SHELBY COUNTY, Ind. — The Electric Bridge, which spans the Little Blue River near Werewolf Hollow, comes with a lot of conventional wisdom, like: Do not turn off your car while parked on the Electric Bridge because you won't get it started again.

And: Do not urinate on the Electric Bridge because the electricity will travel up the stream, enter your body and scorch your insides.

And: Do not engage the troll who lives under the Electric Bridge.

And, most cool: A light bulb on the Electric Bridge will illuminate on its own — without being screwed in, or plugged in, to any power source.

Alley ball:Sign up now for Linear Bocce tourney

Butcher's transplant:Incredible transaction at meat counter: 'Take my kidney'

Historical frankness:Indianapolis Motor Speedway co-founder was once known as this town's 'stupidest boy'

It's all very interesting, but conventional wisdom often turns out to be just lore, so photographer Michelle Pemberton and I traveled to the Electric Bridge in search of the truth.

We arrived at it, on a Tuesday night in September, to discover that a powerful automobile recently had peeled out on the bridge and left tire tracks over half of it. The act seemed an appropriate nod to the throwback nature of a curiosity like the Electric Bridge. Such oddities — the common ones are abandoned, haunted houses, screaming hills, dead man's curves, etc. — are to be found in many rural communities (Morgan County has Gravity Hill). They are teenagers' adventure zones.

How remote is the Electric Bridge? It's 12 miles northeast of Shelbyville. In the roughly 90 minutes Michelle and I were there, from about 9 p.m. to about 10:30 p.m., not a single car came by except for the ones carrying Chris Lux and Michael Brown, whom we'd invited. Lux is a science teacher at Shelbyville High School, and his name means "light" in Latin. Brown sells electrical supplies, including lighting. Both graduated from Shelbyville High School — Lux in 1992, Brown in 2004.

We needed a scientific mind to explain the electricity, which hummed and crackled all around us like a bug zapper and decibel-wise was competitive with the combined cacophony of crickets, frogs and cicadas, even in these dog days when cicadas are their loudest.

The humming and crackling at the Electric Bridge began in the late 1980s when power lines — massive, multiple power lines, rippling with 345,000 volts — were installed along the Little Blue's south bank to transport the juice between Shelbyville and Morristown.

The lines come within yards of the bridge. The bridge was built in 1973. It has metal railings. Metal conducts electricity. So it's a perfect storm.

Lux brought knowledge, and Brown brought light bulbs of various kinds, linear fluorescents, compact fluorescents, LEDs, even a black light. We carried them to the south end of the bridge, the end nearest the electrical wires, and held them high over our heads.

The bulbs lit up.

The tubes were the most fun because they became light sabers. You could feel the vibration in your hands if you gripped the tube loosely.

"It's static electricity," explained Lux, "which is different from AC or DC current."

"It's like when you rub a balloon on your shirt then it sticks to you," said Brown.

The electricity seemed to jar the environment, but Lux said it wasn't a hazard. He said he'd caught fish in the Little Blue River, smallmouth bass and redeye, and there was nothing mutant about them.

The bridge's metal railings are a godsend. Touch the light bulbs to the railings and the bulbs light up. Even better, sit on the railing and then touch another person, lightly, with your fingertip, and you and the other person both get an electrical shock. If that person touches a third person, the third person gets a shock, too. And a fourth. We tried this with four people and everyone got shocked, so perhaps there's no end to it.

If so then theoretically it would be possible to form a chain of human beings across, say, the state of Indiana, all shocking each other in the name of, like, world peace, or Sunday liquor sales, maybe both.

So the Electric Bridge, in that respect, really does work.

The conventional wisdom about the troll that supposedly lives under the bridge, however, is likely false. We saw no evidence. It's true you can't prove a negative, but that said, it seems reasonable to conclude trolls don't exist in real life but rather only online.

Lux fears many of today's teenagers exist mainly online. He said he no longer hears students at the high school talking about the Electric Bridge and that many of them have never even heard of it.

"It's really a shame," Lux said, "because we had so much fun out here. But we didn't have the internet, we didn't have Facebook. A lot of (today's teenagers) just bury their heads in their phones."

The graffiti on the bridge would seem to back up Lux's point. The most recent date scrawled on it is 2004.

We'd parked Michelle's Honda Element on the bridge. She'd shut off the ignition, like you're not supposed to do per conventional wisdom. It came time to leave. We packed up her photography gear, got into her car. She put the key into the ignition and turned the key. The engine roared to life.

There was one final bit of conventional wisdom, the awkward bit that might have resulted in scorched insides, that demanded testing, and then we drove home.

If you want to visit the Electric Bridge, do this: From Shelbyville, take Ind. 44 east. Turn left onto 650 East, then left on East Union Road. Then turn right onto 625 East and then turn right on East 400 North. Follow that to the Electric Bridge.

Call IndyStar reporter Will Higgins at (317) 444-6043. Follow him on Twitter: @WillRHiggins.