The Brown Mountain Lights:
(excerpts taken from various websites, all are linked here on this page)
Brown Mountain is located in the Pisgah National Forest, in the Blue Ridge mountains of Western North Carolina. There are several places where the lights can be seen, here are a few of the more popular places.
- Brown Mountain Overlook Located 20 miles north of Morganton, on NC highway 181, 1 mile south of the Barkhouse Picnic Area.
- Wiseman's View Overlook Located 5 miles south of the village of Linville Falls on Kistler Memorial Highway a.k.a Old NC 105 or State Road 1238.
- Lost Cove Cliffs Overlook Located on the Blue Ridge Parkway, at mile-post 310, 2 miles north of the NC highway 181 junction.
Not familiar with the Lights? Watch this awesome video
Awesome image of the lights
Another image
Better description of directions to places to best view the lights
Troy Taylor talks about the Lights:
In the western hills of North Carolina stands a mountain that is not particularly striking, or even high, but it plays host to perhaps the strangest mystery in the state. The mountain is called Brown Mountain and it lies in the foothills of the Blue Ridge and for many years, it has attracted the attention of people all over the nation and even the attention of the United States government as two separate investigations have been conducted by the US Geological survey into the strange anomalies of this mountain.
The strange events that are occur here have been called the Brown Mountain Lights for more years than most can remember. They appear along the ridges of this mountain on a regular basis and are faithful enough that in clear weather, you can see them just about any night that you care to.
The best place to view them is at Wiseman’s View on Highway 105 near Morganton. Curiosity -seekers will line this stretch of road in the early evening hours and are rarely disappointed. By looking to the southeast, the watchers will suddenly see a light appear that is about the size of a basketball, or so it appears. The light will be reddish in color and it will hover in the air for a moment and then disappear. In a few minutes, it will appear again, but in another location and then all through the night, the lights will come and go, appearing and vanishing against the night sky.
As is normal with this kind of thing, almost every person sees the lights in a different way... some see them as white and bobbing; others as pale and stationary; while others see them coming and going quite rapidly.
Regardless, of how they are seen, they remain a mystery.
No explanation yet exists as to what the lights really are... although many have tried to solve the riddle. Some have suggested will-o’-the-wisp, that elusive gas that resides in swamps, and yet no swamps are found in this area. Others have suggested fox-fire or some sort of phosphorus; radium rays; strange gases; geological anomalies with the rocks; and more.... but all of them have been dismissed. Always popular is the explanation that the lights are simply headlight reflections from Rattlesnake Knob in the distance... but this hardly explains the fact that the lights were reported well before automobiles were even invented.
Some have even suggested that the lights could be firing of moonshine stills by liquor makers on the mountain and while this theory is certainly a romantic one, it has been quite some time since moonshine was made on the slopes of Brown Mountain.
As is the case with most ghost light reports.. there is a fantastic explanation and a spooky legend to explain the source of the lights.
The story dates back to 1850 and a night when a woman disappeared in the area. There was a general suspicion that the woman’s husband had murdered her and everyone in the community turned out to help search for her body. One night, while the search was on, strange lights appeared over Brown Mountain. They were not like lights that anyone had ever seen before and many believed they were the spirit of the dead woman, coming back to haunt her killer. The search ended without the woman being found.
Shortly after, the woman’s husband disappeared without a trace and many wondered what may have become of him. A number of years later, a skeleton belonging to a woman was found on Brown Mountain and the lights that had been seen during the search started to appear again.... and have been seen ever since.
Brown Mountain is located in Burke County, between Morganton and Lenoir, in the western part of the state. The best observation area is marked with a US Forest Service sign, which explains the history of the lights.
© Copyright 1998 by Troy Taylor. All Rights Reserved.
Link to the website from which the article was taken
The article on The Lights from "North Carolina Ghost Stories and Legends" website
Brown Mountain is a low ridge in Burke County that is a showcase for one of the last, great unexplained phenomena in the world. During the night, usually in autumn, mysterious glowing orbs can be seen to rise up off the mountain, hover and wobble about fifteen feet up in the air, and then disappear. There's no denying that the lights are real. They have been observed by countless witnesses and photographed on many occasions. But what they are is still unkown.
Explanatins have varied over the years. The Cherokee were aware of the lights, and claimed that the lights were the souls of Cherokee women searching for their men who had died in a great battle between the Cherokee and the Catawba that took place on Brown Mountain. Other legends say that the lights are the the ghostly echoes of lights that appeared during a search for a murdered woman in the 19th century.
scientific explanations have been offered, from swamp gas to the reflections of automobile headlights from the valley below, but every explanation offered up so far seems to be too easily disproved. The lights have been seen since before automobiles existed, so headlights are hardly an explanation. The swamp gas theory seems to bed crimped somewhat be the distinct absence of a swamp on Brown Mountain. A conclusive theory has yet to be formed, but it is interesting to note that Brown Mountain, like North Carolina's other famous Ghost Light the Maco Light lies along a fault line. Perhaps the Brown Mountain Lights are a side-effect of the enormous pressure beneath the earth.
Whatever their cause, people still flock to see the Brown Mountain Lights, but spotting them is never guaranteed. Reportedly, your best chance to see the lights comes in October and November, after all the leaves are off the trees.
Link to the website
Ibiblio.org's take on the Lights:
The Brown Mountain Lights are one of the most famous of North Carolina legends. They have been reported a dozen times in newspaper stories. They have been investigated at least twice by the U.S. Geological Survey. And they have attracted the attention of numerous scientists and historians since the German engineer, Gerard Will de Brahm, recorded the mysterious lights in the North Carolina mountains in 1771.
"The mountains emit nitrous vapors which are borne by the wind and when laden winds meet each other the niter inflames, sulphurates and deteriorates," said de Brahm. De Brahm was a scientific man and, of course, had a scientific explanation. But the early frontiersman believed that the lights were the spirits of Cherokee and Catawba warriors slain in an ancient battle on the mountainside.
One thing is certain, the lights do exist. They have been seen from earliest times. They appear at irregular intervals over the top of Brown Mountain - a long, low mountain in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. They move erratically up and down, visible at a distance, but vanishing as one climbs the mountain. From the Wiseman's View on Linville Mountain the lights can be seen well. They at first appear to be about twice the size of a star as they come over Brown Mountain. Sometimes they have a reddish or blue cast. On dark nights they pop up so thick and fast it's impossible to count them.
Among the scientific investigations which have undertaken from time to time to explain the lights have been two conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey. The first was made in 1913 when the conclusion was reached that the lights were locomotive headlights from the Catawba Valley south of Brown Mountain. However, three years later in 1916 a great flood that swept through the Catawba Valley knocked out the railroad bridges. It was weeks before the right-of-way could be repaired and the locomotives could once again enter the valley. Roads were also washed out and power lines were down.
But the lights continued to appear as usual. It became apparent that the lights could not be reflections from locomotive or automobile headlights.
The Guide to the Old North State, prepared by the W.P.A. in the 1930s, states that the Brown Mountain Lights have "puzzled scientists for fifty years." The same story reports sightings of the lights in the days before the Civil War.
Cherokee Indians were familiar with these lights as far back as the year 1200. According to Indian legend, a great battle was fought that year between the Cherokee and Catawba Indians near Brown Mountain. The Cherokees believed that the lights were the spirits of Indian maidens who went on searching through the centuries for their husbands and sweethearts who had died in the battle.
There are innumerable stories of the lights. But perhaps the best description is that the lights are "a troop of candle-bearing ghosts who are destined to march forever back and forth across the mountain."
The lights can be seen from as far away as Blowing Rock or the old Yonahlosse Trail over Grandfather Mountain some fifteen miles from Brown Mountain. At some points closer to Brown Mountain the lights seem large, resembling balls of fire from a Roman candle. Sometimes they may rise to various heights and fade slowly. Others expand as they rise, then burst high in the air like an explosion without sound.
Late in 1919 the question of the Brown Mountain Lights was brought to the attention of the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Weather Bureau.
Dr. W.J. Humphries of the Weather Bureau investigated and reported that the Brown Mountain Lights were similar to the Andes light of South America. The Andes light and its possible relation to the Brown Mountain Lights became the subject of a paper read before the American Meteorological Society in April 1941. In this report Dr. Herbert Lyman represented the lights as a manifestation of the Andes light.
The second U.S. Geological Survey report disposes of the cause of the Brown Mountain Lights by saying they are due to the spontaneous combustion of marsh gases. But there are no marshy places on or about Brown Mountain. The report also states that the lights from foxfire would be too feeble to be seen at a distance of several miles.
The report rules out the possibility that the lights are a reflection of mountain moonshine stills. "There are not enough such stills and they probably would not be in sufficiently continuous operation to produce lights in the number and regularity of those seen at Brown Mountain."
St. Elmo's Fire, that electrical phenomenon familiar to sea voyagers, was dismissed by a scientist from the Smithsonian Institution. He stated that St. Elmo's Fire and similar phenomena occurred at the extremity of some solid conductor and never in midair as in the case of the Brown Mountain Lights.
Some scientists have advanced the theory that the lights are a mirage. Through some peculiar atmospheric condition they believe the glowing balls are reflections from Hickory, Lenoir, and other towns in the area. The only drawback to this theory is that the lights were clearly seen before the War between the States, long before electricity was used to produce light.
In recent years scientists have been more concerned about exploring outer space. Perhaps they have forgotten that there are mysteries on our own planet still unsolved. The Brown Mountain Lights are one of them.
Link to this site
