Gurdon Light is Real

We decided to go back to Gurdon last night. We parked on the dirt road this time, and 4 locals pulled up behind us and walked in with us. Some of the locals were under the influence of some type of mind altering drug so they were a little rowdy.

We walked past the second trestle and the locals said it was far enough to start banging on the tracks. They banged away, but nothing happened. We walked another 75 yards or so and something just felt right. I stopped the group and we turned off all of our lights. (It was around 2AM) All of a sudden one of the locals starts yelling "Oh man! Did you see that. There it is. Right there man. How can you not see it?" We all thought they were pulling are legs, but at the same time, I was seeing something too. First, I would just see flashes of light way down the tracks 200 yards or more. Then, I started to see sparks of momentarily concentrated light way down near the horizon. You couldn't really look straight at it to see it well. You had to look off to the side a bit, but then we started seeing it more clearly. We could see it flickering and getting brighter. Then, we saw it swinging back and forth along the tracks. It would go down in the ditch and come back up, most of the time it hung around waist high. Then, it started to get closer. Slowly it swung closer to us and before you know it, it looked as if it were less than 20 yards away. The woods seem to flash around us. Then, we heard it. We heard the lantern swinging back and forth. We heard it off in the woods. It was coming from less than 10 yards away in the woods. The locals were freaking out. They wouldn't shut up! They said that they had never experienced this much in 14 years of living in Gurdon and that was a bad sign. Luckily they were scared off after just 15 minutes so it left just us 4. We watched the light swing back and forth towards us and away for another 10 minutes before deciding to get closer. When we got to about the point where we had been seeing the light, nothing was there. The light was gone. We walked all the way to the 5th trestle, but never saw anything substantially more. We kept walking and stopping all the way back, but again didn't see anything until we made it back the that same spot. It was about 3:45 AM before we saw it again. This time very faint and very far off, but still the same light.

After we got back to the car, we called in our cheeseburger order to the truck stop near the Interstate and we told everyone who would listen our story. Some travelers looked on wide-eyed as they asked where this took place. We told them just 3 miles down the road, and they quickly paid for the goods and high-tailed it out of there.

We have video footage. I'm pretty sure you can't see anything. The light was too faint to pick up on film. I took a couple pictures just because not expecting anything, but when I blew them up on the computer, there are all of these red, white, and blue dots all over the place. It is not digital noise, and I have been assured that lenses are very forgiving with dust on the lens and that shouldn't be the cause. If you look at some of the white dots in the picture, they look very much like the light that we saw, but at the time we didn't see all of this. The picture actually really freaked me out. I just looked at them for the first time and water just started rolling down my eyes. Very strange.

As far as possible causes. 1)I call BS on reflections off the rails. The moon had already set so there were only stars, and the rails were so rusty it took something as bright as a headlamp to make a reflection. Also, the place where we kept seeing it, brush had grown up over the rails. 2) Swamp gas: Yeah right, this stuff floated towards us and away from us. It never just aimlessly floated around in a ball. It never floated off into the woods, and it could move very fast at times. Not swap gas. 3) Quartz crystals: Really? 4)Hoax: Definitely not. This was not like a normal light from a flashlight or lantern. It's as if you don't believe it exists even as you are looking at it. 5) Car lights: No, but not for the same reasons other people give. We couldn't have been over a mile from the highway when we saw the light, but were looking west away from the highway, but we did walk 1.5 miles from the highway over about 6 trestles which is farther than most people even go and could still see cars crossing the highway very clearly. The reason it's not cars is that the cars give off a much different light. A much realer, more of this world, like you could touch and feel it unlike the Gurdon light.

There is nothing that can explain this light. Is it supernatural? Maybe. I can offer no other valid explanation. All I know is that IT DOES EXIST. Whatever IT is, it exists. This is not a joke, this is not a hoax, this is real.

PS, I'm still getting chills just uploading the picture. Oh, and the light part of the picture is the sky. It's not some ghostly trail.

Unfortunately, blogger compresses my picture quite a bit so you can't get the full effect. Definitely click on the image to view it bigger, but here is a close up of part of the picture. There's probably more than 40 of these dots everywhere.

Gurdon Car Light

Wow. Super busy as always. I had completely different plans for the past week, but somehow they got changed. I've been called back to Conway twice to call the PeeWee football games and this Saturday my Boy Scout Troop needed an extra adult to go mountain biking with the kids. We went to Burns Park on their 5 mile loop. We all had a great time, but I was exhausted. I didn't get near enough sleep the night before, didn't eat breakfast, didn't rehydrate or bring a waterbottle with me. Yeah, it was one of those mornings.

I ended up on a houseboat Sunday, cooked sausage on a sand bar in the Arkansas River and my friend brought up the Gurdon Light again. I told him that I'd be up for going right then and there (not actually). That got him excited and around 9PM we left for Gurdon. 5 of us were brave (stupid) enough to travel 2 hours (from Conway, only 1.5 for me here in Little Rock) down to Gurdon. I feel like I am THE authority on giving directions to the Gurdon Light:

Take I30 West out of Little Rock. Get off and head South at exit 63 onto HWY 53. Stop in at the gas station and have a chat. The guy behind the counter is awesome and he wants to hear about your Gurdon story. Anyway, keep heading South on HWY 53 for 3.3 miles. Before you reach Gurdon, you will come up on some train tracks. They will be the first tracks that you come to after leaving the Interstate. You have two options to park. It seems that most people tell you to take a right just before the train tracks onto a dirt road. Follow it for a couple hundred yards and there is a turn around to park at. If you don't want to take that, there is a spot just on the other side of the tracks back on the HWY to park your car at. The proplem with that is the trussle count.

You will pass 1 trussle between the HWY and the preferred place to park. From all of my research this trussle does not count in your trussle count. From here you continue walking down the tracks. It takes a few minutes before you come to the first official trussle. The second trussle is close to the first, but the third is a few hundred yards past the second (It seems much farther in the dark). You must past the 4th trussle to see the light. Now I have heard stories that the light has been seen all the way back to the second, but most people claim that it can't pass the 4th. If you make it this far, it is recommended that you go past the 5th trussle. Also the light has been reported as being seen from both directions going out as well as coming back so always look behind you.

Now for our story. 5 of us packed into Austin's car. I drove and Austin filmed. We're making a sort of documentary out of it so Austin ran the camera. We left Little Rock at about 9:15 PM and got down to Gurdon at about 11. We stopped in at that gas station and had a talk with the guy behind the counter. He told us all kinds of stories about how people he knew swore they've seen it countless times. He was new in town so he hadn't seen it himself but he confirmed that it was real. We got down to the site and parked on the HWY because we didn't know any better. Suddenly the realness started creeping in on everybody. We were out in the middle of nowhere by ourselves looking for a ghost. Luckily I brought a headlamp, because nobody else had one so I led the way. Every now and then we would hear something in the woods. The girls would freak out, but it was just some armadillo looking for a snack. We kept on. Crossing the trussels are a little tough Most of them are rotting out pretty good so you really have to watch your step. It took about an hour to finally get past the 4th trussel. We stopped, turned off our lights an tapped on the rails (that's another thing that you're supposed to do after the 4th trussel). We looked back and we saw a light. We all got excited, but then it turned red and we realized it was just a car going over the tracks so we continued on. We made it past the 5th trussel and repeated the procedure. Again, light followed by red taillight. We continued on past the 5th trussel. We ended up walking 1.5 miles from the road before we said enough. There we saw another light, except this one in the sky. . . a nice shooting star near Orion's Belt. We turned around and walked back and repeated the clanking when we got back to the 5th and 4th trussel. Again, at the 4th trussel, we saw something. You could feel it before it came. You could feel everyone's hair rise. You could sense the excitement and adrenaline in the air, but alas, it too was followed by a taillight. We had been duped yet again. At about the 2nd trussel I gave everyone a good scare as I let out a load HOLY $#!+ A shooting star, definitely in my Top 10 of shooting stars, seared the night sky. It was truly amazing. That is when the disappointment started creeping in. We quickly walked the rest of the way out and went back to the gas station to tell our story.

The drive back home was a long one. It was 4:10 AM when I crawled into bed. . . and I had to work the next day. That was not fun, but it was all worth it. I wouldn't take it back, and I will probably be back. I must see this light. Too many people say it is real for it not to be, and we will get it on film.