The Mystery of the Paulding Light
A Good Scary Story Is Much More Fun Than a Simple Explanation
Picture of the Paulding Light taken on November 3, 2007 as it floats slowly downward.
Attribution: Flivver 99 at en.wikipedia/Wikimedia Commons/CC-BY-3.0
A Personal Encounter
The Paulding Light, also known as the Dog Meadow Light, was a spooky local tale that still lives on in northern Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan where it is located. Stories that accompany the legend vary, but the particular one that we had been hearing at the time involved the death of a railroad brakeman whose spirit continued to roam the tracks at night, eternally waving his lantern in an effort to warn the oncoming train of an impending collision that would also take his life.
It was around 1970 and I was in high school when this story became a fun topic of conversation in my hometown in northern Wisconsin. I don’t remember if I first heard of it through school or on the local radio station, but my older neighbor had just acquired his driver’s license and a beater first car, and investigating the light would be the closest thing to an adventure that we would be likely to find in that neck of the woods. Without knowing the exact location we headed north out of Wisconsin toward Watersmeet, Michigan, a larger town south of Paulding, with the intent of arriving late in the day so that we could find it and set up before dark.
This was still a time when two teenagers could knock on a stranger’s door and ask for information and directions without the risk of getting blown away on the porch, and after a few helpful stops we were directed to a turnoff from highway 45 located about five miles north of the intersection with US Highway 2, to a spot down an old unused road about halfway between Watersmeet and the signpost town of Paulding, MI.
It must have been late when we arrived – this was during the long days of summer but I remember that it was so dark outside that once the headlights were turned off it was easy to get disoriented as we jumped out of the car and wandered down the road. There was no sky glow from nearby cities in this area, and it must have been overcast – at home I had a small telescope and knew the night sky a bit, but I don’t remember seeing a sky that would give us our bearings. We didn’t really know what we were looking for, but fortunately the light didn’t take long to make an appearance.
Forty-four years is not enough time to forget the feeling of my hair standing on end the first time I saw the intense point of wavering white light floating toward us along a line that we perceived, in the total blackness, to be the storied railroad tracks that paralleled the road. It shimmered in intensity and floated down the tracks toward us, fading in intensity as it appeared to approach. I really don’t remember anything that I felt beyond that initial appearance, but we did observe the light a few more times and at some point we noticed a faint red glow as well. I can’t recall what we were thinking when we left that night, but we would soon return.
I should mention that I was acquainted with and would frequently run into the longtime morning radio host for our local radio station (John Wadd at WOBT-AM). John had been following the story as a matter of personal interest for some time, and he would occasionally touch on the subject of the mystery light on his morning show. It was fun to hear him talk about it, and I seem to remember that a few callers weighed in on the subject as well, and this continued even after the “reveal”.
The Legend Busted
No matter how much you may want to see and experience something real and mysterious, there is usually that fun-spoiling rational explanation waiting to be found. This needed to be investigated further, and we returned a few days later with my trusty Sears refractor telescope. It was a toy really, but it worked. We set up on the same spot down the dark road and waited. The light soon made an appearance, but it was moderately difficult to find the slowly moving target in the telescope view (my finder scope was a metal tube, nothing else). When I finally did catch sight of the light through the scope itself, the whole legend fell apart.
Through the telescope I could clearly see twin car headlights descending from a distant highway. The geography was such that as the cars passed over a hill several miles away they would aim directly at our vantage point. This gave the light the unusual intensity, yet the distance was so great that the naked eye could not resolve two separate lights. As I continued to watch I saw tail lights ascending in the opposite lane, which explained the faint red glow that would occasionally be seen floating above the “tracks”.
Any other perceptions that I had experienced on that first encounter, particularly those of the light floating and approaching us above the tracks (which may or may not even exist), were simply notions that were planted in our heads from the story. Lights descending a low hill five miles away can be perceived as a hand-held lantern approaching a few hundred feet away if that is what your brain is expecting.
When word got out about what I had found, I was surprised to find that there were a few people that were skeptical that it was something as simple as car headlights from a distant highway or that simply believed that I never witnessed the genuine Paulding Light.
Anyway, I was satisfied, and I moved on to other things. I did continue to travel that way from time to time as I would visit favorite areas of the upper peninsula, and one time during daylight I stopped at the site and pulled out the telescope (I would often carry it with me to the Keweenau peninsula for fantastically dark night skies). It was not difficult to see a notch in the distant tree line that marked the highway location of the light source, and the heat-wavering images of cars ascending and descending the hill could be seen. To close the mystery, I stopped at the highway spot on the hill about five miles north the Paulding Light vantage point and looked back with the telescope. A similar clearing in the trees could be seen that marked the section of road where we first parked in the darkness.
When the Legends Won’t Die
As I mentioned earlier, there was some disappointment with and disbelief in the simple explanation. Some others that had been following the story had to see it for themselves, and I know of at least one local that continued to believe the superstition over the science.
I never gave the Paulding Light much thought until recently when I decided to see what else, if anything, had been written on the subject. Of course there is now a Wikipedia page dedicated to the Paulding Light, and I had to laugh when I saw that the legend continued to be investigated by others, including a team of students from Michigan Tech who in 2010 also thought to bring a telescope to the site. They apparently saw the same thing that I did in 1970, perhaps defined a little differently because of tree growth. The US Forest Service has also erected a sign on the road marking the spot.
However, we may have missed something. According to the Wikipedia page, a crack team of paranormal investigators from SyFy channel’s Fact or Faked: Paranormal Files program visited the site, and after performing a series of very scientific tests and recreations they decided that the mystery is unexplainable. They even performed an EVP session (electronic voice phenomenon), but apparently the distant headlights had nothing to say.
Happy Halloween!
