Some, not surprisingly, are supernatural. The principal one is that the light comes from a lantern carried by a the ghost of a railroad brakeman killed on the job, sending a warning to the living. This one is mentioned on the Forest Service sign, and is the motif of the T-shirt I bought at a store near Bond Falls.
If this is the case, though, you have to wonder what he's warning us about. As far as I can tell, no railroad operates in the area today. And if there was some real danger around, wouldn't he want to send the warning from a less obscure place, say from somewhere in town, or along a highway?
Such considerations have not deterred investigations of the site by a number amateur ghost hunters. One group, after a thorough inspection of the area, found several electromagnetic anomalies, but no clear evidence of a active spiritual vortex there. However, on a subsequent visit, members of the same group found "brief light orbs.. in the tree line along both the right and left sides of the observation point," including "an orb in the upper right looking somewhat like a face." Additionally, "a shadowy human figure was sighted on an investigator's left side at 1:21 am.," and two different photographs revealed "an ecto-plasmic mist." The group may have received a warning from the undead to back off: "When the camera was attempted to be turned on the primary battery (the one that carries out main camera functions) failed. Leaving the area briefly and going back resulted in the failure of the secondary battery (1:32-1:40 am).... Upon meeting up with fellow investigators back on the north side we learned that the two that had stayed on the north-side in the same location of the sighting, had experienced the same failure to their photo camera, as well as a 1/2 drop in battery in the video camera."
I remembered that incident when I uploaded the photo of the shirt. It is actually faded green in color with a blue and white logo. Yet the photo of it came out black and white...spoooooky!
Camera problems aside, I'm not one to put much stock in ghost stories. So far, though, the naturalistic explanations offered for the light don't amount to much more than speculation. Some say it's caused by radioactive gases seeping from the ground; others have claimed it is due to some refraction of light off of Lake Superior, or from some emission from the powerline at the viewing site. As of yet, no one has confirmed these theories. While I found that researchers from a couple of nearby universities had visited the site, I was unable to find any results of their investigations. If they had cracked the riddle of the light, you'd think the news would have spread.
One explanation I find plausible, even likely, is that the lights come from passing cars on the nearby highway . Their color is that of auto headlights and taillights (although, as noted in part one, some have observed them in shades of blue and green). US 45 parallels the road to the viewing point. Locals claim that the light was seen long before cars were in existence, but the first recorded sighting of the lights was in 1966.
Perhaps auto lights become visible at some point where the road reaches an elevated open spot--the country around there is quite hilly. Another ghost hunter claims to have proven just that during a 1986 trip to Paulding, though for me, his study actually casts doubt on the headlight hypothesis. He states that he measured the duration of the light's appearances against the time it would take cars travelling 55 MPH to pass a certain exposed point along the highway, as seen from a site other that the light-viewing area. They correlated almost exactly. While I have no doubt he saw the lights of passing cars, I'm not sure he saw the same light that appears over the designated viewing area. He writes that the average time of the light's appearance--and the time during which he saw the headlights---was 90.2 seconds. The light is visible for much longer than that. Overall, I get the sense that the study arrived at a particular result because it was the one the researcher wanted to find. Maybe it's time to replicate the study, since it's possible that the opening along the road has increased in size over the last twenty years. Even if it has, however (and it would have to have increased enormously), I do have a lingering doubt about the headlight theory. (To Be Continued)
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