And then ... lights begin to move, flicker and dance across the night sky. No need to panic; they're just the Brown Mountain Lights. While some say there's magic in them thar hills, others ask, "Are these lights mountain magic or what?"
Could they be, as often speculated, the reflection of a passing locomotive, fox-fire (an eerie, phosphorescent light related to fungus and decaying wood, insects and animals), or burning marsh grasses? Are they moon dogs (moonlight shining on haze), St. Elmo's Fire (electrical discharges from sharp objects during a thunder storm) or Andes Light (luminous electrical discharges observed over the crests of the Chilean Andes)? Are they beings from outer space? Are they the result of too much moonshine, bottled or otherwise?
Or are they, as told and re-told in legends and lore, Cherokee maidens with lanterns searching the forests for their fallen lovers and husbands? The souls of the long-suffering Belinda and her child, allegedly murdered by her husband Jim who was in love with Susie? The light created when a mountain gal carries a torch for her loved one? The spirit of a loyal servant in search of his master? Or are they a returning Revolutionary War hero searching for his family?
Another legend tells the tale of a bitter battle in the 1200s between the Cherokee and Catawba Indians. The death toll was quite high and the lights, people surmise, are the wives and sweethearts, with lanterns in hand, searching the forest for their dead warriors.
Women, historically, have carried torches for men and it seems the women of Brown Mountain were no exception. That is, if mountain lore can be believed.
Here's one tale: When a certain mountain guy courted his favorite mountain gal each night, he had to cross through a dangerous patch of forest. To aid in his passage, the gal lit a torch so he would safely find his way. On the eve of their wedding, she lit a torch as she did every night, yet he never arrived. Is she still out there at sunset hoping he'll find his way?
And the lure of mountain lore leads to other versions of the lights. Consider this one: A family is newly settled from Virginia to the foot of Brown Mountain. The husband and father soon leaves his wife, three children and homestead to fight in the Revolutionary War. When he returns, he finds his home a charred ruin with no traces of his family. Sick with grief, hunger, and exhaustion, the lights, some say, is this man still searching for the family he lost.
Another account details a hunter who traveled to Brown Mountain with his trusted servant. While the hunter went off in search of game, the servant stayed behind to set up camp. When the master didn’t return, the beloved servant, lantern in hand, went off in search of him. And to this day, people still see the light of his lantern as he searches, searches, searches for his long-lost master.
Present-day lore says seeing the lights while wooing your sweetheart will bring luck to love. The Burke County Chamber of Commerce at Morganton, North Carolina has published the following: "It's a classic 'courtin' custom' of the Blue Ridge Country to drive your girl friend out to see the Brown Mountain Lights, or to persuade your suitor to take you out to see them if you're a woman in love. If you see the lights, the legend implies, you'll be lucky in love. If not, your courtship will come to nothing."
Part of his duties includes the patrol of the district, keeping an eye out for anything unusual. Smith says he's heard tales about the lights, has seen thousands of people watching for the lights, and has talked to others who have seen the lights. And while he says he's never looked for the lights and never really believed in them, he's seen them.
"I saw them twice. The first time was at least 15 years ago when a fellow officer and I were using binoculars to check on some forest visitors. I was gazing across the bottom up toward Table Rock and saw a different light - not so unusual - but different in the sense that it wasn't supposed to be there.
"When I turned to ask the other officer if he had seen it, he asked at the same time, 'Did you see that light?' This all took place in a matter of seconds. So I said, 'yeah, it's probably just an airplane or something going across.' We watched for about two minutes while it moved around, then it was gone. It was a cloudy night and the light was like nothing I had seen before, doing a lot of dancing like people say. It was there just a short time. It wasn't a bright light and we wouldn't have seen it without binoculars," Smith explains.
"We were at Wiseman's View looking straight toward Table Rock. It was kind of south of Table Rock in an area we call the Chimneys when we first saw it. At first I thought it was just someone walking a trail carrying a flashlight or lantern. But I know the area well, having been there on foot so many times. I know where the trails are and there was no way anyone could have covered the distance those lights covered in that short amount of time.
"The second time, three to five years later, was a crystal-clear fall night when quite a few other people were watching. I was there in my law enforcement capacity watching and listening, and I saw a similar-type light. It was different than the first time but it was down underneath what we call Little Table Rock, lower in the tree line. It moved around a little, then it was gone. There's no doubt in my mind that it wasn't a lantern, wasn't a flashlight and wasn't a star. All I can tell you is that it was a light. I've probably been at this location at Wiseman's View thousands of times and I've seen lanterns and flashlights, and I've seen lights from cities in the distance. The lights I saw were the Brown Mountain Lights."
Ask Smith if what he saw might be Belinda and this forest professional laughs heartily and shakes his head.
Journalist Dan Smith (no relation to C.W.) grew up near Asheville surrounded by mountains and tales of the lights. His mother, who lived in the Squirrel Creek and Cranberry communities, often spoke of the mysteries of Brown Mountain, and he also liked the tune "Legend of the Brown Mountain Light," made popular in the early 1960s by country music singer Tommy Faile. But Smith says, the lights weren't all that mysterious.
"People I knew didn't consider the lights to be all that unusual. Anybody can see them and if you spend time looking for them, you will see them. When I was in high school, it was just something we did (there wasn't a lot to do at that time): get a group of guys together and drink a Cobb's Creek beer or one of those Falstaff beers out of the tall horse container it came in. Maybe that helped influence what we saw."
And former Banner Elk resident Ben Calloway says, "It was fairly eerie, watching the lights go up. They were kind of hazy, the size of a small streetlight at 50-100 yards, and it was fun to see them as a kid. Everyone knew about the lights. It was just part of growing up in the area."
Mrs. Viola Carter, now of Kingsport, Tennessee, grew up in Montezuma, North Carolina. She recounts her favorite Brown Mountain Lights story. "I married a man from Tennessee who had never heard of the lights, and I was very anxious for him to see them. Almost every time we would visit my parents, they and I would take him to see them. Night after night we would sit in the car watching for them. But not even a tiny flicker were we able to see. My husband did not think they existed, and he constantly teased me about my vivid imagination.
"Then, one Christmas on a bitterly cold night, with the clearest sky I ever saw, we went again. And to the utter amazement of all of us, we saw the most spectacular display of lights that I have ever seen. The entire top of Brown Mountain, from one end to the other, looked exactly like a big city with every light glowing brightly. In addition to normal colored lights, scattered among them were red, green, and yellow lights. Every minute or two, lights here and there would go up one or two hundred feet in the air and explode into a brilliant fireworks display. My husband was astonished and he never again teased me about my imagination."
Perhaps the first study occurred in 1913. Conducted by government scientist D.B. Sterret for the U.S. Geological Survey, his findings concluded that the lights were nothing more than reflections from passing locomotives, an observation that disappointed and even enraged some locals who protested that lights were seen even when the locomotives weren't running. A 1921 U.S. Weather Bureau study suggested that the lights were a phenom similar to the Andes Lights (silent electrical discharges between mountain tops and clouds). But that theory, like others including St. Elmo's Fire, foxfire, methane gas and will-o-wisps, continues to be debated.
In May, 1978, a multi-disciplinary team of researchers from ORION, the Oak Ridge Isochronous Observation Network of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, spent eight days in the shadow of Brown Mountain. They were rewarded with sightings on four separate evenings. ORION was founded in 1974 by a group of scientists primarily to perform correlated, instrumented observation of atmospheric phenomena. (Isochronous, by the way, relates to equal time, correlated or simultaneous.)
ORION’s conclusions, explains Dr. David E. Fields, were similar to the ones offered by the U.S. Geological studies of the early 1900s.
"We found there were lots of fairly easily explained things," says Fields. "For instance, any number of lights could be lights and reflections of lights from cities, automobiles, flashlights and lanterns, and of course now we see lights from airplanes.
"I think the refraction theory is most interesting. In cooler air, light moves more slowly than through warm air. Because of this, if a beam of light goes from warmer to cooler air, and it's moving in any direction other than perpendicular to the interface between the different temperatures, the light gets bent just like in a lens. So you'll have a lens effect.
"We also saw some interesting electrical effects when lightning storms were moving in. We saw a lightning strike and subsequent to it, we saw a tree glow, probably St. Elmo's Fire, an electrostatic discharge from the tree. That was pretty interesting. We also had some success with experiments to see if mineral lights can be produced. Mineral lights are the electrical discharges from stressed crystals: piezoelectricity (from the Greek word meaning "to press").
An example would be applying pressure to quartz crystals in the granite which is plentiful in the area. When the quartz is stressed, a voltage develops across the crystal. We speculated that this might give rise to a luminous phenomenon—something miners know about even though other people often don't," Fields explains.
Although scientific studies may not be nearly as much fun as unrequited love, murder, war and revenge, anyone who watches for the Brown Mountain Lights long enough will be rewarded. People see different lights, in all kinds of weather, in any season. Sometimes they last only a few seconds; other times they may last half an hour. Some say the lights cast a red glow, others say it's definitely yellow. For still others, it was absolutely green. The lights range in size from basketballs to car tires.
Many thanks to our readers who wrote to us about the Brown Mountain Lights, including Viola Carter of Kingsport, Tenn.; Marsha Garwood of Thomasville, N.C.; Regina Hill of Micaville, N.C.; Walter A. Johnson of Boone, N.C.; Val Smith of Black Mountain, N.C.; and the Burke County Public Library of Morganton, N.C.
The Barn Dance was created as a way to celebrate rural family life while advertising mail order farm supplies, household necessities, vitamins and Alka Seltzer. Commercial sponsors included Sears-Roebuck, Prairie Farmer magazine, and Miles Laboratories. The formula proved successful and the Barn Dance ultimately ran four hours every Saturday night from 1924 to 1971 (with a TV version beginning in 1961).
Millions listened each week as WLS' 50,000-watt station broadcasted the 70-plus musicians, square dancers and assorted characters dishing out mountain music, novelty songs, hayseed costumes, cornpone skits, jokes, and hillbilly kitsch galore.
When Lula Belle Wiseman (her first name is sometimes spelled "Lulu," but she spells it with the "a") was voted the 1936 "Radio Queen" by readers of Radio Guide magazine, she defeated superstars including Gracie Allen, Jessica Dragonette, Helen Hayes, Frances Langford, Lily Pons and Kate Smith. It was a victory not simply for Lula "Belle of the Barndance" Wiseman, but one for Appalachian mountain music as well.
Call it the precursor to the Grand Ole Opry, Hee Haw and the USO. The Barn Dance made people dance, sing along, and laugh out loud. It also created and helped to create memorable personalities and legends like Red Foley and Luther "Arkie the Arkansas Woodchopper" Ossenbrink. Bill Monroe offered his bluegrass music on the Barn Dance stage.
And then there were Lula Belle (Myrtle Cooper) and "Skyland" Scotty Wiseman. Lula Belle is believed to have been born somewhere near Boone, North Carolina (her birth was later registered in Kenova, West Virginia). And Scotty was born in Avery County, North Carolina, near Spruce Pine. The love story began when the couple worked together on The Barn Dance, later married, performed together as the Hayloft Sweethearts, and had two children—Linda Lou and Steve. Lula Belle played the guitar, was quite funny, and had a knack for mimicking anything and anybody, as she often did, and if truth be known, still does.
Scotty played the guitar, banjo, and was a gifted songwriter, penning such songs as "Have I Told You Lately That I Love You?," "The Legend of the Brown Mountain Light," "Mountain Dew," and "You Don't Love Me Like You Used To," among many others.
Lula Belle and Scotty performed together not only on stage but also on film with a total of seven Hollywood movie credits.
In 1958, the Wisemans retired from show business, relocated to Spruce Pine, North Carolina, and devoted time to caring for their children and grandchildren, Black Angus cattle and gardens. In 1974, Lula Belle was elected to the North Carolina General Assembly where she remained for two terms from 1975-78, serving as the first Democrat from a district that had voted Republican since 1922. In 1981, she suffered a terrible loss when Scotty suffered a heart attack and died.
Two years later, Lula Belle married Ernie Stamey, a retired attorney, Christmas tree farmer and Spruce Pine native. He also was a family friend. Together they divide their time between North Carolina and Florida. Now in her late 70s, Lula Belle doesn't give interviews anymore, preferring that people instead listen to the recordings that she and Scotty compiled with such love.
• Of note: A new compilation "Lula Belle—The Belle of the Barn Dance" is now available on cassette through Mar-Lu Records. And Tommy Faile, Charlotte-based singer and radio personality, performs the songs of Scotty Wiseman, including "The Legend of the Brown Mountain Light," on his latest release, also available through Mar-Lu.
These southern mountains also offer legends and lore that have fascinated generations of locals, tourists, scientists, authors and filmmakers. The mystery of the Brown Mountain Lights is one of the most captivating legends. They have mystified, haunted and inspired scientific research and cultural inquiry. They’ve been the focus of books and films, songs and even an episode of the “X-Files” hit TV show.
Surveyors as early as the 1770s noted “some kind of luminous vapor.” A 1913 Charlotte Observer article mentioned members of the Morganton Fishing Club who saw the lights. Subsequent Observer articles explored other explanations, including the lights from passing locomotives, and the fire and smoke from moonshine stills.
The lights have been investigated by the U.S. Weather Service and twice by the U.S. Geological Survey. Results from the 1922 geological survey offered 11 proposed explanations for the lights, including Will-o’-the-wisps, phosphorus, Andes light, chemical reactions and radium emanations. (Read the report: pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1971/0646/report.pdf)
Could the flickering lights, as often speculated, be foxfire (an eerie, phosphorescent light related to fungus and decaying wood, insects and animals), or burning marsh grasses? Are they moon dogs (moonlight shining on haze) or St. Elmo’s Fire (electrical discharges from sharp objects during a thunderstorm)? Are they beings from outer space? Are the visions the result of too much moonshine, bottled or otherwise?
Local legends offer love, loss and calamity aplenty. Maybe the lights are Cherokee maidens or warriors searching the mountains by lantern light for fallen lovers. Or perhaps the lights are the souls of murder victims, like the long-suffering Belinda and her child, or Revolutionary war soldiers searching with torches for lost family.
North Carolina native Ed Phillips, director of the Burke County Tourism Authority, grew up listening to tales about the lights and has witnessed them himself.
“The lights are one of North Carolina’s top legends, its most popular paranormal legend,” he says. “When I became director of tourism, I developed a couple symposia in 2012 where experts talked about what the lights might be, what they aren’t and what we don’t know.”
Phillips continues: “There was lots of eyewitness testimony, including from historians, researchers and two retired U.S. Forest Service law enforcement officers who had worked on Brown Mountain and in the Linville Gorge for most of their careers. After they retired, they started telling stories about what they saw. To this day, it makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”
Phillips describes symposia attendees as locals fascinated by the lights, researchers and scientists, tourists and “people in dark glasses who wouldn’t give their names.”
Recognizing the local interest, as well as the draw for visitors, in 2011 the lights spawned a bona fide Brown Mountain overlook off of Highway 181, 20 miles north of Morganton. It’s a partially paved and graveled parking lot, with picnic tables and informational signs about Brown Mountain and the Linville Gorge.
“There’s no way for us to count how many people visit,” Phillips says, “but I’ve been told that in nice weather and on Friday and Saturday nights, you’ll find a dozen cars or trucks parked up there, sometimes more. It’s a festive atmosphere as people watch for the lights.”
Daniel B. Caton is professor of physics and astronomy, and director of observatories, at Appalachian State University. As a scientist, he’s a skeptic by training, and remains focused on inquiry and evidence. He and fellow scientists and students formed a Brown Mountain Lights research group in 2012 following Ed Phillips’ symposium at the Morganton City Hall, to investigate the physics of the lights. (Read more on his site: dancaton.physics.appstate.edu/BML/index.htm)
The group—called WCLEAR, short for Western-Carolina Lights Experimental Advanced Researchers— uses stationary cameras in two locations. One overlooks Highway 181 onto Brown Mountain from the Jonas Ridge area. The other is south of the valley, facing north up the Linville Gorge. Both are located at private residences that have provided permission to install the cameras and use the owners’ broadband to collect data.
These are infrared-sensitive night, low-light-level cameras that take sequences of images all night, from dusk to dawn. The next morning, Caton downloads the footage, builds them into videos and posts them on YouTube.
While Caton and his team have ruled out many causes, ball lighting—an unexplained atmospheric electrical phenomenon—remains a possibility, a wild card. “It’s not well understood,” Caton says. “Suppose nature has a way of making ball lightning preferentially in the gorge? Great, we’ve got a natural lab that knows how to make it, but it’s difficult to capture it. It would be much easier to study the lights if we could predict them.
“The bottom line is that most people are completely unfamiliar with the night scape. They’re indoors watching TV or working on their computers, and they’re probably living in a light-polluted environment. So when they get outdoors in a dark location, they are clueless about natural and manmade lights. I estimate that 95 percent or more of the sightings are people who seek the lights, see some kind of light and leave thinking they’ve seen the Brown Mountain Lights.”
He cites a few examples: “I’ve seen people get excited by a flashing cellphone tower light or the lights of Lenoir, a city in Caldwell County. Really, we’ve had airplanes and flashing tower lights for a century. CSX trains travel regularly through the gorge and there are 27 miles of ATV trails.”
The lights have been the focus of numerous books. Author Ed Speer, a native of Marion, North Carolina, turned an early fascination with rocks and minerals of the Blue Ridge Mountains into a global career in exploration geology. For his most recent book, “The Brown Mountain Lights, History, Science and Human Nature Explain an Appalachian Mystery” (McFarland Books, 2017), Speer used his training in science to explore a childhood enigma with fresh eyes. Over three years, he worked with a team of experts—including scientists and outdoor enthusiasts—camping out regularly and employing staged light tests at Wiseman’s View and the Highway 181 overlook.
“The team was convinced we could identify a new, unexplained sequence of light,” Speer says, “But we were mistaken. We simply couldn’t find a light we couldn’t explain. I concluded that 98 percent of all mistaken or baffling lights are manmade lights: town and city lights, and moving planes, trains and helicopters. A very small percentage of people are seeing a naturally occurring light. One example is the eerie blue ghost firefly, which is out only at certain times of the summer, at certain hours and at certain temperatures. And then there are the pranksters playing ‘Brown Mountain Lights.’ So, most of the mystery lights aren’t really mysteries to someone with the time and experience to investigate them.”
Joshua Warren, expert on the paranormal, grew up in the mountains near Asheville, and saw the lights firsthand as a child. He hosts a syndicated weekly paranormal program, “Speaking of Strange,” and founded the Asheville Mystery Museum. He also has a research center in Puerto Rico, where he studies the Bermuda Triangle.
Warren likens the area around the Linville Gorge to a mini-Bermuda Triangle, mentioning the first English settlement on the Carolina coast—The Lost Colony—that inexplicably disappeared.
“You draw that line out East and you’ll come pretty close to hitting the Island of Bermuda, which is the top point of the so-called Bermuda Triangle. The three points of the Triangle are Puerto Rico, Miami and the Island of Bermuda.”
“I feel like Brown Mountain and that whole Linville area are certainly part of this alignment,” Warren says. “People at Brown Mountain have had so many odd experiences that go way beyond telling stories around a campfire. As a serious researcher, I’ve interviewed lots of people, taken lots of measurements and written reports. I’ve been featured on the National Geographic channel, and my team and I captured footage that was studied at the Princeton Optics Lab. They couldn’t explain what we captured.
“Brown Mountain is a special place. Ultimately, we have these odd, eerily beautiful lights upon which everyone projects their ideas. You have the physicists and astronomers with theories, geologists and chemists with theories, and the UFO people who think this area is the landing ground for the mother ship or the place where the saucers go to recharge their batteries.”
Warren adds: “Brown Mountain is a blank slate upon which so many different kinds people can enthusiastically project their own impressions or their own ideas about what might be happening. It breeds a lot of creativity: songs, novels, research, a TV shows. It sparks people’s imagination.
“We know there’s a tangible, objective, measurable, phenomenon occurring there. Whatever it is, it’s something that deeply affects people when they experience it and opens their minds to all the mysterious possibilities here on Earth.”