BEEN THINKING ABOUT …. SPRINGTIME GOBLINS. Old and worn highway winds next to the creek, a creek now obscured by green leaves and the falling dark. Frogs peep. The old town’s yellow street lamps cast globes of light in the creek side forest, illuminating clouds of flimsy Mayflies. The darkness is close, the water down below running over limestone. Springtime in the Ozarks is here.

Heavy traffic whines on the big six lanes. Not long ago, the anachronists of the Ozarks would have stumbled over the idea of big road and big city and yet here we are. Franchise businesses, fast foot, gas station stops, and rows of hotels, shining, brightly lit, with thick blinds drawn against a lengthening morning light. Overhead, tempestuous skies eddy and ripple. The landscaping is precise but the Scotch pines look a little sad, a little too precise. The wildness of the season is lost, covered up by evenly lined wallpaper and the smell of breakfast.

Down Bear Creek, the old rebuilt mansion of Rose O’Neill wakes to another greening season. The mansion is a striking facsimile of the one that burned back in the 1940s. O’Neill was a contradiction, all exquisite feminine beauty, posing on her porch with lit cigar to scandalize the neighbors. A generation or three ago, she was known as the wealthy mother of the beloved Kewpie doll. Today, O’Neill is largely forgotten, though still commemorated by a beautiful mural in downtown Branson painted by Christine Riutzel. O’Neill presents something incongruous to modern audiences. Some find her wide-eyed dolls creepy, others find them nostalgic, adorable. And for many who love Kewpies, O’Neill’s monster art is hard to accept, all sensual hobgoblin lines of mythological muscle straining in fear and tenderness.

Modernity presents a monolithic message: The real is the commercial, the brutalist, the post-modern. At once, anything goes, but always check with the authorities for permission to look for inner truth not in quietude or introspection but from one’s peer group, and to define one’s personality by a rotating series of brands, be they sports teams or Marvel heroes or political parties or religious denominations. In such a world, the eclectic, the brooding, the questioning, the weird, the genuinely virtuous, all are given a wide berth. O’Neill was the original mother monster but even her kids — many now in their 80s — try to explain away her contradictions. Instead, why not embrace the complexity? There’s weird freedom on the other side.

I walk the old path down to the private cemetery where O’Neill lies buried. The overcast sky is a tumult but elm and maple and oak leaf close overhead. Water runs in the wet-weather creek. O’Neill, like every good American of Scots or Irish stock, was a brilliant capitalist and for a time, it seemed as though her wealth could not run out. But strange little cupid babies danced on her coverlet after her brother died and she saw monsters and myth creeping in her own just-beyond forests. Metaphors for the horrors of life? Possible. Real life hobgoblins of Irish folklore haunting the Victorian forest beyond the lamplight of her springtime porch? Also, possible. I sit on the porch steps in the half-light to feel the world of myth and monster just beyond reach.

There is beauty and life in the dark, and something honest in a world that remains — somehow — untamed. Kobolds were said to haunt the old French forests but something tells me there are here in the Ozarks as well. We’re told that talk like that is silly, that it is far better to embrace a fully materialist world in which there is nothing more than the consumer and the consumed. But the riotous tumult of springtime in the Ozarks reminds us, if we are indeed quiet, that there is still richness and value in the unseen, the things beyond, and a life lived in questioning awareness and weird introspection, especially now, when the springtime goblins are out.

— Joshua Heston, editor-in-chief, StateoftheOzarks

© StateoftheOzarks 2026

Art: Rose O’Neill, Sullen Son, courtesy Bonniebrook Museum, Walnut Shade, MO