The Paulding Light

Every night, in a gap cut through the forest for a power line near Watersmeet, a light appears down the corridor. It brightens, dims, sometimes splits or changes colour, and it has been drawing people to this pull-off since the 1960s. The old story is a brakeman killed on a vanished rail line, still swinging his lantern. In 2010 a Michigan Tech student group parked a telescope at the overlook and resolved the light into headlights and tail lights on US-45, six miles down the corridor, bent and held together by a temperature inversion over the valley. Knowing that does not spoil it: it is a reliable, genuinely strange thing you can drive to and watch tonight, and plenty of locals still argue the point.