Dashboards and Saddlebags the Destination Magazine™ Issue 009 December 2011 | Page 11

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
Continued on page 12

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