Tyrone Ghost Hunters: The Legends of the Janesville Pike
It’s spooky season! Officially time to talk about ghost stories and other paranormal activity in our beloved town.
The small town of Tyrone has a lot of ghost stories and accounts of the supernatural. However, the biggest incidents all seem to occur on Janesville Pike by Reservoir Park.
Arguably the most talked-about ghost story in Tyrone is the legend of “Sylvia,” the woman in the white dress that haunts the Janesville Pike.
Ask around and you will hear lots of stories about how the legend of Sylvia came to be.
The most common story of her origin is that she and her newlywed husband were driving up the Pike for their honeymoon, hit a sharp turn too fast, and wrecked.
Many say that when the husband made it out of the crash alive, his wife was on the ground, lifeless, and beheaded in the horrible crash. The husband went to find help but when he finally did and got back to the car, his wife’s body…or head… was nowhere to be found.
Other versions of the legend have both of the newlyweds being killed in the fiery crash.
However it happened, there are still sightings of Sylvia to this day on the Janesville Pike and legend has it there are even rituals to summon her.
One common ritual is to stand at the bottom of Janesville Pike and light a candle. Then drive to the top and yell “Sylvia” three times. When you drive back down you’ll see her on the way into town.
Another version of the Sylvia legend is to drive about nine miles up the Janesville Pike at night. You will first see a few memorials to others killed on the Pike. Just past those memorials, blink your lights on and off eight times to summon Sylvia to the side of the road.
Janesville Pike was also the site of a well-known UFO incident. On October 23, 1984, a man reported seeing an oddly shaped aircraft hovering over Janesville Pike flashing weird lights. He called the police reporting it as a UFO. When other townspeople heard of this a lot of them drove up Janesville pike to see it for themselves.
Many of the people that drove up to see it reported the same exact things the man did when it was first reported. There were even reports that the UFO was three football fields long. Even the chief of police at the time admitted he saw something that he couldn’t identify.
Originally the police were very skeptical about this being a UFO. The most prominent feature of this so-called UFO was the weird lights being emitted from it.
The chief of police speculated the lights may have been coming from the radio tower, which would have supported his original claim that it wasn’t a UFO. However, when he got to the radio tower, it was very obvious that the lights of the radio tower looked far different from those of the aircraft.
Almost every single person that went to Janesville Pike to see the UFO and saw the aircraft agreed that it was a UFO. The people who supported the UFO theory even passed lie detector tests.
So if you wanna say ‘what’s up’ to Sylvia or hang out with aliens, you know where to go.
Tom • Oct 30, 2021 at 7:54 pm
Sylvia has been a legend for a long time and has been seen on the Tipton side. The lights turned out to be the Northern Lights and they even had the fire department chasing them.