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The Spooklight

by
 

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

 
By Sarah Kendzior | May 2, 2025
 

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 20th 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 Black Place

by
 

An enduring strategy of autocrats is to simply run out the clock

 
By Sarah Kendzior | March 8, 2025
 

I am in The Black Place.

The ground is white and cracked and leads to undulating gray hills. The hills stretch for miles, but I know which one I want. I spot it like my own reflection and start walking its way.

There are times I pass a mirror and don’t recognize myself. I got old too fast and saw too much. People think I’m younger than I am until they catch the look in my eye.

The Black Place has seen too much. It absorbed its dark recollections into the soil and put them on display. It is an honest mirror, reflecting the things a person is taught to hide, and making them seem beautiful again.

I walk to The Black Place while my husband and son stay in the air-conditioned car. My parched land novelty tour does not interest them. I tell them I’ll be back in ten minutes. When I return, it’s been an hour. Time loses all meaning in The Black Place.

The Black Place is off a service road in rural New Mexico. It is not marked and not obvious. It surrounds you gradually, like depression. The instinct of many travelers is to move on. I’d moved on before, and regretted it.

It is better to visit The Black Place than to have the black place visit you.

* * *

We left Cortez that morning for Navajo territory, stopping for breakfast at a frybread shack. The tiny turquoise restaurant was decorated with star-spangled tables and tributes to John F. Kennedy. We sat by a coal-burning stove and paid with exact change as required. Outside, horses wandered, kicking up dust on a dirt road. It could have been any year since 1964.

“Ask not what your country can do for you; Ask what you can do for your country,” said a plaque on the wall. That seemed too big a request for 2024. I could only think of the violence this country had inflicted on the Navajo people, and then on Kennedy, in the end. Maybe the sign was not as incongruous as it seemed.

We returned to the car and headed south. I don’t tend to revisit regions on road trips, but I make an exception for The Four Corners. In 2018, I took my children to the ancient dwellings of Mesa Verde. In 2023, we hiked Monument Valley. In 2024, we saw the 13th-century stone towers of Hovenweep and Aztec Ruins. We wandered through the Canyon of the Ancients, strewn with boulders shaped like giant skulls.

These sites are being threatened for destruction by the US government, but they always were. The threat is now more blatant, more flagrant, but the region long bore this burden. This land doesn’t fool you with false promises, nor does it bow down. There is no denial of the grandeur of what was and what might have been.

There is the stubborn persistence of what is.

In Cortez, I bought a Navajo rug. It has a seam on the border called a ch’ihónít’i, or spirit line. The spirit line protects the weaver from the emotions of the person who bought it. The artist wove herself an exit from her creation.

I look at my rug and am grateful the woman who wove this beauty is spared my thoughts. I feel longing for the West — and the lonesome embrace of The Black Place.

I want to go back, but that’s the American mantra. No matter the place, the time, the reason — everyone wants to go back, because the new forward is a void.

You can’t hold forward in your hands. Forward is looser than dust. When it comes to The Black Place or The Nowhere-Place, I choose The Black Place.

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We’re Already in the Aftermath

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Of Trump and Russia, defeating the mafia state, and more

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Feb 26, 2025
 

For the next month, I’ll be doing interviews and getting ready for a tour for my new book, The Last American Road Trip. I’m particularly grateful for my readers as this period is grueling, especially given the political crises and that I have a family of four to support. Trying times! Anyway, I’ll be posting more information about the book and the tour as the date approaches. Here are the answers to your questions!

* * *

Lynn D: Wondering what your take is on the Krasnov allegation (that Trump is a Russian operative who uses that name). Normally, I would dismiss it as another wild conspiracy, but the light of what’s happening, it seems worth considering.

SK: Whether this particular allegation is true is irrelevant compared to the broader question of why nothing was done to prevent a known organized crime associate from gaining access to the highest level of political power. Twice.

Trump’s allegiance is to a transnational organized crime network in which the Kremlin is a key node. He has operated in this network for over half a century. His criminal ties are extensively documented in my book Hiding in Plain Sight, which contains hundreds of end notes to others’ work. Trump is a Kremlin asset: his activity benefits Russian officials and oligarchs and puts their interests before those of the US. This does not make him a secret agent or a spy. Trump is primarily a mafia associate, and it is through that lens that his rise should be examined.

Despite a surfeit of documentation, most pundits and politicians have been reluctant to pursue Trump’s Kremlin ties seriously because: 1) they do not want to follow the money trail, which leads to donors to both parties 2) Trump’s network includes US allies like Israel and Saudi Arabia 3) and ties to cases like Epstein/Maxwell that highlight lost US sovereignty and decades-long sadistic plots 4) and exposes many US officials, especially in the FBI, as corrupt accomplices. As a result, the focus has been on trivialities, like bot farms, or on rumors like this one. As I wrote in Hiding in Plain Sight, “No one could see the forest for the treason.”

I’m suspicious that the Krasnov story is bogus and is being spread as an attempt to delegitimize solid research on Trump’s ties to the Kremlin and its oligarchs. There are many concrete examples of Trump’s illicit activity that were meticulously documented but played down by media and never investigated by officials — some of whom turned out to be on the Kremlin oligarch payroll. Nothing about this crisis is new. The most important question is why every administration, most recently Biden’s, enabled it.

Jodie: Timothy Snyder posted on BlueSky that “Something is shifting….people are starting to realize that there is no truth here beyond the desire for personal wealth and power.” Do you agree? If so, what do you think happens next and how can we, the average citizen, support whatever is necessary to make lasting change?

SK: We lost our representative government: it was infiltrated by organized crime long ago. The last chance to fix it was surrendered by the Biden administration. We have been living in The Aftermath since 2022: it just took Trump’s reinstallation for many to realize it. If that’s a new way of thinking, view this realization not with fear, but with defiant pride that you’ve already survived two years in The Aftermath. And now you are joined by other good people who’ve shed their delusions. We may have driven past the point of no return, but at least we got a carpool going.

As I said years ago, you can’t vote out the mafia. US officials needed to hold Trump’s criminal network accountable for their crimes and admit to the American public the full extent of institutional failure. Only from a place of complete honesty could they prevent the inevitable reinstallation. Only with urgency could this be accomplished, and it had to be done by 2022. But US officials had no interest in doing that because their loyalty lies elsewhere: to their bank accounts, to criminal cults, to foreign states. There was a narrow window in which this crisis could have been remedied. Biden chose to defenestrate democracy while letting the burglars climb inside.

Trump has never been popular and remains unpopular. Musk is even more loathed. What folks seem to be realizing is that it took a bipartisan effort to enable this disaster, and the aims of its players are transnational. A criminal network is carrying out hostile takeovers of multiple countries. They do not care about public opinion. Perhaps people in Snyder’s orbit have shifted — I’m guessing MSNBC viewers woke up after they mass fired the non-white anchors — but most Americans were already angry and unhappy with the status quo. It didn’t matter which party was in charge.

What citizens can do is know their values and have each other’s backs. You have been betrayed. None of you deserve it. You are all survivors of an abusive state. They will try to split this country into parts for resource extraction and they will encourage you to attack each other to make their job easier. Refuse them. Do not fall for stereotypes about “red” and “blue” states or pretend that an election in a country this corrupt is a representation of the people’s will. Never sacrifice your humanity or that of others. If you find yourself willing to negotiate another’s humanity, that is when they’ve won something real. That is when you’ll have surrendered your soul.

Katie G: I have recently become terrified that he will declare martial law. Do you see this as a likelihood? If so, how long do you think we have? His recent stunt with the military has me very concerned.

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I was going to make a noose, but instead I made a basket

by
 

The Craftsman

 
By Sarah Kendzior | Feb 16, 2025
 

I was going to make a noose, but instead I made a basket.

The basket coils like a snake in wait, white string binding plain brown rope. It is small but taut. When I rest it on its side, it looks like an eye. I put it on my bedside so it can watch over me as I sleep.

The basket is too small to hold anything but my nightmares. But I know it’s working, because I used up all the rope for my noose.

* * *

I wanted to stab someone 8000 times. Instead, I cross-stitched an ancient design.

The design is a Mediterranean dream not my own. A four-square grid of dark blue and light blue: the cross, the star, the carnation, and the scroll, made of tiny x’s.

 

 

I like imagining that hundreds of years ago, a Byzantine craftsman stitched the same patterns as me. I do Palestinian embroidery, tatreez, for similar reasons. I want to learn from a past that persists to the present: a strike against genocidaires who insist that Palestinian culture never existed.

I also do tatreez because it’s attractive. Why is it so hard for some to see the beauty? Maybe this is not a question to ask of those who abide the mass murder of children. People who violate universal taboos are not going to understand art or life or love.

It takes me about a month to stab something 8000 times. To X out so much that my stabbing forms intricate shapes and the X’s blend into a restorative whole. From a distance, there is no X in the fabric at all.

I stabbed X so many times that a new and tranquil world took its place.

As I embroidered, Santorini — where I spent my honeymoon decades ago; Santorini, where the inspiration for this textile came — was evacuated due to earthquakes. I remembered riding a donkey by ancient ruins and eating octopus fresh from the sea, and my husband and I wondering when the Iraq War, then three months old, would end. By the time the war of lies was over, we were raising two children in a rotting husk of America, and Greece hated us with reason.

I dream of Mediterranean days. The soft blue thread makes me feel like I could still ride the waves, though I likely never will again.

I wove a cloth of rage, and when it was finished, I held a cloth of memory.

* * *

I wanted to beat someone to death, but instead I got a treadle loom. A loom is an ideal apparatus if you feel like murdering people but also making an appealing placemat.

The center part of a loom is called a beater. You slam it until you push the threads into submission. Before you beat the threads, you pull them through narrow metal slots, like prison bars for string, until they reach the other side. That thread is called “warp” because it takes a warped mind to create this contraption.

I am learning to weave from an 81-year-old woman who generously gave me her old loom and is teaching me how to use it. I asked her how to get the threads through the slots, and she informed me I would use a “slay hook.”

“Yes!” I said, wielding the s-shaped metal like a weapon until she gently told me it was spelled “sley hook”.

“I’m calling it a slay hook anyway,” I said. “Because I want to slay something.”

“Well, this part of the process is very boring,” she said, as I moved 120 strands of thread one by one, “so you might as well.”

I wondered what the spies using surveillance technology to track me thought of my new project. I hoped they were stuck watching my weaving lesson. I hope they groaned when they discovered that after pulling each thread through 120 tiny bars, I had to pull each thread through 120 tiny holes. I hope I bored them to death.

Excessive crafting is a standard Midwestern response to excessive stress. I would be a model Midwestern housewife if I didn’t despise these people with every fiber of my being, and some fibers beyond it.

 

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