The Brown Mountain Lights

Brown Mountain is a low ridge about 1.5 miles long on the line between Burke and Caldwell counties, North Carolina. Local memory puts the lights long before any newspaper did. Joseph Loven, who kept a hotel at Cold Spring, said he first noticed them in 1897 but paid them no attention. Then, in 1910, Rev. C. E. Gregory began spending his summers near Loven's Hotel. After that, the lights became well known.

The earliest printed account appeared in the Charlotte Daily Observer in September 1913. The observers stood on Rattlesnake Knob, near Cold Spring, on the Morganton road, about seven miles from Linville Falls. Brown Mountain lay some six miles away. "With punctual regularity the light rises in a southeasterly direction from the point of observation just over the lower slope of Brown Mountain, first about 7:30 p.m., again about 20 or 30 minutes later and again at 10 o'clock."

They saw a distinct ball, about the size of a toy balloon. Fiery red. It went up a short distance, wavered, and went out in less than one minute.

Later witnesses described something more varied. Sometimes one light, sometimes as many as a dozen. Mostly white, at times tinged red, blue or yellow. The lights grow in size and linger for a few minutes before fading away. Charles Fort, citing the Literary Digest, wrote of "brilliant, globular forms" that moved "with a leisureliness and duration that exclude any explanation in meteoric terms."

October 1913. Rep. E. Y. Webb asked for an investigation, and D. B. Sterrett of the USGS compared train timetables with the appearances. Within a few days he had his answer. The lights were the headlights of westbound Southern Railway locomotives, seen over the mountain from nearby heights.

Then came July 1916. A flood washed out bridges and track across the Catawba Valley. For several weeks no train came within 40 to 50 miles. The lights were reported almost every night. Senators Simmons and Overman pressed the USGS to look again.

In 1922 George Rogers Mansfield spent about two weeks in the area, working from Gregory's former home with a map and an alidade. He judged the lights "clearly not of unusual nature or origin." By his count, about 47 percent were car headlights, 33 percent locomotive headlights, 10 percent stationary lights and 10 percent brush fires. Mansfield said the lights seen right after the flood were cars on roads the water had spared.

In 1961 a furniture salesman named Ralph Lael took the mystery somewhere else entirely. One light led him to a concealed door in a large rock. A voice said: "Do not fear; there is no danger here." Later he claimed a two-day trip to Venus. He went on to open the Outer Space Rock Shop Museum on NC 181, which displayed an "alien mummy."

In a 1977 Oak Ridge National Laboratory test, a distant arc light looked like an "orange-red orb apparently hovering" over the mountain. Joe Nickell, who visited in 2014, wrote: "There is no single explanation because there is no single phenomenon." Dr. Daniel Caton of App State and engineer R. Lee Hawkins kept watching anyway. Their cameras, running since 1999, caught a light in 2016 hovering far above the mountains, filmed from two angles. Caton has suggested ball lightning.

Scotty Wiseman's 1961 song "The Legend of the Brown Mountain Lights" spread the story well beyond the ridge, and the Kingston Trio and many others covered it. People still gather at the Parkway overlooks on summer evenings to watch for them.