Tesla passengers left screaming after car detects 'ghosts' in cemetery

Tesla's cars, like so many made nowadays, come absolutely loaded to the gills with cameras, helping them sense their environment at all times and avoid crashes.

However, these sensors can often take a split second to establish what they're seeing - whether it's a parked car, a pedestrian, a traffic cone or anything else lurking out there.

And a new TikTok trend is all finding a new way to confuse these sensors - with eerie results.

People have started driving their Teslas through cemeteries, with the in-car display showing a whole bunch of pedestrians apparently moving around them.

Needless to say, these aren't visible in real life, causing a ruckus in the car as passengers get more and more baffled by how many 'people' are appearing on the display.

One video has had more than 850K likes so far and is captioned: "Proof ghosts are real?"

It's creepy stuff, but anyone who's driven a Tesla is weighing in with a bit of a reality check - namely, that these flickers of pedestrians in the display are just the cameras establishing what they're looking at.

Some of these responses are particularly deadpan, of course, like one user who said: "It's literally just the car picking up the headstones."

So the cameras might see a tall tombstone, or even a relatively low one, and immediately classify it as a pedestrian in order to maximize safety protocols and warn you - before quickly working out that it in fact isn't a human, deleting it from your display.

It isn't a very dramatic explanation, but this dose of reality that hasn't deterred others from following suit and driving through cemeteries.

Another TikTok video also has hundreds of thousands of likes and shows that the same phantom effects can be viewed in full daylight, so it's not just a night-time phenomenon.

Here, again, the skeptics are out in the comments, with one comment attracting nearly seven thousand likes of its own having a very simple theory: "Looks like trees to me."

Sometimes, after all, the simplest explanation is the most likely one, however much we all enjoy getting on board and having a good old shriek about some ghosts.

Still, don't let this devalue the tech on a Tesla for you - you only have to check out a video of one driving itself around busy streets to be reminded how impressive it can be.