Where the lights are
Every dossier in the archive filed under a light claim — ghost lights, mystery lights, spooklights — plotted against jurisdiction. 33of 36 carry coordinates.
Dossiers by jurisdiction
The shape of the claim
Folklore books speak of a "spooklight belt" running through the Ozarks and the Appalachians — and the record half-agrees. North Carolina leads the archive with 5 light dossiers, anchored by Brown Mountain. Arkansas files the Gurdon and Crossett lights; Texas has Marfa; Oklahoma's Spook Light Road sits on the Missouri line where the tri-state legend migrated.
But the honest finding is dispersion, not a belt: lights appear from Puerto Rico's hills to a North Dakota cemetery. A spooklight is a folk form, not a region — anywhere with a dark road and one generation of witnesses can grow one.
What the count cannot show: most famous lights (Marfa, Joplin's Hornet Spooklight, the Paulding Light) are documented far more thoroughly than any single dossier suggests. The archive counts filings, not photons.