The Mysterious Brown Mountain Ghost Lights
There’s no explanation of why you see lights in these mountains at night
Mysterious 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.
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…