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Haunted places · Forests, islands and abandoned places

The Mysterious Brown Mountain Lights

When
since c. 1909 date reconstructed from later accounts · first known record: 1913
Where
Brown Mountain, Burke County, North Carolina, United States
Verdict
Disputed

For more than a century balls of light have been seen rising at night over an Appalachian ridge. Geologists, physicists and balladeers have all studied them.

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35.91°, -81.82° · dimmed: other phenomena within 1,500 km

What happened

Brown Mountain is a low, wooded ridge in the Blue Ridge Mountains near Linville Gorge. In the early 20th century local people began talking about lights that rose over the ridge at night, hung in the air for a moment and went out. On 24 September 1913 the Charlotte Observer described a “mysterious light” seen almost every evening from Rattlesnake Knob – first noticed by members of a Morganton fishing club, who were laughed at to begin with. Legends soon grew up around the lights: of Native American women searching with torches for men killed in an ancient battle, or of an enslaved man who still roams with a lantern looking for his lost master. Members of Congress asked the U.S. Geological Survey to investigate, and it sent researchers in 1913 and 1922. The lights became a regional attraction – tourists watch for them from roadside overlooks, and scientists at Appalachian State University have been monitoring them with cameras for years.

Witnesses

Members of a Morganton fishing club and local residents (Charlotte Observer report, 1913); dozens of witnesses interviewed by the USGS in 1922.

Explanations and hypotheses

Geologist George R. Mansfield, who carried out observations for the USGS in 1922 from several vantage points using maps and an alidade, concluded that most of the lights were the headlights of locomotives and cars and brush fires in the valleys beyond the ridge. Several residents testified that nobody had heard of the lights before 1909–1910, which undermines the idea of “ancient” legends – physicist Daniel Caton of Appalachian State found only one uncertain trace in Cherokee mythology. Some modern sightings remain unexplained; atmospheric effects and rare electrical discharges have been suggested, but no hypothesis has been confirmed.

Disputed A likely explanation exists, but some of the facts are still disputed.

Sources

  1. The Charlotte Observer – No Explanation: Burke County’s Mysterious Light Still Baffles Investigators (1913), transkrypcja Appalachian State University
  2. George Rogers Mansfield, Origin of the Brown Mountain Light in North Carolina (U.S. Geological Survey, 1922), reprodukcja Appalachian State University
  3. Appalachian State University – History of the Brown Mountain Lights

More: Wikipedia (en)