The St Louis ghost train

A famous apparition solved by two students in a 2001 experiment

For decades people drove out to an abandoned rail grade near St Louis, Saskatchewan, to watch a white light come up the line and swing, with a smaller red light behind it, exactly as a brakeman’s lantern would. It is one of the most reliably reproducible apparitions anywhere, which is precisely what let two high-school students dismantle it in 2001: they showed with a controlled experiment that the lights were vehicle headlights on a distant highway, bent and split by the terrain. The lights still appear. Kept here because a legend that was actually solved, by teenagers, is a better story than one that was not.