[Rockhounds] ‘Ghost’ that haunts abandoned South Carolina rail line may be caused by tiny earthquakes

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Legend has it that if you walk along Old Light Road in Summerville, South
Carolina, you might see an eerie glow hovering over an abandoned rail line
in the nearby woods. Old-timers will tell you it’s a spectral lantern held
by the apparition of a woman searching for her decapitated husband’s head.
Susan Hough has proposed a scientific explanation that is far more
plausible, however. A seismologist with the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS),
she believes the so-called Summerville Light could represent a rare natural
phenomenon: earthquake lights
<https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/srl/article-abstract/doi/10.1785/0220240442/651455/Haunted-Summerville-Ghostly-Lights-or-Earthquake?redirectedFrom=fulltext>
.

“I’m sure there are colleagues out there thinking, ‘She’s lost her mind,’”
Hough says. But in the January issue of Seismological Research Letters, she
recounts how her “flight of fancy” was a byproduct of more traditional
fieldwork.

https://www.science.org/content/article/ghost-haunts-abandoned-south-carolina-rail-line-may-be-caused-tiny-earthquakes