is a will-o'-the-wisp or perhaps the Latin term with translates to "foolish fire." But for us in southwest Missouri, there is only one Spook Light. Out by the Oklahoma border, there's a road lovingly called the "devil's promenade" where a mysterious light appears usually between 10 and midnight. The light can be yellow, orange, green or sometimes blue and can do any number of things from rolling through the woods to frolicking in the fields or even just hanging out on the horizon doing nothing. There are dozens of legends about where the light came from ranging from old Indian spirits to natural gas balls or even traffic reflections.

Last night, what we saw was a simple orange light. Just a light. One that came and went without any reason that I could tell. Some of my friends said it was a reflection from car traffic, some said it was a flashlight. I'm seeing a theme here. I really don't know what it was, just that it was awfully mysterious, just like the Spook Light has always been. But this isn't my first run in with something unexplainable.

When I was little, my mom owned an interior decorating business. She used to work with a fundraiser to benefit SIDS that required her to decorate a room in a show house of the committee's choice. One year in particular, they chose the Longview Farm outside Kansas City.  Go ahead, look it up. A marvel of it's age, Longview is about 1700 acres and built in 1910's with over 48 rooms. It's also a creepy place. While she was decorating her assigned room on the top floor of the mansion, my brother and I had pretty much the run of the place. One afternoon we went exploring down the main staircase and at the first landing we stopped dead. I remember a strange eerie feeling just standing there. Probably my first hint of otherworldly intuition. No real reason to feel strange, but I did. And I remember hustling out of there in a hurry.

The week after my mom finished up the show house, she got a local magazine in the mail. The topic of the magazine was local haunts, with a picture of the stairway landing at Longview Mansion being one of it's primary locales. I can agree with that byline wholeheartedly.

When I was a little older, my first beau took me out to the Amarugia Higlands. At the time I thought it was a National forest, but it turns out that it's a wetlands preserve. Mostly known for local satanic rituals, the Amarugia Ridge Runner, similar to the "Jersey Devil", is a local superstition. We've spent many nights driving around the amarugia's looking for the ridge runner, with only superficial findings that left us all winded and headed back to the city.

In high school I went out on a search for spirits which landed us in Warsaw Missouri at a burned down farmstead. The silo was the only thing left standing on the farm, having all burnt down twenty years ago. The silo is gutted inside, and you can see nothing of the roof except starry night sky. But step back to the road and wait for a bit and you'll see the dark shadow of a fallen firefighter who died in the blaze pacing the top of the silo back and forth, over and over. I did.

We joke at our farm that we have leprechauns or maybe Fae. Things seem to disappear, reappear and sometimes even fix themselves without any explaination. We have found fencing that had to have been fixed with human hands but neither of us had done it. We have found fence posts lying on the ground that aren't the brand we buy, and neither of us has left them there. Who would? My husband swears he has personally seen a cougar in our yard, and with a little prodding he admits that he has seen some type of werewolf beast that's locally called the "momo" short for Missouri Monster but he doesn't want to sound crazy. But I believe him. We've had too many disappearing goats, dogs and cats not to.

Maybe I just want to believe that something else is out there, not in space, but sharing this earth with us. Honestly, humans can be so awful to each other, there is probably nothing to fear at all from ghosts, ghouls and monsters. It's the reason our ancestors left bowls of honey or milk outside their doors for the local fae. And if there's nothing there at all except the barn cats drinking the milk, then it serves only the purpose to make each fall a little more spooky. Tis the season.