SLIders & the Streetlight Phenomenon
Do streetlights suddenly go out when you pass beneath them? Do watches or credit cards stop working in your possession? Perhaps you are a SLIder.
Bad Karma, Or Just Bad Lightbulbs?
The Mystery Of Blinking Street Lights
By Linton Weeks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, November 17, 2002; Page F01
You're knocking around your neighborhood at night or driving along a road and suddenly a street light turns off for no apparent reason. Everything goes blackheart dark. You get that strange abrupt rush, that corner-of-the-cave coldness at the nape of the neck.
Are you doing something to that light or is it doing something to you?
After all, we dealt with this whole nightfall problem decades ago. Great inventors wrestled electricity to ground. Or fried trying. We've made an uneasy pact with power -- if it'll give us lights to demystify the night, we'll think of more and more ways to use it.
So when a roadside bulb douses itself as you walk by or an off-ramp floodlight fizzles out, something weird's going on.
There is a name for this phenomenon: Street Light Interference Data Exchange.
Some folks say it happens all the time to them. Neal Duncan, 45, is an architect who lives in Adams Morgan and takes the same leisurely stroll pretty much every night, including a stretch along 19th Street NW between R and Q streets.
"It's been happening lately," Duncan says. "It's always the same couple of lights."
He'll walk toward one and [cue: "Twilight Zone" theme] the light quivers and pops out. He's been noticing his special effect on streetlights since he was a student at Virginia Tech.
It works this way, tough-minded journalistic research has shown: Driving along Montrose Road, east of I-270, you pass a row of 10 streetlights on wooden poles on the south side of the street between Old Bridge Road and Tildenwood Drive. One of the lights, usually the light closest to the Old Farm Swimming Club, begins to dance. It quavers, then is reduced to an orange night-lighty glow. Sometimes it's another light. Sometimes the light goes completely off.
The other night, after observing the phenomenon, this researcher went around the block. Another of the 10 lights twinkled and darkened. Six go-arounds, and each time one of the lights dimmed to darkness. Lights that had earlier turned themselves off blinked back on.
Robert Dobkin, a spokesman for Pepco, just isn't buying it. "That's a new one," he says. "I think people are imagining things."
He is assured that the on and off switchings are not imaginary.
He asks if the lights were on metal or wooden poles.
"Wooden."
"Those are ours," he says. They are either mercury or sodium vapor lights.
"A lot of these lamp fixtures have photocells," Dobkin says, letting out his breath in a tire-gauge rush.
"That's more common during dusk and dawn," he says. "The sun comes up, a light goes off, then a cloud passes, it's suddenly darker, the light goes on."
This was in the dead of night, he's told. When good children are supposed to be asleep and streetlights are supposed to shine.
"These bulbs age," says Dobkin. "They will flicker off and eventually flicker back on." The filament in a sodium vapor light -- the one with the orange glow -- tends to separate over time and eventually the light goes out, he says. As the bulb cools, the filament "reorganizes" and the light winks back on.
"It's called 'cycling,' " Dobkin says.
What does that mean? he is asked.
"It means the bulb needs to be replaced," he says.
Pepco is responsible for about 70,000 such streetlights in the Maryland burbs. Eventually they will get around to replacing the duds.
Or, Dobkin says, there might be a "loose connection."
No. This is far more serious, so serious that there's an Internet nexus of people who not only share this experience, but also think they're involved in it at some undefined level.
Has Dobkin ever heard of Sliders, people who believe they have influence over the luminosity of streetlights?
"Up until now," he says, "the only sliders I've ever heard of were sliders in baseball and Mudslides." He's referring to a candy-like drink that includes coffee liqueur, Irish cream and vodka.
Dobkin believes that people who believe they influence the behavior of streetlights "may have been imbibing a few too many Mudslides."
A few years ago, a Californian Slider wrote to Cecil Adams, who answers strange questions in his syndicated Straight Dope column.
"On an average night, walking through a parking lot," the Californian explained, "at least one or two street lights will go out when I approach, then regain their luminous state after I have passed. Could there be some sort of electrochemical imbalance in my body that causes this to happen? Am I surrounded by some strange magnetic field? This happens only with street lights, not with lights in my home or public buildings."
Adams replied, agreeing with Dobkin's explanation: "When the sodium vapor bulbs commonly used in streetlights start to go bad, they 'cycle' -- go on and off repeatedly. Cecil is having a hard time getting the Straight Dope Science Advisory Board to agree on what happens, but apparently the bulb overheats, goes out, cools down, then relights. If you're walking past when this happens and you're the neurotic type, you think it's your fault. This surely accounts for most of the reports we have gotten about this over the years."
But there are aspects of all this that cannot be explained away by Adams or Dobkin. If the bulbs are not good, why do the same lights seem to respond to the same people time after time? Why don't the lights just burn out?
Is it possible that certain folks make streetlights go out the way that some people cannot wear watches or use tape recorders or computer touch screens? Some people inexplicably influence the activity of other objects, such as lamps, TVs, radios, children's toys. Others are too supercharged with static electricity to carry around credit cards.
Debbie Wolf, a London barmaid, is said to be a Slider of the first water. Wolf told CNN in a 1998 interview that she can put out a light simply by walking by. "When it happens is when I'm stressed about something. Not really maniacally stressed, just when I'm really mulching about something," she said, "really chewing something over in my head, and then it happens."
Wolf says she has so much inner energy, she can make CD players change tracks.
"A reasonable speculation for the effect, if it is a real one, might have something to do with the electronic impulses of the brain," according to Stephen Wagner, who writes about paranormal activity at About.com. "All of our thoughts and movements are the result of electrical impulses that the brain generates. At present it is known that these measurable impulses only have an effect within an individual's body, but is it possible that they could have an effect outside the body -- a kind of remote control?"
Dobkin says: "Electricity is not a phenomenon about which everything is understood." That doesn't stop the paranormalists from trying.
Hilary Evans, an investigator with the Great Britain-based Association for the Scientific Study of Anomalous Phenomena who coined the term Slider, told CNN, "It's quite obvious from the letters I get that these people are perfectly healthy, normal people. It's just that they have some kind of ability . . . just a gift they've got. It may not be a gift they would like to have."
After years of thought, Neal Duncan has decided that he might not even have a gift, he might just be observant. "At one time I believed there was something in the electrical properties of the light," he says. "I now believe it's a coincidence."
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It's 'lights out' when Debbie the slider's around
'Perfectly healthy, normal people'
April 21, 1998
Web posted at: 10:32 p.m. EDT (0232 GMT)
BRIGHTON, England (CNN) -- A British barmaid has been blowing minds and, quite often light bulbs, with her ability to play havoc with electricity.
Debbie Wolf's presence causes electric bulbs to blow, lights to turn off and on and volumes on CD players to increase.
"I can give out electricity to people, I can blow light bulbs, change volumes," she says. "Really, I can just affect anything that is around me that's electrical."
So far her boss believes she's worth keeping on the payroll because her presence has boosted trade, even though he has had to replace three CD players and numerous light bulbs.
Not only CD players and lights, but also televisions and even the energy levels of other people can be affected if Wolf is in the room.
"When it happens is when I'm stressed about something," she says. "Not really manically stressed, just when I'm really mulching something over, really chewing something over in my head, and then it happens.
"Or, if I'm, you know, sexually aroused. Or just if I'm really, really excited about something."
'Perfectly healthy, normal people'
Hilary Evans, who claims to be the first and only person to study the phenomenon, calls Wolf a "slider," which is short for the whimsical-sounding Street Lamp Interference Data Exchange.
Wolf wrote to Evans when she saw him speaking about the subject on television.
"It's quite obvious from the letters I get that these people are perfectly healthy, normal people," Evans says. "It's just that they have some kind of ability. It's like the ability that Mozart had to compose music. You know, just a gift they've got. It may not be a gift they would like to have ....
"It's something that isn't going to hurt people. It's not going to do you any harm. It's not going to do anybody else any harm. You may even find that it's actually entertaining, and that you can use it for some positive purpose."
Debbie thinks she probably affects more electrical appliances than do other sliders, and that is certainly true in the flat she shares with a woman named Helen.
Helen, is a professional chef, and most of the time sees to it that Debbie stays out of the kitchen. Not only do they not have a refrigerator, because they can't afford to keep replacing it, but the stove is also malfunctioning.
Debbie Wolf causes havoc with electrical supplies:
QuickTime movie
© 1998 Cable News Network, Inc.
Streetlights are blinking off all over the place. But what's the cause? Some weird psychic phenomenon? Or is there a simpler explanation for this ubiquitous occurrence?
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