Spark - Connection Refused for local file in Scala, works for Pyspark

Question

I am trying to read a file from my local drive. When I use spark-shell I get:

Caused by: java.io.IOException: Failed to connect to /192.168.86.248:63393
  at org.apache.spark.network.client.TransportClientFactory.createClient(TransportClientFactory.java:253)
  at org.apache.spark.network.client.TransportClientFactory.createClient(TransportClientFactory.java:195)
  at org.apache.spark.rpc.netty.NettyRpcEnv.downloadClient(NettyRpcEnv.scala:392)
  at org.apache.spark.rpc.netty.NettyRpcEnv.$anonfun$openChannel$4(NettyRpcEnv.scala:360)
  at scala.runtime.java8.JFunction0$mcV$sp.apply(JFunction0$mcV$sp.java:23)
  at org.apache.spark.util.Utils$.tryWithSafeFinallyAndFailureCallbacks(Utils.scala:1411)
  at org.apache.spark.rpc.netty.NettyRpcEnv.openChannel(NettyRpcEnv.scala:359)
  at org.apache.spark.repl.ExecutorClassLoader.getClassFileInputStreamFromSparkRPC(ExecutorClassLoader.scala:135)
  at org.apache.spark.repl.ExecutorClassLoader.$anonfun$fetchFn$1(ExecutorClassLoader.scala:66)
  at org.apache.spark.repl.ExecutorClassLoader.findClassLocally(ExecutorClassLoader.scala:176)
  at org.apache.spark.repl.ExecutorClassLoader.findClass(ExecutorClassLoader.scala:113)
  ... 103 more
Caused by: io.netty.channel.AbstractChannel$AnnotatedConnectException: Connection refused: /192.168.86.248:63393
Caused by: java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused

What could be causing this?

My file read command:

val sysIdOwnersDF= spark.read.json("file:///Users/dev/spark-playground/owner-map.json")

I tried using pyspark to see if I could narrow down a configuration issue, however, using pyspark, I am successful:

>>> df = spark.read.json("file:///Users/dev/spark-playground/owner-map.json")
>>> df.show()                                                                   
+--------------------+
|    system-id-owners|
+--------------------+
|[a, aaa123, f, cc...|
|[a, aaa124, f, cc...|
+--------------------+