Late at night in Stockholm’s subway system, long after the evening crowds thin and the tunnels settle into their metallic hush, some commuters swear they have heard the distant rumble of a train that should not be there. Others claim they have seen it: a pale, silver-lacquered carriage gliding into dim stations without passengers, slowing but never fully stopping, its interior lights flickering like a dying heartbeat. The train is known as Silverpilen, the Silver Arrow, a real but short-lived prototype that once existed in the 1960s and 1970s. But legend says it still moves through the underground long after it was retired, a ghost train that appears when the stations are at their emptiest.
Silverpilen was a unique vehicle in Stockholm’s metro, built as an unpainted aluminum prototype at a time when most trains were coated in bright blue and green. It lacked the advertisements and interior warmth of standard carriages. Its bare metal walls echoed, its fluorescent lights buzzed sharply, and its sparse seating gave the car a stark, almost unfinished feel. During its years in service, passengers often described it as unsettling — a train that felt somehow colder than the others, both literally and figuratively. When it passed through stations, its rattling brightness and reflective skin made it stand out sharply against the usual fleet.
By the early 1990s, Silverpilen had been decommissioned, stripped of parts, and removed from Stockholm’s official system. Yet soon after, reports began to spread of a silver train appearing long after it should have been scrapped. Witnesses described the same details: a three-car formation, bright metal body, unusually empty interior, and a driver who never acknowledged waiting passengers. Some said the train slowed as if inviting boarding, then slipped away before anyone could approach. Others insisted they boarded accidentally, only to find the interior deserted, the train skipping normal stations, and time behaving strangely, journeys that felt far longer or shorter than they should have been.
The most persistent version of the legend involves Kymlinge station, an unfinished and abandoned stop on the blue line that was never opened to the public. Urban explorers and transit employees alike have long shared stories about strange activity there late at night. According to the lore, Silverpilen sometimes drifts into Kymlinge’s darkened platform, its lights flickering through the dust. Some say the train is drawn to the station because it exists in a kind of limbo, constructed but unused, functional but lifeless. The saying goes, “Only the dead get off at Kymlinge.” In the legend, those who accidentally board Silverpilen may find themselves carried there, disoriented, before the train releases them back into the waking metro.
Transit workers have tried to explain the sightings through more grounded means: misidentified maintenance trains, reflections in curved tunnel walls, or older models running late-night routes that catch tired commuters off guard. But these explanations do not account for the consistency of the descriptions, nor for the fact that many witnesses had never heard of Silverpilen before encountering it. A few employees admitted that the prototype had a distinct silhouette, one that could startle anyone expecting a traditional train, but they also acknowledged that, officially, no such vehicle has rolled along Stockholm’s tracks in decades.
Some paranormal researchers point out that underground environments lend themselves naturally to haunting legends. The echoing acoustics, pressure changes, flickering lights, and the isolation of late-night travel all create conditions ripe for the imagination. Others note that the Silverpilen was a physical object with a documented history, making it more believable as a ghost than entirely fictional apparitions. A train that was once real, stripped from service, and then glimpsed again in motion offers a potent blend of nostalgia and unease. It is easier to believe in the ghost of something concrete.
Still, a handful of accounts remain difficult to dismiss, including reports from station security cameras that captured unexplained flashes of light or shadows passing along the tracks when no train was scheduled. Even in the era of digital oversight, Silverpilen persists in urban memory. Ask longtime Stockholm residents, and many will recount a story, a friend who saw it, a coworker who felt a rush of cold air as it supposedly passed, or a relative who swore they boarded it by mistake and could not explain how they ended up several stations away.
Today, the ghost of Silverpilen remains one of Sweden’s most enduring urban legends, a blend of history, infrastructure, and shared imagination. It speaks to the strange loneliness of late-night cities, the way transit systems create their own myths, and the enduring human instinct to fill the dark spaces of the underground with stories. Whether the Silver Arrow still runs through Stockholm’s tunnels or simply lives in collective memory, its legend endures every time a commuter waits on a quiet platform and hears a distant metallic echo rushing toward the present from a past that should be long gone.
Sources & Further Reading:
– Storstockholms Lokaltrafik (SL) historical notes on prototype train development.
– Swedish urban legend archives documenting Silverpilen sightings (1980s–2000s).
– Stockholm newspaper accounts referencing late-night train anomalies.
– Interviews with retired metro employees collected in regional oral history projects.
– Scandinavian folklore studies on haunted transportation and “liminal transit spaces.”
(One of many stories shared by Headcount Coffee — where mystery, history, and late-night reading meet.)
