The mystery behind the ghost train that haunted Stockholm
It’s a mystery that’s plagued the city of Stockholm for decades. Fifty years ago, the Silverpilen (Silver Arrow) train first took to the tracks and it has terrified locals ever since.
The eight-car, silver aluminium train had been built as a test unit in the 1960s. It was different to all other trains. Never painted, it remained silver – a sore thumb among the hundreds of green metro carriages. It had an unusual whirring sound and was devoid of the usual advertisements and graffiti that adorned the walls of other trains.
It was the Silverpilen’s unusualness that marked it as “differnet”, capturing the imaginations of Stockholm’s locals. According to urban legends, anyone who stepped on board was lucky to step off again. Passengers claimed to have been lost in time and arrived at their stop months later. Others say the train only stops at an abandoned station called Kymlinge, leading to the popular local saying: “Bara de doda stiger av I Kymlinge” (only the dead get off at Kymlinge).
Swedish ethnologist and urban legend scholar, Bengt af Klintberg, wrote about the train in his 1986 book, Råttan I pizzan (The Rat in the Pizza): “It is only seen after midnight. It stops only once every year. The passengers in the train seem to be living dead, with expressionless, vacant looks.
“A very common detail is that a person who just wanted to travel to the next station remained seated for one week in the Silverpilen. Many girls dared not enter trains which they believed could be Silverpilen.”
The train was occasionally used until 1996 where the cars were split. But to this day, locals remain haunted by the legends of the Silverpilen.