Ghost Lights

Off of U.S. 221 in Marion, North Carolina, there is a gravel track that makes an unlikely claim of being a state highway. If you are brave enough to bump along the washboard to the very end of the narrow ridge, you will eventually dead end at the beginning of one of the mountains’ favorite ghost stories.

It started with a man named Fate.

Today, Wiseman’s View, overhanging Linville Gorge, is arguably the most popular spot to look for the famous Brown Mountain Lights, even though you can’t actually see Brown Mountain from there. In the middle of the 19th century, young Josiah Lafayette “Fate” Wiseman would go camping with his father up on the ridge that is now topped by Old N.C. 105, ending with the lookout that bears his name. That’s where he began to see a mysterious light, night after night. And various people over the past 170 years also say they have also seen inexplicable lights in the wilderness down at the bottom of the gorge, or hanging over the mountains along the edge. What Wiseman saw was a single light, generally at the same time and at the same place, reportedly beginning in 1854. Then in the 1890s other people began to see lights as well, hanging above Brown Mountain. But many of these lights were different from the one reported by Wiseman, in that they sometimes stayed lit all night long. Other sightings have mentioned movement back and forth, or up and down.

“We were at Wiseman’s View … when this orb or whatever—it was about as big as a basketball—it actually came up, just came right up, and everybody in that little crow’s nest area started backing up,” Little Switzerland resident Deborah Glover said about her sighting, which she said occurred after 2012. “Everybody was going, ‘Ahhhh what is that? What is that?’ It just sort of hovered there for a few minutes.” Glover, who saw the light with her sister and about 40 strangers who had come up to the overlook separately, described the light as pure white or maybe slightly bluish, with an aura around it that might have been very slightly yellow. Descriptions of the lights vary widely—flashes, solid lights, moving or fixed.

Explaining the Unexplained

Author Wade Edward Speer says that there is a simple explanation for Wiseman’s original sighting. “A little bit of literature research is all it takes to realize that the first train ever to operate in Western North Carolina started operating in 1858, and … there are times when it comes around a curve and its headlight is pointed straight at Wiseman’s View,” Speer said. “Fate Wiseman would sit there as a young kid and he would wait for the light to appear, and he knew that it was going to appear way off on the horizon in this direction within 20 minutes of a certain time of the night.” One hundred years later, Fate’s great-nephew Scotty Wiseman would popularize the legend in a song, “The Brown Mountain Light,” leading to even more speculation about the supposedly paranormal origins of the sighting.

Speer, a retired geologist, maintains that while Wiseman supposedly saw the light as early as 1854, it’s more reasonable to assume that it appeared in 1858 and the exact date was lost in the process of passing the story down through the generations. Speer, along with Glover’s husband, Alex Glover, is a member of the Brown Mountain Lights research team and the author of The Brown Mountain Lights: History, Science and Human Nature Explain an Appalachian Mystery. The BML research team, a group of volunteers from a wide variety of backgrounds, has been looking into possible explanations for the legend of the mystery lights since 2012, after a symposium about the mystery was held in Morganton, North Carolina, hosted by the Burke County Tourism Development Authority.

“We actually formed after the first of two annual symposia on the lights,” said Dan Caton, a physicist and astronomer at Appalachian State University in Boone. “We managed to put up cameras and ran them for several years.” The millions of images collected each night for nearly a decade have been compiled into short videos which are available to view on YouTube—more information is available at Caton’s web site, brownmountainlights.blogspot.com. “We did experiments, too,” Caton said. “Some of the group went with ATVs and on foot with just ordinary flashlights and lanterns, and the camera could see those.” Each light that appeared in the pictures was painstakingly investigated, and nearly all of them turned out to be electric lights from nearby towns or houses, or from campers and hikers in the wilderness. “The first electricity showed up in Western North Carolina, that was in Hickory, at the train station … in 1888,” Speer said. There are stories that mysterious lights were seen by Native Americans before that point, but these have largely been debunked. “By 1900—12 years—electricity had spread all the way up and down the Catawba Valley and the Yadkin River Valley,” Speer said. “And sure enough, that’s when people started reporting seeing lights. No lights were seen before then.”

Let the rumors fly

As the story of the lights spread, so did the variety of potential explanations—burning natural methane, Native American ghosts from some great battle in the past, and, of course, aliens. Some mysterious lights in the area have been demonstrated to be from natural sources. The area does not have the right geological formations for natural gas, and methane from decaying vegetation does not burn long enough to be responsible for the stories. But there is a little-known species of firefly, the blue ghost firefly, that shines and behaves differently from more common fireflies and can be hard to identify for those unfamiliar with it.

Speer thinks there was an outside influence that caused the legend to really take off—an exciting adventure story that appeared just after the turn of the last century. “In 1911, Jules Verne … a science fiction writer, the most famous author in the world, published his last book,” said Speer. Verne published The Master of the World in French in 1904 and then the English version was released posthumously in 1911. “The first chapter of his book talks about mystery lights suddenly being seen over the top of a rocky, inaccessible mountain, just north of Morganton, North Carolina,” Speer said. After that publication, reports of mystery lights skyrocketed, leading to a demand that local politicians “do something.” Accordingly, the U.S. Geological Survey sent an investigator in 1913 and again in 1922 to find the source of the lights. Both concluded that the lights were manmade.

Mike Fischesser, an entrepreneur who organizes youth wilderness education projects and builds rope bridges, tree houses and other adventure infrastructure with his company, Beanstalk Builders, served as the BML team’s interviewer, collecting eyewitness accounts. Unfortunately these are not available to the public, as the team felt they could get more honest reports from people if their privacy was protected. “I have never seen [the lights] but I do believe in many of the people that have seen them—they have no reason to lie,” Fischesser said. Although he discounts some of the more far-fetched interpretations, such as aliens or ghosts, Fischesser prefers not to pick a favorite scientific theory about what might be causing the lights. “It’s kind of neat that we don’t know it,” he said.

In the years that the BML team spent photographing and studying the Brown Mountain area, nearly every photo of a mysterious light was traced back to a man-made source. The lack of repeated instances of truly inexplicable lights has been something of a discouragement for the team, but in July of 2016, the automatic cameras photographed one light that has stayed a mystery. “There was one unaccountable light that appeared over the mountains, and that was it,” Caton said. “I’ve just gotten cynical about it. … I don’t know where we are.” Speer is inclined to believe, that with so few truly unexplained lights, those few are probably also from some unidentified electric source. But Caton isn’t so sure. “What I think they could be … is ball lightning,” he said. Ball lightning, Caton said, forms glowing balls of some sort of gas around the size of a soccer ball. “Ball lightning is an odd phenomenon—we don’t really understand how nature makes it,” he said. “These … globs of glowing gas … will suddenly form and glow, and they’ll move horizontally some feet.”

Still Believing?

Asheville-based paranormalist Joshua P. Warren also believes the lights are most likely a form of ball lightning, based on video evidence and lab research he conducted in the early 2000s. Warren, in a 2004 report, suggested that there might be some special characteristics of the Brown Mountain area that are conducive to unusual amounts of electric activity, such as pressure from the nearby Brevard Fault causing quartz in the bedrock to give off sparks.

Deborah Glover did not end up joining the BML team herself, but she is familiar with the research and is confident that the light she saw was not the blue ghost firefly or any of the other commonly mistaken lights. “It just hovered for a few minutes and then it was gone, and everybody started looking over the edge to see where did it go, and there was no other light there,” Glover recalled.  “There were many that were there seeing it that night, and if I had been by myself nobody would believe me. But my sister was standing right there beside me and she saw the same thing.” The light seemed to be about six or eight feet away from the platform, but didn’t put off any heat that the spectators could feel. “It’s almost like it rose from underneath us somewhere and then it just went down—but when you looked over the edge you didn’t see anything,” she said. “It was just gone.”

For those who still want to believe, the most popular spots to look for the Brown Mountain Lights are Wiseman’s View and the Brown Mountain Overlook on N.C. 81. Warren recommends looking for the lights in the fall season, and Caton warns against heading out to the overlooks without spending some time getting used to the night sky, to avoid false positive sightings. “Because people are indoors, they’re watching TV, they’re watching the internet, they’re looking down at their phones—they’re totally decoupled from their environment, day and night. … People need to familiarize themselves with what the night looks like, and then go look,” he said.

“And I hope you see something.”