Dashboards and Saddlebags the Destination Magazine™ Issue 020 November 2012 | Seite 14

The Mysterious
Brown Mountain
Lights

There’s no explanation of why you see lights in these mountains at night
By Sherry Jackson

M

ysterious lights have been
appearing at Brown Mountain
in the Linville Gorge area of North
Carolina for hundreds of years.
According to Cherokee legend,
around 1200 A.D. a great battle was
fought between the Cherokee and
Catawba Indians at Brown Mountain
and the mysterious lights are from
the Indian maidens still searching for
their men who died in battle.
Many people have tried to explain the
origin of the lights over the years. In
1771, a German scientist explained
the lights as inflamed nitrous vapors,
but that was instantly disputed. A 1913
U.S. Geological Survey concluded
that they were headlights from a
locomotive, but when the tracks
washed away three years later and
people continued to see the lights that
theory also was thrown out. During
the early 1900s, the mysterious lights
were thought to be aliens, and Brown
Mountain was even featured in an
American pulp magazine, The Argosy,
telling people to go see the UFOs at
Brown Mountain.

14

The lights have been reported as
being white, red, yellow, orange and
blue. They’ve been described looking
like large balls of fire to small candle
lights and from floating near the
ground to rising up high into the sky.
Bluegrass musician Scotty Wiseman
wrote a song titled “Legend of the
Brown Mountain Lights,” and National Geographic has called Brown
Mountain one of the three best places
to experience a natural wonder.
A symposium held last February
intended to “finally solve the mystery
of this strange phenomenon.” Burke
County tourism director Ed Phillips
brought in two notable experts,
Joshua Warren, a paranormal
investigator, and Daniel Caton, a
professor of physics and astronomy
at Appalachian State University, both
of whom have been studying the
lights for years. The two men spent
an entire afternoon duking it out
between paranormal and science,
exploring different theories, but in
the end the lights remained a mystery.

Dashboards and Saddlebags •The Destination Magazine