JD Hall, Insight to Incite, Sept. 18, 2026
I’ve seen things I cannot explain, things that if I weren’t an avowed supernaturalist, I’d question my sanity for. And recently, too. I’ve always been sensitive to supernatural things, and I’ve felt that each new place has new weird things, in different ways, and all equally inexplicable. Local spooky things, if you will. That doesn’t mean I believe every story told around the campfire, nor do I assume every snapping branch is Bigfoot’s footfall stalking me in the woods. In fact, no matter what’s in the woods, I’d typically rather be there at dark than downtown during the daylight with the fentanyl zombies haunting Main Street.
But I’ve seen (and heard enough) that’s inexplicable by the natural order, and I’ve had enough humility to admit the world may contain things I don’t yet have a label for. Since moving to my new neck of the woods, I’ve seen several things that don’t make sense, so I’ve researched the local lore to see what the old-timers claimed was lurking in the shadows. You know, besides the copperheads.
For several years, I lived a few miles away from the infamous Joplin Spooklight, one of the most stubborn mysteries in American folklore. Also called the Hornet Spooklight, it appears along the Missouri-Oklahoma border as a glowing orb that hovers, bobs, retreats, changes intensity, and sometimes seems to approach the people watching it. It has been reported so regularly that going out to see it became a local pastime. This was not a corn liquor miracle. It is a confirmed anomaly.
In fact, it’s been documented for a very long time. In 1965, Popular Mechanicsenlisted a University of Arkansas mechanical-engineering professor and a colleague – an instructor specializing in fluid dynamics- for a field investigation with a 60-power telescope built by Hicks. They observed the Spooklight and tried to resolve it by tracing the sightline roughly fifteen miles to U.S. Route 66, and reproduced it by covering automobile headlights with colored cellophane and blinking them on a set schedule. Which makes total sense, because as everyone knows, locals love to cover their headlights with colored cellophane, stop in the middle of Route 66, and blink their headlights.
For crying out loud, if I reproduce the sound of horse hoofbeats with coconuts, it doesn’t mean the sound of hoofbeats in the desert is coconuts. Sometimes science is dumb.
Becuase the problem is, the light has been reported since the 1800s, long before automobiles and U.S. 66. Missouri Southern State University maintains a Spooklight collection containing photographs, correspondence, interviews, newspaper reports, and other materials documenting the phenomenon’s long history. Scientists, journalists, university professors, and investigators connected with the United States Army Corps of Engineers have examined it. The City of Joplin still acknowledges that no investigation has produced a conclusive explanation. It’s a thing. Nobody knows what the thing is. And it’s about as regular as Old Faithful, no matter the weather, and the light seems personable. The light also changes color, moves against expectations, and reacts to observers.
The Spooklight isn’t the only weird thing. Ozark folklore describes a landscape crowded with different kinds of unnatural beings, each with its own appearance and habits, and more personal testimony than you can shake a stick at. The people who handed down these stories added their own and typically rejected all other lore as superstition except what they encountered, showing it’s not just insane hillbillies prone to believing every tale. Nonetheless, tales of “haints,” witches, wild men, phantom animals, hag-riders, wandering lights, and assorted woodland terrors called “booger-dogs.”
It’s all so gloriously weird.
A haint, for example, is allegedly a spirit lingering near a home, road, graveyard, cave, spring, or previous place of violence. There’s a famous cave about ten feet off my property where a hanging once took place, and you’ll be pleased to know I’ve not seen any dead bank robbers. But according to lore, some haints appear recognizably human, while others are known mainly by footsteps, mimicking voices, or repeated disturbances in the area. A haint belonged somewhere, was attached to a person, place, death, or unfinished grievance.
Booga ooga. Ooga Ooga Booga.
“Booger dogs” are another common belief. In Ozark speech, a booger could mean a frightening creature without a specific species. Booger dogs were commonly described as unnaturally large black dogs, or dog-like things, appearing on lonely roads, near graveyards, or beside travelers after dark. They might follow silently, vanish suddenly, resist ordinary pursuit, and typically display red, glowing eyes. They don’t attack. They haunt and freak people out. Witnesses claim they instantly recognize them as supernatural when they see them.
The weird thing is how universal some of these experiences are. Britain has its Black Shuck, Barghest, and other spectral hounds haunting roads, churchyards, and boundaries. Similar dogs appear throughout European folklore as omens, guardians, pursuers, or creatures associated with death. Ozark settlers brought traditions with them, which helps explain some of the similarity. It does not explain why the stories persisted as alleged encounters instead of surviving only as remembered tales from the old country. They continue today.
Then there are the hag-riders. A victim would awaken unable to move, struggling to breathe, with the sensation that an old woman or malicious presence was sitting upon his chest. Sometimes the sufferer saw the attacker, while other times he felt its weight and intentions. This is especially common. Scientists say it’s sleep paralysis. More than half of adults experience being attacked by something supernatural this way, and the “something supernatural” is almost always a personable, humanoid spirit. Nobody imagines an inanimate ton of bricks on them, but a spiritual entity. Professionals claim is a hallucination. It doesn’t explain why the hallucinations manifest in the same way for almost everyone.
One of the more interesting rabbit holes I’ve fallen into has been the local “Blue Man.” I was at first intrigued because there is an actual blue family in Appalachia, whose skin tone is likely caused by a genetic mutation from incest. But this wasn’t that. Despite the name, the creature was not necessarily blue. The name comes from the alleged discoverer: a trapper nicknamed “Blue Sol” Collins, who found it near Spring Creek in 1865.
He reportedly found that animals or pelts had disappeared from his traps and that enormous humanlike tracks appeared in the snow. Following them, the trail led toward a hollow, and the creature he later described was a towering, hair-covered, powerfully built figure, 8-9 feet tall, living in a cave lair, carrying a club, and throwing boulders at him. Others reported it up until about 1915, claiming it could pick up small horses or cattle over the shoulder, and found habitations in caves full of bear and mountain lion bones. Reportedly, communities within about a 30-mile radius were aware and tried to keep their distance. Modern researchers claim the newspaper reports were all jokes, and everyone was in on it. I’m not so sure, not only because there’s no punch line, but becuase it sounds pretty identical to native tales of similar giants in the Southwest, with a certain degree of archaeological and cultural evidence. It also sounds like consistent, visible sightings of dozens of dead giants in the area as reported in local newspapers in the early 20th century, found and substantiated by local university researchers just before the Army Corps flooded the place in a hurry, which I wrote about in Giants in the Ozarks.
Here’s the thing. We can dismiss the Blue Man as an Ozarks Bigfoot story, and we can dismiss all of them without a single bead of sweat off my back. For the record, I don’t believe any of them, per se, even though they’re fascinating. Any one of these stories may be false, or all of them. The Spooklight might even be swamp gas from a swamp that exists so far below the soil that no one has discovered it yet. Folklore attracts errors because people attract errors.
The harder question is why these stories persist everywhere you go, and no matter the culture – including cultures dominated by Christianity. Why is the lore the same as in pagan cultures? Why does every culture have elves, gnomes, or little people, and why does an Asian mushroom exist that causes every single person who ingests it to have the same hallucinations of little people? Why do drugs – different drugs, too – cause people to have visions of the same “man in the dark hat,” no matter the nation, language, or culture? Why giants and dragons in every culture? Why do werewolves or shape-shifters exist in every culture? If this were a 20th-century phenomenon,, you could blame Hollywood. But all these predate Hollywood by, well, forever.
I believe that the reason every culture tells tales of demigods, Annunaki, and celestial beings coming from above with impressive knowledge is that that’s exactly what the Bible says happened. Could other folklore have roots in supernatural reality?
Perhaps the old Ozarkers were wrong about many things lurking beyond the lantern light. They may still have been right about the most important thing. The woods are more crowded than they appear.
ANGELS, DEMONS, AND A GREAT BIG CATEGORY ERROR
Most Christians possess a supernatural filing cabinet with three drawers. God goes in the top drawer, angels go in the second, and Satan with all his demons gets shoved into the third. The basic system remains pretty simple.
The Bible’s unseen realm is not simple. Scripture describes cherubim, seraphim, living creatures, Watchers, unclean spirits, principalities, and the heavenly host. Some of these terms may overlap, and some may describe offices rather than separate kinds of beings. Even after making every responsible allowance, however, the biblical population cannot be compressed into angels with white wings and demons with red pitchforks.
The word translated as “angel” means messenger. It tells us what the being is doing, not necessarily what kind of being it is. Calling every heavenly creature an angel is therefore something like calling every human being a mailman. A messenger may look human enough to be mistaken for an ordinary traveler, as happened when Abraham entertained heavenly visitors and when the men of Sodom saw the visitors who came to Lot. That does not mean every creature in heaven shares the same form. The opposite is true.
Cherubim are the first great casualty of religious artwork. Scripture does not describe them as plump babies with undersized wings, floating around heaven like airborne toddlers who have escaped the nursery. Ezekiel encountered living beings with multiple faces, wings, gleaming bodies, and a connection to enormous wheels full of eyes. I have no idea what that means. Neither do you. They moved together with terrifying speed beneath God’s glory. Whatever Ezekiel saw, nobody would pinch its cheeks, I guarantee you.
Isaiah saw seraphim surrounding God’s throne, and each possessed six wings, using two to cover the face, two to cover the feet, and two for flight. Their cry shook the temple’s thresholds, and one handled a burning coal from the altar. The Hebrew name is connected with burning, and related language elsewhere can describe fiery serpents. These are not cherubim wearing different uniforms. They’re weird beings. If physics applies to them, and it might not, they claim a human being would need wings three times the length of their body to fly. Of course, the bumblebee defies this logic, but wings that are long enough to flap over and cover eyes like a pair of hands, and cover the feet, are really long. For all I know, they might have been 95% wings.
John’s Revelation adds four living creatures around the throne: one resembled a lion, another an ox or calf, another had a face like a man, and the fourth resembled a flying eagle. They had six wings and were covered with eyes around and within. Folks, by any other definition, those are called monsters. If you saw one, you’d run. Or collapse. And God chose these monstrous, animal-like forms to worship Him night and day around His throne, for eternity.
Other biblical beings are described more by rank, residence, or activity than by appearance. Job presents the sons of God assembling before the Lord. The Psalms describe God judging among the gods and ruling over a heavenly council. Daniel speaks of Watchers and portrays spiritual princes connected with earthly kingdoms, which the Book of Enoch expands upon and, though not Scripture, Scripture quotes it as having some good ideas. Paul lists rulers, authorities, principalities, powers, thrones, dominions, and spiritual forces operating in heavenly places, most likely the Old Testament Council of Elohim.
Michael Heiser performed an important service by dragging many of these passages out of the denominational attic, demonstrating that the biblical writers understood the unseen realm as populated, organized, and involved in the government and rebellion of nations. Yet, in my view, even Heiser’s recovered divine council does not exhaust the biblical evidence. Recovering supernatural government is not the same as compiling a complete census of supernatural life (not as though it’s possible).
A larger possibility exists. Scripture introduces us primarily to unseen beings who interact with God’s government, deliver messages, participate in worship, oppose divine purposes, or affect human affairs. Naturally, those are the beings relevant to the biblical story. The Bible has no reason to provide a field guide to every creature God made any more than Genesis needed to include an illustrated catalog of beetles.
We have mistaken the biblical spotlight for the boundaries of creation. Because Scripture shows us certain beings performing important tasks, we assume nothing else occupies the darkness beyond them. Yet the beings Scripture does reveal are already diverse in form, intelligence, authority, function, and apparent nature.
The Bible never says that everything unseen is an angel or a demon. That cramped taxonomy comes from us, not from Scripture. Once we accept that, the old stories from the Ozarks become considerably more interesting.
THE UNSEEN REALM MAY HAVE WILDLIFE
The visible creation is almost offensively diverse. God made men, mammals, birds, reptiles, fish, insects, bacteria, fungi, parasites, octopuses, and jellyfish, which seem designed specifically to keep biologists from getting arrogant. Have you seen documentaries on octopi? I do not believe in space aliens. But if I did, I’d call them octopi. They do not operate by the rules of biology, the freaky little thing, or huge things, as the case may be. The farther we explore the ocean, the forest, the soil, or the human body, the more creation refuses to fit inside our tidy little boxes. I mean, there is a fungus that communicates inexplicably underground with other fungi over miles, basically the origin tale of The Last of Us.
My point is, the seen realm’s biodiversity is huge and inexplicable. Why should we believe the unseen realm is any more explicable or diverse?
Many Christians imagine the unseen creation as a nearly empty office building. God occupies the top floor, angels deliver the correspondence, and demons keep trying to set fire to the lobby. Every strange encounter must therefore involve an angel, or a demon. We rule out dead human beings, unless, like Heiser thought, they are a Nephilim hybrid without a soul – at which point some ghosts are real and we call them demons – or a figment of a superstitious person’s imagination.
I can imagine Justin Peters freaking out at this right now.
Why should the unseen creation be less diverse than the visible one? If God filled every material environment with astonishing varieties of life, there is no obvious reason He would populate the invisible realm with only a few kinds of intelligent moral agents. Scripture never says He did. On the contrary, the creatures Scripture reveals already display tremendous differences in appearance, rank, power, function, intelligence, and proximity to God. If a hyper-cessationist says, “The Bible doesn’t say God created diverse supernatural life,” I’d argue the Bible doesn’t say God made octopi, but we should rule them out as self-created.
This raises the possibility of supernatural biodiversity. The unseen realm may contain something resembling an ecology, populated not only by rulers, messengers, warriors, and rebels, but by creatures occupying roles for which we have no theological category. Some may be highly intelligent, while others may possess no more rational capacity than an animal. Some may communicate. Others may react, hunt, flee, guard territory, follow patterns, or move through environments inaccessible to our normal senses.
Why, you ask. What purpose would they serve? I have no idea. In fact, I have no idea why fungi exist, but I vaguely remember from fifth-grade life science that there’s a reason in the ecosystem. I have no idea why mimes exist, but there’s probably a reason. At one time, we had no idea the role that bees played in the ecosystem and just thought they were fuzzy little sugar makers with stingers on their behinds. Turns out, there are reasons for things that God doesn’t fill us in about, and I presume that includes every single living creature except for snakes, who are just the objects of a divine grudge and exist to remind humans that sin makes monsters.