BWBS Ep:159 The Brown Mountain Lights

In the mountains of western North Carolina, something ancient waits in the darkness. For over eight hundred years, mysterious lights have appeared above a low ridge called Brown Mountain, dancing across the sky in ways that science cannot explain and folklore cannot forget. Tonight, we journey into the heart of Appalachia's most enduring supernatural mystery.

This episode begins with the Cherokee legend of a great battle fought in 1200 A.D. between the Cherokee and Catawba Nations. When the fighting ended and hundreds of warriors lay dead across the mountain, the women from both tribes came searching with torches held high, calling out for husbands and sons who would never answer. According to the legend, some of those women never stopped searching.

Eight centuries later, their torches still burn on the ridgeline.We explore the first documented white witness to the phenomenon, a German cartographer named John William Gerard de Brahm who observed the lights in seventeen seventy one and tried to explain them as nitrous vapors catching fire. We follow the story of Fate Wiseman, whose family legend about a faithful servant searching for his lost master became the famous bluegrass song that made the Brown Mountain Lights a household name across America.

The episode delves into darker territory with the murder of Belinda, a young healer whose abusive husband killed her and her newborn child sometime before the Civil War. According to local legend, the mysterious lights led searchers to her hidden grave, and they still appear above that ravine to this day.We examine the government investigations of nineteen thirteen and nineteen twenty two, when scientists declared the mystery solved by attributing the lights to train headlights and automobiles. We reveal how the devastating flood of nineteen sixteen destroyed that explanation entirely when the lights continued appearing even after all the trains stopped running and the roads washed away. The narrative takes us through the strange case of Ralph Lael, a furniture salesman who claimed to have followed one of the lights into a cave where he made contact with beings from Venus. 

We hear about Tommie Hunter, who actually touched one of the lights in nineteen eighty two and felt an electric shock surge through his body while six witnesses watched. We follow TV journalist John Carter into the woods after midnight, where he watched a glowing orb approach his group in a zig-zag pattern before making a dramatic turn and vanishing into nothing. Modern investigations receive thorough coverage, including the work of Dr. Daniel Caton at Appalachian State University, whose team accumulated over six thousand hours of camera footage and still couldn't explain everything they recorded. 

We explore the theories of paranormal researcher Joshua Warren, who believes the unique geology of Brown Mountain creates conditions for ball lightning and who successfully recreated similar phenomena in his laboratory. Throughout the episode, we encounter the many legends that have accumulated over the centuries. The lover's light, where a young woman still holds her torch waiting for a groom who never arrived on their wedding night. The Civil War ghosts, soldiers in blue and gray still searching for fallen comrades. The Revolutionary War patriots, still carrying the flame of liberty through the eternal darkness.

This is a story about mystery and meaning. About the places where our certainty breaks down and the universe reminds us that it still contains secrets. About love so powerful it became visible, and grief so profound it became eternal. Whether you believe the lights are spirits of the dead, ball lightning generated by geological forces, or something we haven't discovered yet, one thing is certain. The Brown Mountain Lights are real. They've been appearing for eight hundred years. And somewhere in the darkness of Linville Gorge, the search continues.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:08):
Sh sh sh sh.

Speaker 2 (01:02):
The darkness in Lynnville Gorge is different from other kinds
of darkness. It's thicker, somehow, more alive, the kind of
darkness that seems to breathe against your skin and whisper
things you can't quite understand. I want you to imagine
something with me. Picture yourself standing at an overlook on
Highway one point eighty one, somewhere between mile markers twenty

(01:24):
and twenty one. The October wind cuts through your jacket.
The moon is hidden behind a wall of clouds so
thick they look like smoke. Below you, the gorge drops
away into nothing, just black emptiness, stretching out toward a
low ridge called Brown Mountain. You've been waiting for hours,
Your legs ache, your coffee went cold two hours ago.

(01:48):
Maybe you've started to think this whole thing was a
waste of time. Maybe you're about to give up. And
then it happens. A light appears on the mountain, just
one at first, a soft orange glow that seems to
rise up from the trees, like someone struck a match
in the darkness. It hovers there, fifteen maybe twenty feet

(02:08):
above the ridge line, pulsing, breathing you blink hard because
you're not sure what you're seeing. The light changes color
orange to red, red to white. Then it begins to move,
not like a flashlight or a campfire, not like anything

(02:29):
you've ever seen. It drifts left across the ridge, pauses,
then shoots straight up into the sky and vanishes. Before
you can process what just happened, two more lights appear,
then three, then a whole constellation of them, dancing along
the mountaintop like fireflies, the size of basketballs. Your heart

(02:51):
is pounding now, your hands are shaking. You want to run,
you want to scream, But you can't look away because
something ancient is happening on that mountain, something that has
been happening for over eight hundred years, something that science
cannot explain and folklore cannot forget. Welcome to Brown Mountain.

(03:13):
Welcome to North Carolina's most enduring supernatural mystery. Welcome to
the place where the dead still search for the living
and the lights never stopped burning. This is the story
of the Brown Mountain Lights. To understand the lights, you
first have to understand what happened on that mountain. You
have to go back, way back to a time before

(03:35):
the first European explorer ever set foot in the Appalachian Mountains.
The year was twelve hundred AD. The Cherokee and the
Cataba nations had been rivals for generations. Their territories overlapped
in the mountains of what we now call North Carolina.
For years, tensions had been building, Hunting grounds were contested,

(03:56):
honor was at stake, War was inevitable. The Catabo were
fierce warriors. The Spanish, when they arrived in the region
three hundred years later, estimated their population at twenty five
thousand strong. They were scattered across the Carolinas and Virginia.
They knew every ridge, every creek, every hidden valley in

(04:17):
their territory, and they defended it with their lives. The
Cherokee were equally formidable. They controlled the Smoky Mountains and
the land that stretched east toward.

Speaker 3 (04:27):
The Blue Ridge.

Speaker 2 (04:29):
Their warriors were legendary, their culture was rich with tradition,
and they would not yield their hunting grounds without a fight.
So when the two nations finally clashed near Brown Mountain,
it was a slaughter for three days. The fighting raged
warriors from both tribes met in the forests and hollows around.

Speaker 3 (04:48):
That low ridge.

Speaker 2 (04:50):
The sound of war cries echoed through the gorge, blood
soaked into the mountain soil. By the time it was over,
hundreds of men lay dead on both sides. The casualties
were catastrophic. Entire families lost their fathers, Entire villages lost
their protectors. And that's when the searching began. According to

(05:10):
Cherokee legend, the women from both tribes came to the
battlefield as soon as the fighting stopped. They came to
find their husbands, their sons, their lovers. They came to
bring the dead home, but the bodies were scattered across
miles of rugged mountain terrain. The undergrowth was thick, the

(05:30):
ravines were deep. Darkness fell quickly in those ancient forests,
so the women lit torches. They walked the ridges in
the hollows, holding their flames high above their heads, calling
out the names of the fallen, searching through the night,
searching through the next day, searching for weeks. Some of

(05:51):
them never stopped searching. The Cherokee believed that when a
person dies with unfinished business, their spirit cannot rest. It
stays bound to the physical world, trapped in an endless
loop of whatever task they left incomplete. And for those
grieving women, their task was never completed. They never found
all the bodies, They never brought all of their loved

(06:14):
ones home, So they search still. Eight hundred years later,
they search still. That's what the Cherokee say. The Brown
Mountain lights are the torches of those ancient women, spirit
lights that flicker and dance across the ridge line, just
as they did in twelve hundred AD, the ghosts of
grieving widows and heartbroken mothers still calling out for men

(06:37):
who will never answer. If that legend is true, then
every light you see on Brown Mountain is an act
of love, an expression of devotion so powerful that not
even death could end it, a promise kept across eight
centuries of endless nights. That's a beautiful thought. It's also
a terrifying one. The Cherokee knew about the lights for

(06:59):
centuries before where any European encountered them, But that encounter
did eventually happen, and when it did, the mystery only deepened.
The first documented white man to explore the Brown Mountain
region was a German cartographer named John William Girard de Brom.
He was brilliant, eccentric. Some said he was a mystic.

(07:21):
He served as the British Colonial Surveyor General of the
South District of North America, and he was considered the
most prolific map maker in the Southern colonies. In seventeen
seventy one, Debrom was traveling through the region documenting the
geography for the British Crown. He kept detailed journals of
everything he observed, the mountain ranges, the river systems, the

(07:44):
native plants and animals, and then he observed something he
couldn't explain. Debrom noted the appearance of strange lights in
the mountains. He described them as glowing vapor globes of
fire that seemed to ignite spontaneously in the air. Being
a scientific man, he tried to rationalize what he saw.
He theorized that the lights were caused by nitrous vapors

(08:07):
mixing with the wind and catching fire. It was a
reasonable guess for the seventeen hundreds, but it was wrong.
Local frontiersmen heard De Brahm's explanation and dismissed it immediately.
They knew what they had seen. They had heard the
Cherokee legends, and they believed, as the natives did, that
the lights were the spirits of those ancient warriors and

(08:29):
the women who searched for them. But de Bram's observation
is important for another reason. It proves that the lights
were being seen long before there were locomotives or automobiles
in the region, long before there were electric lights in
the nearby valleys, long before any of the modern explanations
could possibly apply. The lights were there in seventeen seventy one,

(08:51):
they had been there for hundreds of years before that,
and they would continue appearing for hundreds of years after.
Now I want to tell you about a man named
Josiah Lafayette Wiseman, but everyone called him Fate, and his
story would become the most famous legend associated with the
Brown Mountain Lights. Fate Wiseman was born in eighteen forty two.

(09:13):
His family was one of the first to settle in
the Lynville Gorge region. They carved out a life in
those harsh mountains, hunted the forests, farmed the hollows, built
a community from nothing. When Fate was about twelve years old,
something happened that would stay with him for the rest
of his life. He was camping at a spot now

(09:33):
known as Wiseman's View, with his father. It was a
clear night, the kind of night when the stars seemed
close enough to touch. Fate was staring out across the
gorge at Brown Mountain when he saw something strange, a
flash of light. It wasn't lightning, it wasn't a campfire.
It was just this sudden burst of illumination on the horizon. There,

(09:55):
one second, gone the next. Fate pointed it out to
a father, but by the time the old man looked
it was gone. His father shrugged it off. Probably nothing,
he said, go to sleep, But Fate couldn't sleep. He
kept watching, and about an hour later, the light appeared again,

(10:16):
same place, same brief flash, same mysterious glow. Over the
following months, young Fate became obsessed. He would return to
that same spot and wait. He discovered that the light
appeared at almost exactly the same time each night. It
varied by maybe half an hour, but it was remarkably consistent,

(10:39):
always in the same place on the horizon, always that
same brief, tantalizing glimpse. Fate Wiseman would live until nineteen
thirty two. He was ninety years old when he died,
and throughout his entire life he never stopped watching for
those lights, never stopped wondering what they were. But Fate's

(10:59):
contra tribution to the legend goes beyond just witnessing the phenomenon.
He passed down a story, a story that would eventually
become a song, a song that would make the Brown
Mountain lights famous across America. The story goes like this,
Brown Mountain got its name from a plantation owner who
lived in the area sometime in the eighteen hundreds. This

(11:21):
man was, by all accounts, kind to his enslaved workers.
One night, he ventured onto the mountain to hunt. The
hours passed, darkness fell, he never returned. A man who
worked for the planner took a lantern and went searching
for him. He walked the ridges, calling his employer's name.
He searched the hollows, he checked the ravines, but the

(11:44):
planter was gone, vanished without a trace, And then the
searcher vanished too. He was never seen again. His body
was never found, but the light from his lantern that
never stopped appearing. Night after night for years and decades
and generations, people saw a light moving along the ridge

(12:04):
line of Brown Mountain, a single glowing orb, rising and
falling drifting left and right, as if someone was walking
through the woods with a lantern, still searching for someone
they would never find. That's the legend Fate Wiseman passed down.
His great nephew, a musician named Scottie Wiseman, turned it
into a song in nineteen sixty one. He called it

(12:28):
the Legend of the Brown Mountain Lights. The song became
a hit.

Speaker 4 (12:35):
Enemedies of the old covered Wagon. When they capped on
the flats for thene with the moon shining down Lord
the old canyon under him, they watched all that Brown
Mountain lineagg.

Speaker 2 (13:24):
Arristmaster artists like the Kingston Trio and the Country Gentlemen
recorded their own versions, and just like that, the Brown
Mountain Lights became North Carolina's most famous paranormal phenomenon. But
the Ancient Battle and the Faithful Servant weren't the only
tragedies that people linked to the lights. There's another story,

(13:46):
a darker story, and it involves a woman named Belinda.
This happened sometime before the Civil War. Back in those
days in the isolated communities around Brown Mountain, marriages worked differently.
An and a woman simply decided to live together.

Speaker 3 (14:03):
That was it.

Speaker 2 (14:04):
That was the marriage, no ceremony, no paperwork, just a
promise and a shared life. Belinda was just a teenager
when she married a man named Jim. She was already
expecting their first child. Everyone in the small community around
Jonas Ridge rejoiced for the young couple. Belinda was beloved.

(14:26):
She worked as what folks called a granny woman, which
meant she was a healer. She cured wartz, she stitched wounds,
she delivered babies. Her patients adored her gentle bedside manner.
Jim seemed like a good man at first. He cleared land,
planted crops. His fields were admired throughout the region. He

(14:48):
and Belinda attended Sunday services together. They seemed happy, but
then the pregnancy progressed and Jim changed. Stay tuned for
more backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back at After these messages,
he started drinking heavily. He began sneaking off to visit
another woman who lived across the mountain. The neighbors saw

(15:10):
what was happening. They looked at Belinda with pity. Whispers
spread through the hills, But instead of feeling guilt or shame,
Jim became angry. He blamed Belinda for the rumors, and
then the violence started. Belinda stopped making house calls, she
stopped attending church. She was ashamed of the bruises, ashamed

(15:31):
of what her marriage had become. She retreated into silence.
On the day her baby was born, Belinda and the
child disappeared. When concerned neighbors came to check on her,
Jim met them on the porch. He was drunk, belligerent.
He told them Belinda had run off back to her family.
The neighbors walked away, relieved that she had escaped. They

(15:54):
kept an eye out for Jim's return from wherever he
had gone, but weeks passed. No one saw Jim, no
one heard from Belinda. Eventually the neighbors went back to
Jim in Belinda's place. They found the cabin empty, abandoned,
bloodstains on the floor. Something was very wrong. A search

(16:15):
party formed. They combed the woods around Brown Mountain looking
for any sign of Belinda and her baby. They found nothing,
no bodies, no graves, just endless forest.

Speaker 3 (16:27):
And then as twilight settled over the valley, the.

Speaker 2 (16:30):
Searchers saw something strange. Lights on the mountain glowing orbs
appeared above the ridge line, one at first, then several,
dancing through the darkness like spirit flames. The searchers were terrified,
but something drew them toward those lights, some forces they
couldn't explain. They followed the glowing orbs through the woods,

(16:53):
stumbling through underbrush, climbing over rocks, until finally they arrived
at a deep ravine. At the bottom of the ravine
was a pile of field stones. The lights hovered above it,
flickering and pulsing. The searchers began moving the stones one
by one, and beneath that cairn they found what they
were looking for. Two skulls, one adult, one infant, Belinda

(17:19):
and her baby. There's a tradition in the Old Mountain
communities when the skull of a murder victim is held
over the head of the murderer, the killer cannot lie,
the truth must come out.

Speaker 3 (17:31):
Jim was found.

Speaker 2 (17:33):
He was held down, the two skulls were dangled above
his face. As his neighbors demanded answers. Jim said nothing.
He never spoke again, not a single word, for the
rest of his life. The lights, they say, still appear
over that ravine. Some believe they are Belinda and her child.
Their spirits, restless, still seeking justice for the violence done

(17:56):
to them. Others say the lights are whatever force led
those search to the buried bodies, still watching, still waiting,
still remembering. Either way, the lights never stopped. The stories
multiplied over the years. New legends emerged, new explanations, new terror.
During the Civil War, soldiers on both sides reported seeing

(18:19):
the lights. The Confederates camped in the mountains saw glowing
orbs moving through the trees at night. The Union troops
who pushed into North Carolina saw them too. Some soldiers
believed the lights were signals from the enemy. Others thought
they were the spirits of the dead, the souls of
men killed in the thousands of skirmishes that bloodied the

(18:39):
Appalachian Wilderness. The war ended, the lights did not. By
the early nineteen hundreds, the Brown Mountain Lights had become
a regional phenomenon. Locals talked about them constantly. Visitors came
from surrounding counties hoping to catch a glimpse.

Speaker 3 (18:56):
The Charlotte Observer.

Speaker 2 (18:57):
Ran articles about mysterious sightings. Members of the Morganton Fishing
Club reported watching the lights for hours, and then the
government got involved. In nineteen thirteen, the United States Geological
Survey sent a scientist named D. B. Sterret to investigate.
Sterrett spent time at the overlooks watching the mountain at night.

(19:19):
He came to a conclusion that seemed to explain everything.
The lights, he said, were just locomotive headlights. Trains running
through the Cataba Valley below. Their headlights refracted through the
mountain air, creating the illusion of mysterious floating orbs. Case closed,
mystery solved, except it wasn't. Three years later, in nineteen sixteen,

(19:42):
a massive flood tore through the region. It destroyed railroad bridges,
washed out roads, knocked down power lines. For weeks, no
trains ran through the valley. There were no automobiles, no
electric lights, and the brown mountain lights kept appearing night
after night. Witnesses gathered at the overlooks and watched the

(20:03):
familiar orbs dance across the ridge line. The lights didn't
care that the trains had stopped. They didn't need locomotives
or headlights. They had been appearing for centuries before any
of those things existed. The government's explanation fell apart, and
the mystery deepened. The public wasn't Satisfied with the failed
train headlight theory, people demanded answers. So in nineteen twenty two,

(20:28):
the US Geological Survey tried again. This time, they sent
a scientist named George Rogers Mansfield. Mansfield was thorough. He
set up camp near Loven's Hotel, at the former home
of C. E.

Speaker 3 (20:41):
Gregory.

Speaker 2 (20:42):
He brought an alliedayed telescope. He created detailed maps of
the region. He spent night after night watching the mountain
and recording every light he saw. His findings were published
in a document called Origin of the Brown Mountain Light
in North Carolina. It became Geological Survey Circular six forty six.

(21:03):
According to Mansfield, forty seven percent of the lights he
observed were automobile headlights, thirty three percent were locomotive headlights,
ten percent were stationary lights from buildings in the valley,
and the final ten percent were brush fires. That accounted
for everything. One hundred percent explained no mystery, no ghosts,

(21:25):
no ancient Cherokee maidens, just mundane sources being distorted by
atmospheric conditions. Mansfield went further. He examined the geology of
Brown Mountain itself. He tested rock samples. He found nothing unusual,
just granite, the same rock you'd find anywhere else in
the region. No special magnetic properties, no mysterious minerals, nothing

(21:51):
that would generate unexplained luminosity. The scientific establishment declared the
mystery solved again, but the locals knew better. Joseph Lovin,
who had accompanied Mansfield during some of his observations, said
something telling. After the study concluded. He admitted that the
lights they recorded that night were probably not the true

(22:12):
brown Mountain lights. They weren't bright enough, they didn't move
the right way. They weren't the phenomenon that had terrified
and fascinated people for generations. The government had explained a
bunch of car head lights and train lamps. They hadn't
explained the brown mountain lights, not really, not the lights
that rose up from the mountain itself, not the lights

(22:34):
that changed color before your eyes, Not the lights that
moved in ways no vehicle could move, Not the lights
that had been appearing since twelve hundred AD. The mystery remained.
By the middle of the twentieth century, a new explanation
had emerged, an explanation that came from the stars. The
nineteen fifties were the Golden Age of UFO sightings Roswell

(22:58):
happened in nineteen forty seven. Project Blue Book was investigating
aerial phenomena across the country, and everywhere people looked, they
saw flying saucers. Why should Brown Mountain be any different.
The lights, some began to say, weren't ghosts at all.
They were spacecraft, alien vessels from another world. Observers claimed

(23:20):
to see the lights moving in ways that defied physics,
shooting straight up at impossible speeds, changing direction instantaneously, winking
out of existence, and reappearing miles away. An American pulp
magazine called The Argasy featured Brown Mountain as one of
the best places in the country to spot UFOs. Tourists

(23:40):
flooded into the region, hoping to make contact with extraterrestrial visitors.
And then there was Ralph Layle. Ralph was a furniture
salesman from the nearby area. He ran a little rock
shop where he sold minerals and curiosities to tourists. But
Ralph had a secret. He claimed to have experienced something
extraordinary on Brown Mountain, something that changed his life forever.

(24:04):
In nineteen sixty five, Ralph self published a pamphlet called
the Brown Mountain Lights. It was only twenty eight pages long,
but what it contained was unlike anything anyone had ever
claimed before. Ralph said that one night he encountered the
lights up close. He was walking through the woods near
Lynnville Gorge when he saw an orb approaching him. I'm frightened,

(24:26):
he wrote, I don't know what to do. The light
moved closer. It was about ten feet away, now glowing
so bright he could have read a newspaper by its illumination.
Ralph described it as nearly a perfect circle ten to
twelve feet across. In the center was something brown, something
that looked like a tumble bug standing on its back end,

(24:47):
suspended in the middle of the glowing ball. It seems
to have three hands or feelers protruding out from each side,
Ralph wrote. Instead of running, Ralph followed the orb. It
led him through the forest to a hidden cave, and
inside that cave, Ralph claimed he made contact with beings
from another world. They were gas based life forms. He

(25:09):
said they came from Venus, and they invited him aboard
their spacecraft. Ralph claimed he traveled to Venus. He claimed
he met the alien's queen. He claimed she was beautiful.
He claimed they were intimate, and then just like that,
they returned him to Earth. Now, look, I'm not going

(25:29):
to tell you what to believe about Ralph Layl's story.
The man displayed what he claimed was a mummified alien
in his rock shop for years. He was either a
genuine contactee, a creative hoaxer, or something in between. But
here's what I find interesting. Ralph was a local. He
had lived in the region his whole life. He had

(25:50):
seen the Brown Mountain lights many times before that alleged encounter.
He knew the difference between car head lights and the
real phenomenon. Whatever Ralph experience that night, it was real
to him. It changed him. He spent the rest of
his life trying to share his story. The alien explanation
never gained as much traction as the ghost theories, but

(26:13):
it added another layer to the mystery, another possibility, another
reason to stare into the darkness and wonder. Most people
who witnessed the Brown Mountain lights see them from a
distance from the overlooks, from the ridges. They watched the
orbs dance across the mountain and wonder what they are.
But some people have gotten closer much closer. In nineteen

(26:37):
eighty two, a Morganton resident named Tommy Hunter was standing
at the Highway one eighty one overlook with six other people.
They had come to watch for the lights, like so
many before them, and then one appeared. But this light
didn't stay on the distant ridge line. It rose up
from the mountain and drifted toward the overlook. It hovered
near the edge of the cliff, just a few feet

(26:59):
away from where Tommy was standing. He could see it
clearly now, a ball of light, glowing, pulsing, almost close
enough to touch. So Tommy touched it. He reached out
his hand and made contact with the orb What happened
next is something Tommy never forgot.

Speaker 3 (27:17):
He said.

Speaker 2 (27:18):
It felt like sticking his finger in a light socket.
An electric shock surged through his body. The light was real,
it was tangible, It carried energy, and then it was gone,
vanished into the night air as if it had never existed.
All six people who were with Tommy that night corroborated
his story. They saw him reach out, They saw the

(27:41):
light react, They saw the look on his face when
the energy passed through him. Whatever the Brown Mountain lights are,
they're not just optical illusions. They're not just tricks of
the atmosphere. They're not just distant car headlights distorted by refraction.
They can be touched, they carry charge, They exist in

(28:01):
physical space. That's terrifying. That's also fascinating. Let me tell
you about two more encounters, Two stories from ordinary people
who saw something extraordinary. The first comes from a TV
journalist named John Carter.

Speaker 3 (28:16):
He worked for WBTV.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
News and produced a segment on the Brown Mountain lights
for his Carolina Camera series. One night, after midnight, John
ventured deep into the woods around Brown Mountain with a guide,
some family members, and his cameraman. They hiked for a while.
The forest was dark, silent, the kind of silence that
makes you realize how alone you really are. And then

(28:41):
they saw it, a light about fifty yards away, visible
through the bare branches of the trees. John estimated it
was about two to three feet in diameter. It hovered
maybe twenty feet off the ground, glowing. Then it started moving.
The light came toward them in a zigzag pattern, left

(29:02):
to right, getting closer. John watched through the trees as
this orb approached. His heart was racing, His cameraman was filming.
Then when the light was close enough that they could
see it clearly. It made a dramatic turn to the
right and disappeared gone, just like that. John Carter had

(29:22):
seen a lot of things in his career as a journalist.
He had covered crime scenes, natural disasters, political scandals, but
nothing prepared him for what he witnessed that night on
Brown Mountain. Nothing in his experience could explain it. The
second story comes from a man named Fred Shustler. He
was leading an excursion of young adult singles from various

(29:44):
churches to the Brown Mountain Lights Overlook. They brought snacks,
someone had a guitar. They told scary stories and sang
songs while waiting for the lights to appear. The night
wore on, no lights appeared. Stay tuned for more Backwoods
big Foot stories. We'll be back after these messages. They

(30:05):
figured they were just going to have a nice time
without seeing anything paranormal. It was time to pack up
and leave. Fred was standing at the edge of the
overlook when he saw something below him down the steep encline.
A light, not a distant orb on the mountain, a
light right there, right below where he was standing, close

(30:27):
enough that he assumed it was a prank, all right,
very funny. Fred called out, now, come on up, we
need to leave. The light didn't move. It just hovered there, shining,
almost blindingly bright. Fred was getting irritated. Now seriously, he said,
come up now, or we'll leave you.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
The light stayed steady.

Speaker 2 (30:51):
Unmoving, unlike anything Fred had ever seen. After about thirty seconds,
it simply went out vanished. Fred rushed back to the van,
expecting to catch whoever had played the prank before they
could climb back up. He wanted to see who had
managed to get down that steep incline in the darkness
without anyone hearing them. But everyone was already.

Speaker 3 (31:14):
At the van.

Speaker 2 (31:15):
Everyone was accounted for. No one had left the group.
Fred counted heads, He counted again. Everyone was there. So
what was that light? Fred still doesn't know. He tells
the story decades later, and he still can't explain what
he saw that night. He knows it wasn't a flashlight.
He knows it wasn't a prank. He knows it was

(31:37):
something else, something that exists in the spaces between what
we understand and what we fear. The twenty first century
brought new technology to the mystery, and with it new
hope for answers. Doctor Daniel Caton is a professor of
physics and astronomy at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina.
He's not a ghost hunter, he's not a paranormal investigtion gator.

(32:00):
He's a scientist, a skeptic, a man who believes in
the power of data and evidence. And yet even he
couldn't deny what he saw. One evening, Caton was driving
home from Ashville. On a whim. He decided to take
a detour to Wiseman's View. He stood at the overlook
for about an hour, scanning the horizon. The wind whipped

(32:22):
through the canyon. He was ready to give up and
go home, and then just as he turned to leave,
a bright flash appeared overhead. It wasn't a star, it
wasn't a satellite, it wasn't an airplane. Caateon had spent
decades studying the sky. He knew what all of those
things looked like. This was something else. For a few seconds,

(32:45):
the light lingered, then it vanished. That experience changed Caton.
He became determined to find an explanation. He and his
colleagues installed two low light cameras on rooftops overlooking Brown
Mountain and Lynnville Gorge. The cameras ran all night, every night,
recording everything they could see. By twenty fourteen, they had

(33:06):
accumulated over six thousand, three hundred viewing hours of footage.
They analyzed every frame, they documented, every light source. They
eliminated everything they could identify. Most of what they recorded
was mundane aircraft, vehicles, distant town lights, the same things
Mansfield had documented in nineteen twenty two. But some of

(33:30):
what they recorded couldn't be explained. Anomalous lights that moved
in ways no known source could move, orbs that appeared
and disappeared without any identifiable cause. The mystery remained unsolved.
On the other side of the investigation stands Joshua P.

Speaker 3 (33:47):
Warren.

Speaker 2 (33:48):
Warren is a paranormal researcher based in Ashville. He's been
studying the Brown Mountain light since his family first took
him camping there as a kid. He remembers seeing a
ball of light climbing up through the tree and ascending
into the sky. That experience changed his life. Warren led
the expedition that captured the first known video footage of

(34:09):
the lights. He's written books about them, he's given talks
about them, He's appeared on countless TV shows and documentaries.
His theory is fascinating. Warren believes that the unique geology
of Brown Mountain creates the conditions for the lights to appear.
The mountain, he says, contains layers of quartz, which is

(34:29):
a non conductor, and magnetite, which is a conductor. When
the mountain cools at night, it contracts, squeezing these layers
together and creating electrical discharges. Warren actually recreated these conditions
in a lab. He and his colleagues produced something that
looked remarkably like ball lightning. Is that what the Brown

(34:50):
Mountain lights are? A form of natural plasma generated by
geological activity?

Speaker 3 (34:55):
Maybe?

Speaker 2 (34:56):
But that explanation raises more questions than it answers. Why
would this phenomenon occur at Brown Mountain and almost nowhere else?
Why are the lights so unpredictable? Why do witnesses describe
them doing things that ball lightning typically doesn't do, like
changing colors and moving with apparent intention. Warren and Caton,

(35:17):
despite coming from completely different backgrounds, have arrived at a
similar conclusion. They both believe ball lightning might be part
of the explanation, but they also both admit that we
still don't fully understand what's happening on that mountain. The
mystery endoers the Brown Mountain Lights have become part of
our cultural mythology. They've been featured in books, songs, movies,

(35:40):
and television shows. They've inspired horror films and documentary investigations.
They've become a shorthand for the unexplained. In nineteen ninety nine,
The X Files broadcast an episode called Field Trip. In it,
FBI agents Molder and Scully investigate the unexplained deaths of
two hikers near Mountain. The Lights are referenced as a

(36:02):
century's old mystery that even the Cherokee once witnessed. The
episode blends hallucination with folklore, using the mountain's reputation as
a setting for one of the show's more surreal cases.
Scottie Wiseman's song The Legend of the Brown Mountain Lights
has been covered by artists for decades. The Kingston Trio
recorded it, The Country Gentlemen recorded it. Progressive bluegrass bands

(36:27):
like Acoustic Syndicate and Yonder Mountain String Band have performed it.
The song has become part of the American folk tradition.
National Geographic called Brown Mountain one of the three best
places in the world to experience a natural wonder. A
found footage horror film called Alien Abduction was released in
twenty fourteen. It tells the story of a family whose

(36:49):
camping trip to Brown Mountain goes terribly wrong when they
encounter extraterrestrial visitors. The movie used interviews with real witnesses
as part of its marketing, blurring the line between fiction
and documented experience. Every year, the town of Morganton holds
a Brown Mountain Lights Festival. Tourists come from across the
country to learn about the phenomenon, hear the legends, and

(37:12):
hope to see the lights for themselves. Joshua Warren even
offers certification programs for Brown Mountain investigators. The lights have
become a brand, a tradition, a piece of North Carolina's identity.
But beneath all the commercialization and pop culture references, the
mystery remains. The lights still appear, witnesses still report experiences

(37:36):
that defy explanation. The dead still search for the living
in the darkness of Lynnville Gorge. Let me take you
back to nineteen sixteen, because something happened that year that
should have settled the debate forever, something that skeptics have
never been able to explain away. July of that year
brought devastating floods to the mountains of western North Carolina.

(37:59):
The rain fell for d Creeks became rivers, Rivers became torrents.
The water tore through the landscape with unstoppable force. Railroad
bridges collapsed, Miles of track washed away into the muddy water.

Speaker 3 (38:14):
The trains that.

Speaker 2 (38:15):
Had chugged through the Cataba Valley for decades suddenly had
nowhere to go. Roads became impassable, power lines came down.
The modern infrastructure that scientists had blamed for the lights
was simply gone. For weeks, the region was isolated, no trains,
no automobiles on the flooded roads, no electric lights flickering

(38:37):
in the valley towns below. Just the mountains and the
darkness and the rain, and the lights kept appearing. Night
after night. Witnesses gathered at the overlooks. Night after night
they watched the familiar orbs rise from Brown Mountain. The
lights danced and pulsed and drifted across the ridge, just
as they always had. They didn't need locomotives. They didn't

(39:00):
need headlights, they didn't need electricity. They needed nothing from
the modern world at all. This is the detail that
skeptics always struggle with. This is the wrench in every
conventional explanation. If the lights were caused by trains, where
were the trains in nineteen sixteen, If they were caused
by automobiles, where were the automobiles. If they were caused

(39:24):
by electric lights from the towns below, where was the
electricity gone? All of it was gone, washed away by
the flood, but the brown mountain lights remained. The old
timers talked about this for years afterward. They used it
as proof that the scientists had it wrong. Whatever was
causing those lights, it wasn't modern technology. It was something older,

(39:48):
something deeper, something that had been there long before the railroad,
long before electricity, long before the white man ever set
foot in these mountains. The Cherokee knew about the lights,
and twelve hundred ad De Brahm documented them in seventeen
seventy one. They appeared during the Civil War, they survived
the nineteen sixteen flood. They're still appearing today. Whatever the

(40:13):
brown mountain lights are, they're not going away. Most people
who go looking for the brown mountain lights never see them.
That's the honest truth. You can sit at the overlook
for hours, staring into the darkness and see nothing but
stars and distant town lights. But when you do see them,
when you really see them, everything changes. There's a writer

(40:36):
who documented his experience trying.

Speaker 3 (40:38):
To photograph the lights.

Speaker 2 (40:40):
He drove up the winding mountain roads after dark alone
with camera equipment in his back seat. The higher he climbed,
the more isolated he felt, the trees pressed in on
both sides of the narrow road. The darkness seemed to thicken.
I could get abducted, he thought to himself. At the
very least, I'd go down as a legend. He reached

(41:01):
the overlook. The parking lot was empty except for one
truck that passed him quickly. Wanting nothing to do with
a stranger in the dark, he strapped on his head
lamp and walked to the viewing area alone. The silence
was overwhelming, not just the absence of sound, but the
presence of something else await in the air, a pressure,

(41:23):
the feeling that something was watching him from the darkness.
He waited for hours. A woman named Cindy arrived with
her children. They watched together for a while. The lights
didn't appear. Rain began to threaten Cindy and her children fled.
Be careful if you're going to stay alone, she warned
him as she drove away.

Speaker 3 (41:45):
He stayed.

Speaker 2 (41:46):
The darkness closed in around him, The witching hour approached,
and then nothing. The lights didn't show that night. But
here's what that writer said afterward. He said the experience
was worth it anyway, not because he saw the lights,
but because of what he felt. The fear that turned
to excitement, the isolation that became communion with something ancient,

(42:11):
the sense that he was participating in a mystery that
stretched back centuries. That's what the Brown Mountain lights do
to people. Even when they don't appear, they leave their mark.
They change the way you think about the darkness. They
make you wonder what else might be out there, just
beyond the edge of what you can see. Doctor Daniel
Katon didn't just have one experience with the lights. He

(42:34):
became obsessed. He wanted to document the phenomenon scientifically. He
wanted to capture evidence that could be analyzed. He wanted
to answer the question once and for all. So he
and his research team set up cameras. They formed a
group called w CLEAR that stands for Western Carolina Lights
Experimental Advanced Researchers. They installed infrared sensitive night cameras and

(42:57):
two locations overlooked Highway, one pint eighty one onto Brown
Mountain from the Jonas Ridge area. The other was south
of the valley, facing north up the Lynnville Gorge. The
cameras ran every night from dusk to dawn. They captured
thousands of hours of footage. Every morning, Caiton would download
the data, compile it into videos, and analyze what the

(43:20):
cameras had seen.

Speaker 3 (43:21):
For years.

Speaker 2 (43:22):
This went on year after year of watching, cataloging, documenting.
Most of what the cameras captured was mundane aircraft, lights,
vehicles on distant roads, the glow of Morganton in the
valley below, campfires from hikers in the wilderness, all the

(43:42):
ordinary sources that scientists had been blaming for decades. But
not everything could be explained. Some of the lights moved
in ways that no vehicle could move. They would appear suddenly, hover,
drift in one direction, then shoot off in another direction. Entirely,
they would change color, They would split into multiple orbs,

(44:02):
then merge back into one. These were not car headlights,
These were not airplanes. These were something else. Caton is
careful about his conclusions. He's a scientist. He doesn't make
claims he can't support with evidence. But even he admits
that some of what the cameras captured remains unexplained. We

(44:22):
just don't know what causes the Brown Mountain lights, he said,
after years of research, coming from a skeptic, from a
man who spent his career studying the sky, that admission
is remarkable. If anyone was going to solve this mystery,
it should have been Daniel Cayton. He had the training,
he had the equipment, he had the dedication, but the

(44:43):
lights refused to be explained. C. W. Smith spent more
than twenty five years as a district law enforcement officer
for the US Forest Service. He worked in the Pizga
National Forest, the Grandfather Ranger District. Brown Mountain was part
of his patrol. Terror to stay tuned for more Backwoods
Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages. If anyone

(45:07):
should have seen the lights, it was Smith. He spent
countless nights in those woods. He knew every trail, every
overlook every hidden corner of that wilderness. He talked to
hundreds of people who claim to have seen the lights.
He watched thousands of visitors staring out into the darkness
hoping for a glimpse of the phenomenon. He heard every story,

(45:31):
every theory, every explanation, and yes, he saw them himself.
Smith doesn't talk about his experience as often. He's a
practical man, a law enforcement professional, not given to flights
of fancy or supernatural speculation. But when asked directly, he'll admit.

Speaker 3 (45:50):
What he saw. The lights are real.

Speaker 2 (45:53):
He's careful to distinguish between the various things people see.
Some of what gets reported as brown mountain lights is
definitely conventional campfires, flashlights, car head lights, bouncing off fog.
These things happen. They account for a lot of the sightings,
but not all of them. Smith has seen lights that

(46:14):
moved in ways he couldn't explain, lights that appeared from
nowhere and vanished into nothing, Lights that rose from the
mountain and climbed into the sky. A quarter century of
patrol in those forests taught Smith many things. He learned
to trust his eyes. He learned to distinguish between what
was ordinary and what was not. And he learned that

(46:36):
something genuinely mysterious happens on Brown Mountain. He just doesn't
know what it is. There's a legend I haven't told
you yet, a story about love and longing that might
be the most romantic of all the Brown Mountain tails.

Speaker 3 (46:50):
It goes like this.

Speaker 2 (46:51):
Once upon a time, a young couple lived in the
mountain surrounding Lynville Gorge. They were deeply in love, the
kind of love that makes people do foolish things, the
kind of love that doesn't care about obstacles or danger.
Every night, the young man would walk through the forest
to visit his sweetheart. The path was treacherous. It wound

(47:12):
through dense undergrowth. It crossed dangerous ravines. Predators lurked in
the shadows. A wrong step could send a man tumbling
into the darkness, never to be found.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
So the young woman lit a torch.

Speaker 2 (47:26):
Every evening, as the sun went down, she would climb
to a high point near her home and light a flame.
She would hold it aloft a beacon in the darkness,
guiding her lover safely through the forest. The light meant
she was waiting. The light meant he was loved. The
light meant home. This went on for months, maybe years.

(47:48):
Night after night, the torch burned, night after night. The
young man followed its glow to his beloved. And then
came the night of their wedding. Everything was prepared, the
Sarah money was ready, the whole community was gathered to celebrate.
All the young woman had to do was light her
torch one more time. All her lover had to do

(48:09):
was follow the light to the happiest day of their lives.
She lit the torch, She waited, She watched the forest path.
He never came. Was it an accident, a fall in
the darkness, an attack by an animal.

Speaker 3 (48:25):
No one knows.

Speaker 2 (48:26):
All anyone knows is that the young man never arrived.
His body was never found, His fate was never determined.
But the woman kept waiting. She lit her torch that night,
She lit it the next night. She lit it every
night for the rest of her life, waiting, hoping, believing

(48:46):
that somehow, somewhere her lover was still trying to find
his way to her. Some say she's still out there.
Some say the lights on Brown Mountain are her torch,
still burning, still guiding, still waiting for a min who
will never arrive. If that's true, then the Brown Mountain
Lights aren't just a mystery. They're a love story, a

(49:08):
testament to devotion that transcends death itself, a flame that
not even centuries of disappointment could extinguish. The modern people
of Burke County have embraced this legend. They say that
if you take your sweetheart to see the Brown Mountain
Lights and the lights appear, you'll be lucky in love.
Your relationship will endure, your bond will be strengthened. But

(49:32):
what if the lights are really a woman still searching
for a love that never arrived. What does it mean
to witness that endless, hopeless devotion. What does it say
about love that refuses to accept loss? Maybe lucky in
love isn't quite right. Maybe what we're witnessing is something
more profound, something more tragic, something that reminds us how

(49:53):
powerful love can be and how terrible it is to
lose it. The legends kept accumulating as the sin tes passed.
Each generation added its own layer to the mystery. After
the Civil War ended, new stories emerged. Soldiers from both
sides had seen the lights during the conflict. They had
told their families they had written letters, they had carried

(50:16):
the memory with them into peacetime, And when those soldiers
passed on, people began to say that maybe the lights
weren't just Cherokee maidens anymore. Maybe they were also the
ghosts of boys in blue and gray, still carrying their
torches through the mountains, still looking for fallen comrades, still
fighting a war that had ended decades ago. The South

(50:37):
lost a lot of young men in those years. The
mountains of North Carolina were a battleground. Skirmishes happened in
every hollow. Brothers killed brothers, fathers killed sons. The death
toll was catastrophic, and the bodies weren't always recovered. Families
never knew what happened to their loved ones. Did they

(50:59):
die in battle, where they captured? Did they desert and
disappear into the wilderness. The uncertainty was agonizing, The grief
never found closure. So when people saw lights moving on
Brown Mountain, it was easy to imagine that they were torches.
It was easy to imagine that they were the spirits
of lost soldiers, still searching, still wandering, still trying to

(51:23):
find their way home. The Revolutionary War added its own legends, too,
stories emerged of Continental soldiers who had come to the
mountains and never left, Ghosts of patriots still carrying the
flame of liberty through the eternal darkness. Each war left
its ghosts on Brown Mountain. Each tragedy added to the
chorus of spirits. The mountain became a repository for all

(51:46):
the region's unfinished business, all its unresolved grief, all its
love that outlasted death. Let's talk about ball lightning. It's
a real phenomenon. Scientists have documented, they've even created it
in laboratories, but they still don't fully understand it. Ball
lightning appears as a glowing sphere. It can be various colors.

(52:11):
It can move in ways that seem to defy physics.
It can last for seconds or even minutes. It can
pass through walls. It can explode. It can disappear without
a trace. Sound familiar. The descriptions of ball lightning match
many of the reported Brown Mountain lights. Glowing orbs, multiple colors,

(52:32):
unpredictable movement, sudden appearance, and disappearance. Doctor Caton believes ball
lightning might be the answer, or at least part of
the answer. He thinks the unique conditions in Lynnville Gorge.
The combination of altitude and humidity and atmospheric pressure might
make ball lightning more likely to form there. Joshua Warren

(52:54):
has a similar theory, but he takes it further. He
believes the geology of Brown Mountain itself creates the conditions
for these discharges. The layers of quartz and magnetite, the
compression and expansion is the mountain heats and cools the
electrical potential building up and then releasing in spectacular fashion.

(53:15):
Warren actually tested this in a laboratory.

Speaker 3 (53:18):
He and his team.

Speaker 2 (53:18):
Recreated the geological conditions. They squeezed layers of quartz and
magnetite together, and they produced something that looked very much
like ball lightning. Is that what's happening on Brown Mountain?
Is the mountain itself generating these lights through pizzo electric effects?

Speaker 3 (53:35):
Maybe?

Speaker 2 (53:36):
But here's the thing. Ball lightning is rare, extremely rare.
Most people go their entire lives without seeing it. If
Brown Mountain really does produce ball lightning regularly, it would
be unique. It would be a geological phenomenon unlike anything
else on Earth, and that raises questions, why Brown Mountain?

(53:58):
Why not the thousands of other mountains with similar geology.
Why has this particular ridge become famous for mysterious lights
when others have not. Science can explain a lot, but
it can't explain everything. The Brown Mountain Lights sit at
the intersection of what we know and what we don't.
They challenge our assumptions, They resist our categories. They remind

(54:22):
us that the natural world still contains surprises. There's another
dimension to the Brown Mountain Lights that we haven't explored,
the psychological dimension. What is it about this mystery that
captures human imagination so powerfully?

Speaker 3 (54:37):
Think about it.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
People have been coming to these overlooks for over a century.
They stand in the darkness for hours. They strain their
eyes looking for something that might not even appear. They
travel hundreds of miles for the chance to see a
few seconds of unexplained light.

Speaker 3 (54:54):
Why.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Part of it is the challenge We live in an
age of information. Anything we want to know is just
a search engine query away. Mysteries have become rare, The
unexplained has become almost extinct. Brown Mountain is one of
the few places left where you can still encounter genuine mystery.
Part of it is the connection to history. When you

(55:18):
stand at that overlook, you're standing where generations before you
have stood. You're participating in a tradition that stretches back centuries.
You're adding your eyes to the countless eyes that have
searched that ridge. There's something powerful about that continuity, something
that connects you to your ancestors and your descendants. Part

(55:40):
of it is the confrontation with the unknown. Modern life
is sanitized, controlled, predictable. We've banished the darkness, we've conquered
the night. But at Brown Mountain, the darkness still has power.
The unknown still has presence. You can feel it against you,

(56:01):
you can sense it watching you. That's frightening, but it's
also thrilling. It's also alive. The Brown Mountain lights remind
us that we don't know everything. They remind us that
the universe is bigger than our explanations. They remind us
that there's still room for wonder, still room for all,
still room for the kind of mystery that makes the

(56:23):
hair stand up on the back of your neck. That's
why people keep coming. That's why the lights matter, not
just as a paranormal phenomenon, not just as a scientific puzzle,
but as a testament to the power of the unknown,
the importance of mystery, the irreplaceable value of things we
cannot explain. So what are the Brown Mountain lights? After

(56:47):
everything we've explored, after all the legends and investigations and
close encounters, do we have an answer? The honest truth, No,
we don't. We have theories, we have high hypotheses, we
have explanations that account for some of the sightings, but
we don't have a complete answer. We don't have a
solution that explains everything. Here's what I think. I think

(57:11):
the Brown Mountain lights are real. Too many credible witnesses
have seen them for too many centuries for them to
be entirely explained away. Something is happening on that mountain.
I think some of the sightings are conventional car headlights, campfires,
misidentified aircraft. These things absolutely account for a portion of

(57:32):
what people report, but not all of it. Not the
close encounters, not the lights that moved with apparent intelligence,
not the orb that shocked Tommy Hunter when he touched it.
I think we don't fully understand the natural world. We
assume that science has explained everything, but it hasn't. There
are phenomena that remain mysterious. There are forces we haven't identified.

(57:57):
There are energies we can't measure with our current instruments,
and I think the legends matter whether or not. The
lights are literally the spirits of Cherokee women. Those stories
contain truth. They speak to the power of love and grief.
They remind us that the dead are not forgotten. They
connect us to the land and its history in ways

(58:18):
that purely scientific explanations cannot Maybe the Brown Mountain lights
are ball lightning, Maybe they're piedzo electric discharges. Maybe there's
something we haven't discovered yet. Or maybe there really are
spirits walking that ridgeline torches, burning in the darkness, an
ancient search that will never end. Joshua Warren has a

(58:41):
theory that goes beyond ball lightning, a theory that connects
Brown Mountain to something much larger, something cosmic. He believes
that Brown Mountain sits on what he calls a vortex,
a place where the boundaries between dimensions are thin, a
location where energy flows in and out of the earth
and waves we don't fully understand. Warren points to other

(59:03):
locations that share similar characteristics. Area fifty one in Nevada,
the Joplin Spook Light in Missouri, Dulce, New Mexico, where
some believe an alien military base is hidden underground. All
of these places fall within a band between the thirty
fifth and thirty seventh parallels. All of them are known

(59:24):
for strange phenomena, all of them have resisted conventional explanation.
North Carolina, Warren notes, has more than its share of
weird places. The Lost Colony of Roanoke, where over one
hundred English settlers vanished without a trace, The Devil's Tramping
Ground near Siler City, where nothing will grow and animals

(59:45):
refuse to enter. And of course Brown Mountain with its
centuries of unexplained lights. Could these all be connected? Could
there be something about certain places on Earth that makes
them more prone to paranormal activity? Stay tuned for more
BA back Woods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.

(01:00:05):
Could the Brown Mountain lights be evidence of something beyond
our current understanding of physics. It's a radical theory. Most
scientists would dismiss it out of hand, but Warren has
spent decades investigating the paranormal. He's seen things that conventional
science can't explain, and he believes that the Brown Mountain
lights are just one piece of a much larger puzzle.

(01:00:28):
Meteors were once considered paranormal, Warren says, in ancient times,
everyone knew rocks didn't just fall from the sky. Duh, Someday,
I think we'll know what the brown mountain lights are.
Once we figure it out, scientists will totally take over.
He shrugs when he says this. That's the curse of
being a paranormal researcher. You're on the fringe until you

(01:00:51):
discover something. Then you're pushed aside again.

Speaker 3 (01:00:55):
But so be it.

Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
Warren captures something important here. The history of science is
full of phenomena that were once considered supernatural or impossible. Electricity, magnetism, radiation.
Each of these was mysterious before it was understood. Each
of them seemed to violate the laws of nature, before
we expanded our understanding of what nature could do. Maybe

(01:01:20):
the brown mountain lights are next. Maybe someday we'll understand
exactly what causes them. Maybe we'll look back and laugh
at all the ghost stories and alien theories.

Speaker 3 (01:01:30):
Or maybe not.

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
Maybe some mysteries are meant to remain mysterious. Maybe some
phenomena exists precisely at the edge of what we can
know forever, tantalizing, forever, just out of reach. Every year,
the town of Morganton celebrates the Brown Mountain Lights with
a festival. People come from across the country. They gather

(01:01:52):
in the historic Courthouse Square. They listen to speakers, They
share stories. They prepare for their own expeditions to the overlooks.
Ed Phillips, the director of the Burke County Tourism Authority,
grew up listening to tales about the lights. He's seen
them himself, and he's dedicated to sharing the mystery with
as many people as possible. The lights are one of

(01:02:15):
North Carolina's top legends, Philip says, its most popular paranormal legend.
In twenty twelve, Phillips organized a symposium to explore the phenomenon.
He brought together Joshua Warren and doctor Daniel Cayton, a
paranormal investigator and a skeptical scientist. The two men spent
an afternoon debating theories, presenting evidence, challenging each other's conclusions.

(01:02:41):
In the end, neither convinced the other. The mystery remained,
but something remarkable happened during that symposium. Eyewitnesses came forward,
historians shared documents, researchers presented data. The sheer volume of
testimony was overwhelming. Whatever the Brown Mountain Lights are, they're

(01:03:01):
not a hoax, they're not mass hysteria, they're not wishful thinking.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
They're real. The festival continues to grow. Each year.

Speaker 2 (01:03:11):
New generations discover the mystery. Families make pilgrimages to the overlooks.
Young couples test the legend about being lucky in love.
Ghost Hunters bring their equipment, scientists bring their skepticism, and
everyone watches the mountain. Everyone hopes to see something they
can explain. That's the power of the Brown Mountain Lights.

(01:03:32):
They bring people together. They create community. They give us
something to share, something to wonder about, something to chase.
In an age of division and isolation. That's no small thing.
If you want to see the Brown Mountain Lights for yourself,
here's what you need to know. The best viewing locations

(01:03:52):
are Brown Mountain Overlook on Highway one point eighty one
between mile markers twenty and twenty one. You can also
try Fry Wiseman's View in the Pizga National Forest, about
five miles south of Lynnville Falls, Lost Cove Cliffs on
the Blue Ridge Parkway at mile Post three ten offers
another option. Go on a clear night. The lights are

(01:04:14):
more commonly reported when there's no moon. October and November
seem to be the best months. Right after rain is
supposed to be particularly good. Bring patients, lots of patients.
Most nights the lights don't appear. You might wait for
hours and see nothing. That's part of the experience. That's

(01:04:35):
part of what makes a sighting meaningful. Bring binoculars. The
lights can be small and distant. They're easier to see
with magnification. Bring a blanket. It gets cold in those
mountains at night, especially in the fall. Bring skepticism, not
too much, but some Not everything you see is paranormal.

(01:04:57):
Some lights are cars, campfires, some are airplanes. Learn to
distinguish the ordinary from the extraordinary. Bring an open mind.
Not everything can be explained. Some of what you might
see defies conventional understanding. Be willing to accept that, be
willing to wonder and bring reverence. You're not just looking

(01:05:21):
for lights. You're participating in something ancient. You're joining a
tradition that stretches back eight centuries. You're standing where Cherokee
women stood, searching for their fallen warriors. You're standing where
Civil War soldiers stood, watching the ridge line with fear
and fascination. You're standing where countless seekers stood before you,

(01:05:43):
all of them looking for something they couldn't quite name.
The mountain deserves your respect, The mystery deserves your attention.
And the dead, if they're really there, deserve your acknowledgment.
I want to end by going back to the beginning,
back to twelve hundred eight, back to that ancient battle
between the Cherokee and the Catawba. Imagine what it was

(01:06:06):
like for those women. Their men had gone to war,
they had waited at home, tending fires, raising children, hoping
for the best, but fearing the worst. And then the
fighting ended, and the silence began. No one came home,
not that first day, not that first week. The women

(01:06:27):
began to wonder, They began to fear. They began to
understand that something terrible had happened. So they went to
the mountain. They went to find they're dead. The undergrowth
was thick, the terrain was brutal. Bodies were scattered across
miles of wilderness. How do you find anyone in that chaos?

(01:06:47):
How do you bring closure when the forest swallows everything
You light a torch, You walk into the darkness, you
call out the names of the ones you love. You
don't stop until you find them, or until you can't
go on. Some of those women never stopped. Eight hundred
years later, they're still searching. Their torches still burn on

(01:07:07):
the ridgeline, their voices still echo through the gorge, Their
love still lights up the night. That's what the Cherokee
legend tells us. That's what the Brown Mountain lights might be.
Not a scientific phenomenon, not a geological curiosity, but a
testament to love, a monument to grief, a reminder that

(01:07:30):
some bonds can never be broken, not by death, not
by time, not by anything. If you ever see the lights,
remember that. Remember that you might be witnessing devotion that
outlasted centuries, searching that outlasted death itself. Love so powerful
it became visible, grief so profound it became eternal. That's

(01:07:54):
worth a cold night at an overlook. That's worth hours
of watching and waiting. It's worth the drive and the
patience and the uncertainty, because in those lights, if they're
really what the legends say, you're seeing something miraculous, something
that should be impossible, something that tells us the most
important truth about human beings. We never stop loving, we

(01:08:18):
never stop searching, We never give up on the ones
we've lost, even if it takes eight hundred years. I
saved one story for near the end, because it's the
strangest of all. Remember Ralph Layle, the furniture salesman who
claimed he met beings from Venus. Ralph didn't just have
one encounter. He claimed there was a portal in a

(01:08:39):
cave on Brown Mountain, a doorway to another dimension, a
place where human beings could cross over into something beyond
our understanding. After his initial experience, Ralph became obsessed with
finding that cave again. He searched the mountain for years.
He brought others with him. He documented every everything he found.

(01:09:01):
And here's the strange thing. Other people started reporting similar experiences.
Not everyone who went looking found what Ralph found, but
some did. They described caves that seemed to go on forever,
Tunnels that twisted through the rock in impossible ways, chambers
that felt wrong somehow, spaces that seemed larger on the

(01:09:23):
inside than they should have been. Some reported feeling watched,
Others reported hearing voices. A few claimed they saw figures
in the darkness, beings that weren't quite human, entities that
existed in the spaces between dimensions. Now, look, I'm not
saying any of this is true. Ralph Layel's story about

(01:09:44):
traveling to Venus and meeting the alien queen stretches credibility
well beyond the breaking point. These cave stories might be
nothing more than over active imaginations fueled by spooky atmospheres.
But here's what's interesting. Brown Mountain is full of caves.
The geology of the region creates natural caverns throughout the ridge.

(01:10:05):
Most of them have never been explored. Some of them
are too dangerous to enter. Others are hidden so well
that only the most determined seekers ever find them. What's
in those caves we don't know. Most of them have
never been documented. They exist in darkness, untouched by human eyes,
hiding whatever secrets they contain. Maybe they're just caves, ordinary

(01:10:29):
geological formations with nothing special about them. Or maybe there's
something else. Maybe the Brown Mountain lights are connected to
something deeper, something that lives beneath the surface, something that
occasionally emerges into our world in the form of glowing orbs.
It's speculation, wild speculation. But the mystery of Brown Mountain

(01:10:52):
has always inspired wild speculation. That's part of what makes
it so fascinating. Throughout history, mysterious lights have been interpreted
as omens, signs of things to come, warnings from beyond.
The people of Burke County are no different. Over the decades,
patterns have emerged in the local folklore, patterns that connect

(01:11:14):
the Brown Mountain Lights to significant events. Some say the
lights burn brighter before major storms, that they appear more
frequently in times of trouble, that they serve as harbingers
of change. During the Great Depression, locals reported seeing the
lights almost every night. The same was true during World
War II and during the uncertainty of the Cold War years. Coincidence, Probably,

(01:11:40):
the human mind is always looking for patterns, even where
none exist. We want the universe to make sense. We
want mysterious phenomena to mean something.

Speaker 3 (01:11:51):
But what if they do.

Speaker 2 (01:11:53):
What if the Brown Mountain lights really are connected to
the emotional energy of the region. What if they respond
to collective green and fear and uncertainty. What if they
burn brighter when people need the most. That would fit
with the original Cherokee legend the lights appeared after a
great tragedy. They were born from grief and loss. They

(01:12:14):
represent love that refuse to accept death. Maybe they still
respond to those emotions. Maybe they still burn brightest when
people are hurting. Maybe they're not just a phenomenon to
be studied, but a presence to be felt, a comfort
in dark times, a reminder that love survives everything. I

(01:12:35):
don't know if that's true, neither does anyone else, but
I think it's worth considering. The Brown Mountain lights have
meant something to people for eight centuries. That meaning might
be more important than any scientific explanation we could ever find.
That's what the Brown Mountain lights do to people. They
create moments that can never be forgotten, experiences that can

(01:12:57):
never be explained, questions that can never be answered. And
somehow that's exactly what we need. Here's the thing about mysteries.
We need them. We need places where our certainty breaks down.
We need phenomena that resist explanation. We need reminders that,
despite all our science and technology and accumulated knowledge, the

(01:13:20):
universe still contain secrets. Brown Mountain is one of those places.
The Lynnville Gorge is one of those wildernesses. The lights
that dance across that ridge. Are one of those phenomena
that humble us, that remind us of our limitations, that
invite us to wonder. In an age when information is everywhere,

(01:13:41):
when answers are just a search engine query away, we
need places.

Speaker 3 (01:13:45):
Like Brown Mountain.

Speaker 2 (01:13:46):
We need phenomena that resist easy explanation. We need reminders
that the universe is vast and strange and full of wonder.
The Brown Mountain lights have been appearing for over eight
hundred years, lasted empires. They've survived wars, They've witnessed the
rise and fall of civilizations. They've watched the Cherokee give

(01:14:08):
way to the settlers, watch the forest give way to Rhodes,
watch the darkness give way to electric light. And still
they appear. Still they pulse and glow and drift across
the mountain. Still they refuse to be explained or dismissed
or forgotten. Longer than the United States has existed, longer
than the English language has been spoken on this continent.

(01:14:31):
They were here before us, and they'll probably be here
after us. What does that mean? I don't know. Nobody knows.
Maybe the lights are natural phenomena. Maybe they're supernatural manifestations.
Maybe there's something in between, something that exists in the
spaces we haven't mapped yet, something that waits in the

(01:14:52):
darkness for those brave enough to look. If you ever
find yourself in western North Carolina on a clear October night,
make the drive to one of the overlooks. Stay tuned
for more Backwoods Bigfoot stories. We'll be back after these messages.
Brown Mountain Overlook on Highway one point eighty one, Wiseman's

(01:15:13):
View in the Pizga National Forest, Lost Cove Cliffs on
the Blue Ridge Parkway. Stand in the darkness, let your
eyes adjust. Listen to the wind moving through the gorge.
Feel the weight of all those centuries pressing down on you.
Feel the presence of all those witnesses who came before,

(01:15:33):
all those seekers, all those believers, all those skeptics who
left with more questions than they arrived with. And watch,
watch for a flicker of light on the distant ridge,
a glow that rises from the trees, an orb that
moves in waighs. No flashlight or headlight ever, could you
might see nothing. Most nights, the lights don't appear. They're unpredictable,

(01:15:59):
They answer to no schedule, they obey no rules we understand,
but you might get lucky. You might see something that
changes the way you think about the world, something that
makes you question what's possible, something that connects you to
all those witnesses who came before, stretching back through the centuries,
to those grieving Cherokee women with their torches held high.

(01:16:22):
If that happens, you'll understand why the Brown Mountain lights
have captivated people for so long. You'll understand why the
mystery matters. You'll understand why some things are better left unexplained,
because in that moment, standing in the darkness, watching something
impossible move across the mountain, you won't want an explanation.

Speaker 3 (01:16:43):
You won't want.

Speaker 2 (01:16:43):
Science or skepticism or rational analysis. You'll just want to watch,
to wonder, To remember, the lights are still burning on
Brown Mountain. After eight hundred years, The search continues, and
somewhere in the darkness, the dead are still caught out
for the living. They are still searching for the ones
they loved, still carrying their torches through the eternal night,

(01:17:08):
still refusing to accept that death is the end. Listen carefully,
you might just hear them. Feel the cold mountain air
on your face, feel the ancient weight of the appellations.
Beneath your feet. Feel the presence of all those spirits,
If spirits, they are still walking the ridge line after
all these centuries. This is sacred ground. This is haunted ground.

(01:17:33):
This is ground where love has outlasted everything that should
have ended it. This has been the story of the
Brown Mountain Lights, the most haunting mystery in all of
North Carolina, the place where the torches never go out,
the mountain where love outlasts death itself. So here's the
part of the story where the credit should roll. We've

(01:17:53):
walked through the history, the legends, the scientific swing and
a miss attempts, the eyewitness accounts that refer us to
sit down and be quiet. We've stared into that foggy,
blue black bowl of the Lynnville Gorge and watched something
stare back. And if you're anything like me, you're left
in that delicious paranormal limbo. Not convinced, not dismissive, just itchy,

(01:18:18):
like there's a page missing from reality and you can't
stop flipping the book. But let me bring this thing
home right here in North Carolina, right in my backyard.
I live about twenty miles from the overlook twenty. That's
not some cross country pilgrimage. That's not an I'll do
it someday when life slows down. That's a quarter tank

(01:18:39):
of gas and a decent playlist that's closer than half
the grocery stores I willingly drive to without blinking. And
yet I haven't gone, not to really go, not to
sit there with my boots on the ground and my
eyes up, waiting for Brown Mountain to do what Brown
Mountain does. I've been to the festival the last few years,

(01:19:00):
so I've tasted the vibe. I felt the buzz of
locals and visitors trading stories in line for kettlecorn, like
they're swapping campfire relics. I've watched the way people talk
about the lights, not like some gimmick, but like a
neighbor they don't fully understand. You can tell a lot
by how folks tell a story. Nobody talks about the
Brown Mountain lights like they're begging you to believe. They

(01:19:23):
talk about them like they're reporting weather, like yeah, sometimes
they show up, sometimes they don't, but when they do,
you'll never forget it. That kind of casual awe messes
with you because it doesn't feel like folklore. It feels
like something woven into the place itself, into the ridgelines
and the old timber paths and whatever memory the mountain

(01:19:45):
keeps when nobody's looking. And I think that's why I've waited,
not because I'm scared of what I'll see, but because
I'm not sure.

Speaker 3 (01:19:53):
Who I'll be after I see it.

Speaker 2 (01:19:55):
There's a strange honesty and finally showing up for a
mystery that's been circling your life, Like the moment you
stop talking about the phenomenon and start participating in it,
you lose a little of your safe distance. The mystery
gets closer personal, not a story anymore, a chapter you're
stepping into. So yeah, I think I may need to

(01:20:16):
take that short road trip soon. Not with the Hollywood
expectation of glowing basketball sized orbs floating down to boop
my forehead like a cosmic rumba, not even with a
promise that I'll see anything at all. Brown Mountain doesn't
owe anybody a performance. But I want to go for
the right reasons, to sit in the dark and let
the mountain speak in whatever language it chooses, to put

(01:20:39):
my own eyes on the same horizon that has stirred
people for generations to see if the stories feel different.
When the air is cold and still and I'm not
listening to someone else describe it, I'm listening to the place.
Maybe nothing happens, and maybe that's okay, because even the
waiting is part of this phenomenon, even the not knowing

(01:20:59):
is kind of communion with it. But if the lights
come out, if they do that slow, impossible drift, that
flicker and pause like something thinking, then I'll know something
I don't know yet, not necessarily what they are, but
what it feels like to be in their presence. And
that matters, because in the end, the Brown Mountain lights

(01:21:19):
aren't just a mystery out there in the woods. They're
a reminder that we still live in a world with
corners left unlit, and sometimes the strangest thing you can
do is drive twenty miles toward one of them. So
maybe next time you hear my voice on this subject,
it won't be from the studio. Maybe it'll be from
the overlook wind in the mic night wrapped around the

(01:21:40):
ridge line, me whispering something like, all right, Brown Mountain,
I'm here, show me what you've got. Until next time,
stay curious, stay brave, and never stop looking for the
light in the darkness, because the darkness is vast, but
so is love. And sometimes, on a cold, clear night

(01:22:01):
in the mountains of North Carolina, love becomes visible. It
becomes light.

Speaker 1 (01:25:01):
Never