Spooklight

Q & A with Sarah Kendzior

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By Sarah Kendzior | May 12, 2025
 
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And away we go…

Sylvia C: If Trump wasn’t around to fill the role of cult leader and autocrat, do you think another autocratic leader might have emerged to fulfill the goals of Project 2025? I understand that Trump has been at it for forty years or so, but did we just get very unlucky with this criminal in chief, or might another have been anointed by the extreme right wing?

SK: We didn’t get unlucky, exactly: intelligent career criminals installed a skilled demagogue frontman after decades of planning and institutional complicity. (For those who doubt this claim, see Hiding in Plain Sight.) But the question of whether there can be a Trump successor is very interesting. The GOP tried with DeSantis and Haley and failed. They tried with JD Vance, and he alienated two Popes, one who would rather literally die than spend one more minute with him. Trump is unique because of his deep connections in business, “business” (organized crime), entertainment, media, and politics. He also had an enormous amount of leverage through blackmail, threats, and bribes, and is a skilled propagandist. It’s hard to replicate that.

In 1990, when the New York tabloids thought Trump was “over”, they wrote of their relief. In 2020, when Trump lost the election, Americans partied in the streets the way countries do when a dictator is toppled. Trump has a cult of personality that doesn’t seem possible to replicate, which is to the advantage of free-thinking people. The key is to never conflate Trump with systemic problems. He is their culmination, not their origin, and those problems will need to be tackled urgently when he goes.

Laura H: Do you see us surviving this regime? Other than protesting, what can those of us trapped in red states do to help us survive?

SK: I will quote red state philosophical luminary Dalton from Road House, the greatest movie set in Missouri: “Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected. Take it outside. And be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.”

I’m serious: this is the best “surviving a red state” advice around. And since Dalton was a NYC-to-Missouri transplant cooler, his wisdom applies nationwide. Dalton sagely noted that no one ever wins a fight. This is a call for people to live less in reaction to hostile elements and instead be proactive in building a road house of their own — a road house of the soul, if you will. Or else a real-estate developer tied to organized crime may take advantage of you! And that’s when it’s time to not be nice.

Kas: There seems to be a kind of debate brewing among leftists/progressives between those who consistently point out the most dire outcomes as increasingly likely and those who accuse them of fearmongering and discouraging folks from acting. The likelihood that some version of martial law is or is not staring us down would be an example of this. Personally, I don’t think there’s a conflict between being realistic about the extremism of the moment and continuing to act where and when we can to hold whatever ground is left, but I’d love to hear your take.

SK: Those deriding realists as “doomers” are abetting authoritarianism, whether they realize it or not. Many do realize it and collect checks to spread this sort of rhetoric. The ideal situation for Trump’s return was an unprepared population who believed his reinstallation could not happen and that his arrest was imminent — and that’s what podcasters and “legal experts” bleated for years in a manner very similar to QAnon. Those pundits should be regarded as a liberal counterpart to QAnon. Like QAnon, they caused material harm by creating a culture of conformity so rigid it led to anyone with a different view getting threatened with violence for not “trusting the plan”.

People should be realistic about Trump. That means looking at his network, its history, and what institutions have done in reaction to it. One cannot unilaterally stave off something like martial law, but your odds of surviving or combatting it increase when you discuss the topic with like-minded folks instead of being silenced by people who chide you for bringing it up. I encourage people to examine the track records of commentators and see how their past predictions panned out. Did they falsely promise “rule of law” and browbeat anyone who pointed to hard evidence of institutional corruption? Then they may be working for nefarious forces. This is more likely to be true if they have a record of fraud and/or are living in a foreign country and don’t have their life on the line here in the USA.

Norm C: Is it my imagination or are some pundits that were reluctant or afraid to suggest what your well researched and written books have been calling out for years, are now “jumping on the bandwagon”. They sell subscriptions, speaking engagements, merchandise etc. to help us resist and “fight back”. I often enjoy reading their free commentaries but wonder if I’m just being manipulated by a skillful communicator. Is the movement being “monetized”? Any suggestions on navigating among and selecting good sources of information and commentary.

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The Spooklight

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“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.

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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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