The Brown Mountain Lights

On a clear autumn night in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina, people park their cars at an overlook on Highway 181, bundle up against the cold, and stare out into the dark at a low ridge on the horizon.

They are waiting for the lights.

Brown Mountain is not particularly impressive as mountains go. It’s a long, low, rounded ridge, about 2,600 feet high, densely forested, on the edge of the Linville Gorge — one of the deepest and wildest canyons in the eastern United States. There are no towns on it, no roads to speak of, no houses.

But for more than a century, people have reported seeing strange lights rising above it at night: glowing orbs, red, white, blue or yellow, that appear over the ridge, float, flicker, split apart, rise and fall, and then vanish. Sometimes there’s just one. Sometimes there are dozens.

No one has ever proven what they are.

The First Reports

The first widely published account of the Brown Mountain Lights appeared in the Charlotte Observer in September 1913. A group of fishermen camping in the area had reported seeing mysterious lights rising over the mountain night after night, appearing just above the horizon and then disappearing.

The story caused a sensation. People began coming to the area to see the lights for themselves. Many of them did.

Within weeks, the United States Geological Survey sent a geologist to investigate. He concluded, after a brief study, that what people were seeing was the headlights of locomotives on a railroad line in the valley beyond the mountain, reflected or distorted by the atmosphere.

The locals were skeptical. And three years later, they got the chance to prove the geologist wrong.

The Flood

In July 1916, a massive flood swept through western North Carolina, destroying bridges, washing out roads and knocking out railroad lines across the region. For weeks, no trains ran in the valley. Power lines were down.

And the lights, the locals said, kept appearing.

In 1922, the U.S. Geological Survey sent another scientist, George Rogers Mansfield, to take a more thorough look. He spent time in the area, talked to witnesses, and mapped the lines of sight from the viewing points to the surrounding landscape. His report concluded that the vast majority of the lights could be explained by human sources: about half were car headlights on distant roads, about a third were locomotive headlights, and the rest were brush fires and stationary lights in towns and houses. The lights, he said, were simply ordinary lights seen at a great distance across the gorge, in unusual atmospheric conditions.

Many people accepted his explanation. Many others didn’t. They pointed out that the lights had reportedly been seen before cars existed in the area, and that some witnesses described them doing things car headlights don’t do — rising straight up from the mountain, hovering, splitting, moving against the wind.

The Legends

Over the years, many stories have grown up to explain the lights.

The most commonly repeated is a legend that the lights are the spirits of Cherokee and Catawba warriors who died in a great battle on Brown Mountain centuries ago, and that the lights are the torches carried by the women who still search the mountain for their husbands and sons. Historians have found no record of such a battle, and the story may have been invented in the twentieth century. But it’s told at every overlook.

Another legend says that, before the Civil War, a wealthy planter went hunting on Brown Mountain and never came back. An enslaved man who worked for him went out with a lantern to look for him, searching night after night. The lights, the story goes, are his lantern, still searching.

Yet another story says that a woman disappeared in the area in the 1800s, and her husband was suspected of killing her. When searchers went looking for her body, the lights appeared over the mountain. Years later, a skeleton was found.

The Song

The lights became famous far beyond North Carolina. A song about them, “The Brown Mountain Light,” written by the country musician Scotty Wiseman, was recorded by many artists, including the Kingston Trio in the 1960s. It tells the story of the enslaved man with his lantern, still searching. The lights have appeared on many television programs about unexplained mysteries, and in at least one episode of The X-Files.

The Science

In recent years, scientists have returned to Brown Mountain with modern equipment.

A physicist from Appalachian State University, Daniel Caton, has led a long-term project to monitor the mountain with automated cameras, hoping to capture the lights on video and analyze them scientifically. Researchers have studied the possibility that some of the lights might be caused by natural phenomena: ball lightning, gases released from the ground, electrical charges in the rocks, or a rare and poorly understood phenomenon known as “earthquake lights.”

So far, there’s no definitive answer. Some researchers believe that most sightings are ordinary lights — cars, trains, campfires, distant towns — combined with the power of suggestion. Others believe that something unusual and natural is happening in the mountains that science hasn’t yet explained.

Waiting in the Dark

I’ve always liked the Brown Mountain Lights, because they’re one of the rare mysteries where the waiting is part of the experience.

On a fall night, at the overlook, there’s a strange community among the strangers who gather there: families, couples, old-timers who’ve been coming for decades, college students with telescopes. People talk quietly. They point. Someone says, “There — did you see that?” and everyone turns. Most nights, no one sees much of anything. Some nights, people go home convinced they’ve seen something extraordinary.

And the mountain just sits there in the dark, the way it has for millions of years, keeping its secret.