Of all the epic roadside attractions in Texas, only one has inspired a Pulitzer Prize winner to write driving directions encoded in lyrical verse. W.S. Merwin’s 2001 poem “The Marfa Lights” is partly about the mysterious objects of the title, but it’s really an ode to the place you go to see them. And how to find it:
east of town on the way to Paisano Pass
… somewhere on Route 90
looking south toward the Chinatis
a marker has been set up by the road there
“SEE MYSTERY LIGHTS” promises the stencil outside the Thunderbird hotel on Marfa’s main strip in far West Texas. The sign is a relic of the old pre-Donald Judd era, when the Thunderbird was just another 1950s motor court along the highway, and the most popular attractions beyond the Dairy Queen down the block were natural wonders you could experience for free. The Lights have always existed—stories of sightings have been passed down from wagon riders and ranchers to Native Americans who considered them manifestations of their ancestors—but it wasn’t until 1986 that the city designated an official viewing area. In 2003, it was expanded into the place you can visit today: a platform to see one of the great unexplained phenomena of the universe.
The viewing area is close to town, but not too close. Locals would take their dates there when saying you had “gone to see the Lights” meant something different. About 9 miles east of Marfa and a third of the way to Alpine, the lookout is on the south side of the highway, in a spot where the agave-speckled flats stretch out toward the border and desert mountains line the horizon. There was an Army airfield there during World War II, and if you look up the landmark on your phone for a UFO’s-eye view, you can see the old runways etched across the terrain as clearly as the Nazca Lines. But those ghosts are even harder to see from the pull-off than the ones tourists seek, at the only rest stop in America that promises an experience of the paranormal along with a place to pee.
The promise is there in the stalk-mounted binocular viewers permanently aimed into the void—no quarters required—and the picnic tables that suggest you’ll need to see this sitting down. Merwin captures the vibe on a busy night, with people rolling in as night falls, peering from buses, setting up camp chairs and tripods, and waiting for the magic to happen.
And waiting. Because on a close read, you can tell Merwin—maybe like you—never saw the Lights.
As anyone who has driven across the Trans-Pecos region after midnight knows, the trick to seeing an unexplained phenomenon through your windshield is to not be looking for it.
That may be why, the time I took my friends to see the Lights 10 years ago, we saw a chupacabra.
As a young dad transplanted from Iowa to Austin in the late ’90s, Big Bend was the perfect family getaway—a way to get the wide-screen Texas you came for even if you only had a long weekend to spare. And Marfa, which was just starting to earn its reputation as a hipster destination, turned into an ideal base camp—a time-warped small town where a kid could safely roam but was also packed with world-class cultural diversions for grown-ups. Marfa harbored unexpected experiences of the uncanny around every corner.
On our first visit there, we stopped at a souvenir shop in Alpine called the Apache Trading Post. In the back, past the baskets of fossils and racks of dream catchers, they had a room where you could watch videos of the Marfa Lights. The VHS tapes looked to have been playing on a continuous loop since the ’80s—white noise mixed with jittery orbs bouncing around the screen like an old Pong game. The amateur quality only made them more compelling, like folklore recorded on a camcorder.
The attraction of these places—museums that promise to show you proof of things you are pretty sure do not exist—is powerful. Driving back from a Rockport fishing trip in the late 2000s, my son and I came upon a chupacabra exhibit by the highway in downtown Cuero, home of the taxidermied corpse of the purported goat-sucker a local rancher found on her property. A few years later, we drove around the Guadalupe Mountains and into New Mexico to visit the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. There, we studied the 1940s aviator maps and news clips and admired the hilariously bad life-size diorama of the alien autopsy. I even went on a Bigfoot watch once, with an in-law who promised “backpacking with benefits.” What we got was car camping with guys who claimed to have communicated telepathically with Sasquatch through crickets.
You don’t have to believe the stories such places and people tell to find them entertaining, even profound. They are repositories of urban legends—contemporary myths that promise authentic wonder and mystery can still be found. “The truth is out there,” at the far reaches of the open road, where the network coverage runs out but the blacktop rolls on.
To find it, you just need a little serendipity.
We were on such a trip when we encountered the cryptid. It was Memorial Day weekend 2015, and my wife and I were showing visiting friends from New York our favorite spots in Big Bend, complete with yurt glamping, hot mountain hikes, West Texas Italian food, a drive on the Pinto Canyon Road, and a star party. After dinner on the last night, it was time to see the Lights.
We set out around 9 p.m. in my Volkswagen, headed east past the last gas stations into the dark desert. The skies were clear, and the Marfa Public Radio DJ was playing what he called “space music”—ambient instrumentals designed to conjure the cosmic. The road unfolding in our headlights was mesmerizing. We were two-thirds of our way to the Lights when we saw it.
A ghostly creature walked right in front of us, crossing the road through our high beams. I hit the brakes. It was not in a hurry, and we all got a long look. “A large gray beast loomed up in the headlights and walked across the road, four long legs, not a deer or wild pig shape or motion, and too big for a dog or coyote,” our friend Henry recalls. The beams gave it the eerily luminous glow of a specter, as if it was made of moonlight. And then it was gone, back into the darkness.
We were stilled by the paranormal frisson of the encounter. I remembered the stories I’d read explaining how most “chupacabras,” like the one the lady found in Cuero, are just coyotes deformed by mange. But that understanding did nothing to take away from the magical weirdness of what we had witnessed. We all saw it and knew it was a chupacabra—even as we also knew there is no such thing as a chupacabra. Looking so strange, in the moment we saw it, that we could make up our own legend.
By the time we got to the viewing area, fierce gusts had blown in. I went out alone to the fence line and looked into the void. No lights, just howling wind, until it was interrupted by the sound of a more 21st-century phenomenon: one of those transcontinental freight trains that regularly hurtle through far West Texas, loaded with military armor.
Some local traditions say the Marfa Lights are spirits whose appearances grow increasingly scarce as the region develops. We heard such stories on a June 2022 trip with our friend Pepe Rojo, as he and a colleague installed revolutionary flags for the Agave Festival, provoking dialogue among locals about the dissipating Lights as a mystical symptom of Marfa’s gentrification. You don’t have to believe that explanation to appreciate its metaphoric truth, in the same way you don’t have to believe in chupacabras to see one with your own eyes.
