St. Louis, Saskatchewan

Two grade 12 students tested the obvious explanation and wrote up the result. Shannon Dunn and Alysha Lederhouse, at Churchill High School in La Ronge, had seen the light on a road trip with friends; Dunn believed in the paranormal and Lederhouse did not. "I argued that it's probably car headlights," Lederhouse told Dave Yanko. "But everyone else was like: 'Well, what if it's not? What if it's a ghost train?'" Through the autumn of 2001 and the winter of 2002 they made several trips south with a 1:50 000-scale map, a compass and a global positioning system borrowed from Lederhouse's father, who worked in mineral exploration. From the old track bed they fixed their own position, drew a straight line through the point where the light appeared to originate, and marked every road on or near that line. Lederhouse's father then drove to each one, aimed his headlights back at them and flashed on command by cell phone. Yanko set down the result: "Except for the odd coincidence, however, there was no match between flashing headlights and the appearance of the ghost train." Every road they had picked was lower than the track bed. The nearest road at a comparable elevation was a hilltop section of Highway 2, 8.5 kilometres away, which they had dismissed for being impossibly distant. "We got (dad) to stay there for about 20 minutes, just flashing his lights off and on," Lederhouse said. "He'd tell me when he turned on his lights and it was exactly, like, there was no question that that was where the light was coming from." When he turned the car around on the gravel at the crest of the hill, the small red lantern of the headless trainman appeared as well. Their physics teacher offered diffraction as the mechanism: light passing a narrow gap, "perhaps some distant trees on either side of the old track bed", spreads and swells, so that "headlights normally too tiny to be noticed could become apparent". Lederhouse's own reaction was "we were shocked", and Dunn told Yanko that the findings "take a lot of the fun out of it". Three sources that all spoke to the girls report three different prizes. Yanko wrote that the project "earned them one of three gold medals awarded at the science fair". Riemer wrote in 2014 that the two teens "received first place in their science fair". Peters wrote in 2022 that the judges "awarded the girls third place for their project". Attempts to repeat the experiment have failed so far: Mayor Les Rancourt told Riemer that "others have tried to duplicate their experiment but without the same results", and Riemer set down the standing local objection: "Locals doubt the girls' theory because the lights were seen long before the advent of cars in the district." That objection can be dated against the railway itself. There was no track bed north of St. Louis to walk along until the last spike of 17 May 1917, and Canada Post's own version of the legend places the death "in the 1920s". The road the students blamed belongs to the same years: the 1928 bridge deck "expedited the completion of the highway from St. Louis to Prince Albert over the next two years". Rails and motor traffic reached this stretch of the South Saskatchewan within about a dozen years of each other, so a sighting older than the automobile would also be older than the line the light is said to run along. The oldest local memory on record cuts the other way. Don MacPhedran, aged 88 and living in Prince Albert, gave Darren Bernhardt of Saskatoon's StarPhoenix the vehicle explanation on 27 October 2001, describing lights that "go out of sight wherever there's a little dip, and then they reappear again and then turn and go slightly northeast". Dunn and Lederhouse also had predecessors: in 1999 Dustin Armstrong and Ben McIvor of Carlton Comprehensive High School in Prince Albert videotaped the light for a school project and declared it paranormal after their camera failed to record what their eyes had seen. None of the sources read for this file gives the dead man a surname, a date, an inquest or an employer's file, and the "conductor", "brakeman" and "engineer" of the various tellings are three different jobs. When Joel Gaudet took a film crew to the site in 2024 for the series Paranormal Prairies, that was still the open question: "Did someone really die out there and who is it", he said, adding "There are no legitimate answers out there for it and we were like let's try and see what we can do." Three documents that would settle several of these points have not been read here: the StarPhoenix of 27 October 2001, Jill Strelieff's interview with Lederhouse in the Leader-Post, and Jo-Anne Christensen's Ghost Stories of Saskatchewan (Hounslow Press, 1995), which the Internet Archive catalogues under identifier ghoststoriesofsa0000chri but serves only on loan; a full-text search of it returned "No hOCR or Abbyy file present". A Google Books query the same day returned quota error 429, so the printed record before 1995 remains unmeasured. A commercial layer has run alongside the legend throughout. Canada Post sold the headless conductor to stamp collectors in 2014; a diner in the village was named after the light and shirts were printed, and by 2014 both had closed; the 2024 film series was sponsored by a distillery that had taken the name Phantom Light.