Paulding Light

On most clear nights, people park at the end of Robbins Pond Road in the Ottawa National Forest, a few miles north of Watersmeet, and look north up a long valley cut by a power line. Sooner or later a light appears in the distance – white, sometimes red, occasionally flickering or seeming to bob and grow brighter – then fades and returns. The first recorded sighting dates to 1966, and the light has drawn a steady stream of visitors ever since. A Forest Service sign at the viewing spot recounts the legend.

The best-known story says the light is the lantern of a railroad brakeman killed on a line that once ran through the valley, still swinging it to warn of an approaching train. Other versions make it the ghost of a murdered mail carrier, a grandparent searching for a lost child, or a “Native American” figure dancing on the power lines – a familiar trope of American ghost-light lore rather than any documented Ojibwe story. Like many American ghost-light legends, the story arrived to explain the light, not the other way round.

Investigators have looked hard at it. In 2010 a team from Michigan Technological University’s student chapter of SPIE, the optics society, led by doctoral candidate Jeremy Bos, watched the light through a telescope and saw the headlights of a moving car – and a reflective Adopt-a-Highway sign – on U.S. Highway 45, about four and a half miles to the north. While one member logged cars passing that stretch of road, others logged sightings at the viewing area; every sighting matched a passing vehicle. When a team member drove the highway with his hazard lights on, observers at Paulding saw flashing yellow lights. Temperature inversions and heat shimmer explain why the distant headlights seem to float and pulse; red lights are taillights. Earlier investigators had reached the same conclusion.

None of this has dented the light’s popularity. As Bos put it, some people will believe what they want to believe, and on summer and autumn evenings the viewing area can still fill with cars and families waiting for the show.

A single light, usually white but sometimes red, appears in the valley to the north, seems to approach, brighten, bob or split, then fades. Occasionally colours and flashing are reported.

Viewed from the end of Robbins Pond Road, off U.S. 45 north of Watersmeet, looking north along the power-line clearing. The light is seen after dark on most clear nights.

The Paulding Light is one of the Midwest’s best-known ghost lights, featured on television, in Michigan travel guides and in a Michigan Tech video documenting the 2010 experiment. The Forest Service sign and nightly crowds have made it a quirky Upper Peninsula tradition.