The night is pitch black, save for the few lights scattered around. You do see headlights flickering in and out of view from the highway just parallel, but it’s far off and obstructed by mesquite trees to the point where you can recognize the lights that pass along it as headlights.

You know what to do from the stories you’ve heard: You park your car along the edge of the dark road and, hoping to get a rise out of the friends with you, completely turn off your car. Your friends roll their eyes and laugh a little. You all think this is mostly bs but there’s still a nervousness in the air. None of you point it out.

“Y’all ready?” Your friends agree. You suck in a breath and flash your headlights three times.

Anson, Texas is a small town just under a 30 minute drive from Abilene. It holds an intersection of two busy highways. Cars constantly stream through the town; it’s hard to find a quiet moment without traffic, even late at night.

People in the area will recognize Anson for different things: having the county seat, The Cowboy Christmas Ball, its no dancin’ in Anson history. The thing everyone local knows about Anson, however, is the Anson Light.

Everyone knows the story by heart. A few details will change, depending on who you ask, but the story itself stays the same. A mother sent her sons on some errands, out of earshot from the house but close enough to see the flicker of a lantern. The family had a code: dim your lantern to make it flash three times if you need help.

The children inevitably meet an untimely end. The how is where the details get fuzzy. Sometimes the kids die by a horse drawn carriage equivalent of a hit-and-run. Sometimes the children were sent into a blizzard to retrieve firewood. Either way, the result is the same: the children die and the mother, buried in the nearby cemetery, is left to look for her children every time a light flashes three times.

For bored teenagers, it’s the literal stuff of legends that makes it perfect for a quick legend-tripping session. You see a ghost light and can even get some Sonic afterward, all from the safety and comfort of your car. Name better plans for a fall Saturday night.

Anson has stories to tell, but for some reason we just don’t tell them.

Tom Isbell in Texas Monthly‘s 2000 Article “Seeing the Light”

There are plenty of stories to attest to the validity of the ghost light. I gathered a few stories from some anonymous friends and they had the same through line. In each story, the light approached the vehicle. In one story, the light hurried in the opposite direction when the occupants of the vehicle, spooked, decided to leave. In another, the occupants felt as though the light was chasing them until the vehicle got to a certain distance. Then the light retracted.

Most stories I’ve heard, from trusted sources, acknowledge that yes, you can see lights on the highway in the distance from this particular intersection, but each time it becomes very clear that whatever this approaching light is, it’s not a vehicle. The light comes closer than the highway ever manages to get. If there were, by some stellar odds, a vehicle that cuts across the way each time the light is witnessed, you would see two headlights. Yet it’s always just the one.

The idea that every encounter is just a vehicle on a highway also doesn’t account for each time the light is witnessed while a vehicle is travelling along the highway in the background. Several witnesses have been able to judge the distance and estimate it to be between their vehicle and the distant highway.

Just like the lights at Marfa, debunkers are hot on the case to shoot down the ghost light. Forbes posted about an ACU professor’s explanation of the phenomenon that employed iPhones in GPS tracking. Vehicles on the highway were the culprit for lights spotted during their experiment. A 2000 article from Texas Monthly seems to nail down the source of the story: a man named T. Middlebrook, wanting to get a rise out of a date, made up a story as a teenager knowing that headlights would eventually emerge in the distance.

At first glance, these stories seem to kill our ghost dead. But there’s a few issues with these explanations. Neither account for stories where the light approaches the experiencer or where the light grows in both intensity and size. And, as the wife of the author pointed out in the Texas Monthly piece, you never see tail lights accompanying the light.

There’s an argument to be made that none of these debunkers’ arguments matter. What matters is the belief–the stories, the whispers, the excitement. There’s a notion that’s been put forward into pop culture by media like Neil Gaiman’s American Gods and purveyors of the strange like the podcast Astonishing Legends. This idea questions whether or not history can be the sole basis of paranormal activity or if the collective belief of enough people can give phenomena power and establish its existence in our reality.

Either way, The Anson Light is a good story for a scare on a cool autumn night. Those in the Big Country searching online for spookiness near them can’t miss the articles about the urban legend, but the story isn’t exactly advertised by the town itself. As then mayor Tom Isbell told Texas Monthly in the 2000 writeup on the tale: “Anson has stories to tell, but for some reason we just don’t tell them.”

Sources: Texas Monthly, Texas Hill Country, Forbes, YouTube, anonymous interviews.

Do you have any stories regarding the Anson Light? Do you have a similar urban legend in your town? Tell me about it in the comments! I’d love to hear it.