Author: rubberslothbird

Roan Mountain stands right on the border between North Carolina and Tennessee, about one hour west of Banner Elk. Roan Mountain is not just one mountain, but a five-mile long ridgetop that reaches it’s highest elevation a Roan High Top nearly two miles above sea level. This long ridge is covered with shady balsams and rhododendrons that fill the hills with beautiful patches of pink and white when they’re in bloom. But some people say that there’s more than immediately appears along this high ridge. Some say that on the heights of Roan Mountain supernatural voices can be heard.

The wind is powerful on Roan Mountain. In 1799, the survey team that was sent out to determine the border between North Carolina and Tennessee noted when passing through the area that the wind had worn large holes in the face of the rock on top of the mountain. As European settlers began to descend on the area in the early 19th Century, stories soon began to be told that the wind that whipped around Roan Mountain carried something else with it. They said that when you stood at the highest points along the ridge, you could hear voices singing in the wind.

But no one agreed what kind of singing it was. Some said it was the sound of a beautiful angelic choir, that the voices were ones of heavenly beauty. Some said that Roan Mountain was the place where the angels gathered to practice singing for the Christian Judgement Day, that on Roan Mountain could be heard the sounds of heaven.

Others disagreed. They said that the sounds that called out on Roan Mountain were an unearthly wailing, the sounds of demons and tormented souls crying in pain and torture. They said that the voices of Roan Mountain were echoes coming from Hell.

In 1878, Colonel John T. Wilder, a Union Army officer during the Civil War who had settled in Tennessee after the fighting had stopped noticed the growing attraction of the Blue Ridge Mountains as a tourist destination. By that time, Asheville and Hot Springs were both already well-established stops for people seeking beautiful views and cool summer air. Wilder realized that Roan Mountain had spectacular views, and was also now easily accessible by the newly-built East Tennessee and Western North Carolina Railroad. So Wilder build The Cloudland Hotel on top of Roan Mountain and hoped to draw visitors from across the country.

The 166 room hotel offered full service, beautiful views, and reasonable rates of only $2 a day, $10 a week, and $39 a month. It also sat directly on top of the border line between Tennessee and North Carolina. At that time, consuming and selling alcohol was illegal on the North Carolina side of the property, but legal on the Tennessee side. To keep things straight, a wide white line was drawn down the center of the dining room, even dividing the central banquet table in half, to let patrons know exactly where they could enjoy a drink. According to legend, the Sheriff of Avery County spent a good deal of time hanging around the dining room, keeping his eye peeled for anyone who strayed over the border into North Carolina holding a drink. One foot across the state line would immediately result in a very stiff fine, payable on the spot in cash.

But it was guests at this hotel who had some of the most notable encounters with the strange music of Roan Mountain. Henry E, Colton, a geologist and naturalist visited the mountain in 1878 and there recorded that he did hear a clear and distinct sound “like the humming of a thousand bees” when standing on the mountain. He attributed this sound the electrical energy generated by the friction of air currents rising up from the valley.

Another visitor who trekked out from the Hotel in the late 19th Century had a completely different experience of the phantom music. This young man hiked out onto the mountain on a gloomy day against Wilder’s warnings and soon found himself caught in a raging thunderstorm. As the wind around him raged, he began to hear unearthly howls and moans calling from the air around him. He took shelter in a cave, where he found himself confronted by much more than he had bargained for.

In the cave, the voices didn’t cease, but grew even louder. The air around the young man soon began to be filled with spectral visions, gashed and torn bodies bearing the marks of torture floated around him. Their screams of torment filled the air, as the hideous shapes danced around him. The man passed out from fear. When he awoke, he found his clothing was torn and as white as if it had been bleached. The man returned to the cave convinced he had seen a vision of Hell.

People say they hear the phantom choir of Roan Mountain singing to this day, and to this day some hear angelic voices and some hear tormented screams. It’s said that the sounds are most often heard after a thunderstorm has passed through the valley. Some say that it’s the wind moving through the balsams, some say it’s something not of this world, and that whether your the voices of angels or demons on Roan Mountain is a taste of what awaits you in the next world.

There’s another unusual phenomenon associated with Roan Mountain, although this one is entirely natural. Multiple people have reported seeing circular rainbows in the sky above the mountain. While all rainbows are full circles, rainbows are also very large, and from the perspective of the viewer the arc of the bow is most often interrupted by intersecting with the Earth. While this is something that is often seen by airline pilots flying high above the ground, it’s only from very high altitudes when atmospheric conditions are exactly right that the full circle of the rainbow can be seen from the surface. Roan Mountain seems to have just the right conditions to make it one of the few places on the planet where this can happen.

The Cloudland Hotel closed early in the 20th Century, and the building was demolished and the land sold to the National Forest Service. Today, Roan Mountain is protected forrest land and the Appalachian Trail crosses the top of the ridge. Its beauty is open and enjoyable to anyone who cares to take a challenging hike through the hills, and to anyone who may be prepared to hear voices singing to them from outside of this world.

The French Broad River meanders slowly through Asheville on its way to Tennessee, where in the vicinity of Knoxville it joins with the Holston River to form the Tennessee River. The Tennessee flows into the Ohio, which connects to the Mississippi. It’s this convergence which gave the river such an important place in the early economy of North Carolina. In the days when rivers were the most important transportation routes across the county, it was the French Broad which connected North Carolina to the West. The French Broad was the early lifeblood of Asheville, and from the settling of the mountains by Europeans until the early 20th century the river was lined with logging camps and sawmills cutting and shipping timber out into the wide world.

But apart from it’s economic importance, the French Broad has also been a source of joy for those who lived in Asheville. It’s slow path through the city and cool, inviting waters made it the perfect place to take a dip on a hot summer day. It’s from this that we get the story of one of North Carolina’s most unusual ghosts, the naked ghost of the Craven Street bridge.

The story goes that sometime in the early 20th century, one evening a group of young boys went swimming in the river on a hot summer day. They were out on what was then the western edge of the city, just south of where now I-240 crosses the river. These were the days before bathing suits were something that most everyone owned, and so the boys stripped off and dove into the river as naked as the day they were born. In a few ways, things were a little more relaxed back then.

The boys chose a bad time to go swimming. There had been bad storms upriver a few days before, and the usually calm French Broad was flowing more swiftly than normal. The gentle eddies where the river flowed over the boulders lying in its bed had become dangerous undercurrents. They had also ventured out late in the evening, the sun was already heading down as they first swam into the waters.

The boys were playing and laughing, not noticing that they were floating further and faster down the river than usual. When they noticed that the light was fading and they had drifted down to close to the pilings of the bridge where Craven Street crossed the French Broad, and where the water was flowing in dangerous rapids around the bridge, they realized they needed to head home. And they also realized that one of their party was missing.

The boys began a frantic search for their missing friend. They called out his name, dove underwater, and sent one of their number running for help. As the neighbors came down a frantic search was organized, boats were set out on the water, and lanterns lit up the river.

As the night grew deeper, they sadly realized their chances had run out. They made the choice to call off the search. Boats would be sent out in the daylight to dredge the river. But even that was to no avail. The poor child’s body was never found.

But soon after the boy disappeared, some of those traveling across the bridge at the time when night fell began to speak of something strange. They said that they saw a naked boy running across the bridge, but that when they called out to him he kept running as if he couldn’t hear. And if they ran to catch up with him, he vanished into thin air.

Naked ghosts are something of a rarity in American Folklore, although the topic of why ghosts wear clothes has been a surprisingly hotly debated one in the history of religion and belief in the supernatural. Those arguing against the possibility of the spirits of the dead returning to earth have presented multiple variations on the premise that if a ghost is the appearance of a soul on Earth, for a ghost to be clothed that means that the clothing must also be possessed with some immortal element capable of returning to earth. To put it simply, they say that if a ghost isn’t barefoot it means that shoes have souls. Which is to many people on both sides of the argument a theological absurdity.

The American satirist and short story writer Ambrose Bierce lampooned the idea of clothed spirits in his 1902 essay The Clothing of Ghosts, stating that he would only accept as real a spirit who appeared to him while completely nude. “We draw the line at clothing,” Bierce wrote, “The materialized spook appealing to our senses for recognition of his ghostly character must authenticate himself otherwise than by familiar and remembered habiliments. He must be credentialed by nudity —and that regardless of temperature or who may happen to be present.”

If the clothed or unclothed spirit of Ambrose Bierce ever returns to this earth, we expect that he will at least have a definite answer to the question for us all. If you don’t want to wait around for his spirit to return, the naked ghost of Craven Street bridge is supposedly still seen until this day, when drivers in the early evening hours on the hottest days of summer are surprised to see a naked boy running along side their car who disappears before he finishes crossing the bridge.

Grandfather Mountain sands above Blowing Rock Highway near Linville. The mountain gets its name from the mountain’s profile, which resembles the head of a bearded old man laying down in sleep. The unique and gorgeous natural environment around Grandfather has long been a draw for visitors to the North Carolina mountains. Grandfather Mountain was operated as a private tourist attraction for many years until 2011, when it was purchased by the State of North Carolina and is now a publicly-owned nature preserve.

The mountain has been a source of inspiration to many, including Shepherd M. Dugger, who praises its beauty in extremely flowery language in his highly odd combination of historical romance and travel guide The Balsam Groves of Grandfather Mountain. Originally published in 1907, Dugger’s book often cited as some of the finest bad writing ever produced by a North Carolina author. But as bad as his prose may be, Dugger is not alone in finding beauty in the woods and trails of grandfather mountain.

Hiking is one of the prime attractions that brings people to the park. The park’s eleven trails cover miles of terrain, and the more difficut backcountry trails take hikers through unique ecosystems that are home to dozens of rare and endangered species. It’s on one of these trails that something even more rare has been seen, the ghost of a lost hiker.

The phantom hiker of Grandfather Mountain is said to be an older man, bearded, with a rough and grizzled appearance. He can be distinguished from a living hiker by the lack of Neoprene and Gore-Tex in his wardrobe. Instead, he’s said to wear old-fashioned workman’s clothes that look like they’re from somewhere in the middle of the Twentieth Century. He wears a rough canvas army backpack and carries a long walking stick.

The phantom hiker is said to appear mostly as the evening is settling in, when most of the day hikers have left or are working their way back. He never says anything, and will never acknowledge any greeting. He simply appears walking along one of the trails in the backcountry, moves swiftly ahead of anyone else he encounters, and then simply vanishes.

No one knows who this mysterious figure is. Some have suggested that he was a hiker who became lost in the the thick woods around the mountain, and fell or was injured and was unable to make his way back out. Others have said he’s just the spirit of a man who loved the mountain so much that he chose to stay there after he died.

This ghostly hiker seems to do no harm. He seems to want little to do with people in general. He only seems to be there, like all the other visitors, to enjoy the natural wonder of Grandfather Mountain.

The Brown Mountain Lights

Brown Mountain is a low ridge in Burke County that, during dry, crisp evenings in the autumn, is host to a genuine and baffling mystery. When conditions are right, mysterious glowing orbs can be seen to rise up off the mountain, hover and wobble about fifteen feet up in the air, and then disappear. There’s no denying that the lights are real. They have been observed by countless witnesses and photographed on many occasions. But what they are is still unknown.

The Brown Mountain Lights have been observed for centuries, and multiple legends have arisen around the phenomenon. The Cherokee were aware of the lights, and according to some accounts claimed that the lights were the souls of Cherokee women searching for their men who had died in a great battle between the Cherokee and the Catawba that took place on Brown Mountain. Another legend says that the lights are the the ghostly echoes of lights that appeared during a search for a murdered woman in the 19th century.

But what was once the most widely known legend was recorded in song in the 1950s by the duo known as the “Sweethearts of Country Music.” Scott Wiseman and Myrtle Eleanor Cooper were both North Carolina natives, who sang recorded as Lulu Belle and Scotty from the 1920s until the 1950s. A married couple, the two performed together from 1935 until 1958 as regulars on the Chicago radio station’s WLS-AM’s National Barn Dance program. At the time, they were one of the biggest acts in country music.

The song Brown Mountain Light, penned by Wiseman, tells a version of the story where a man, accompanied by a slave, becomes lost while hunting on the mountain. The man is never found. The slave returns to the mountain every night with a lantern to hunt for him, carrying on this search even from beyond the grave.

Wiseman, who was from nearby Boone, said this version of the story is one he head from his uncle, who took him hunting and camping near Brown Mountain. The song rose to the top of the country charts and subsequently became the best-known version of the legend for a generation.

The legend of Brown Mountain recorded in the Lulu Belle and Scotty song is somewhat dated, particularly in regard to its unforgivable romanticizing of slavery. Indeed, it’s easy to imagine a retelling of this story where the lights are from people looking for the slave who, when realizing he was alone on the mountain, seized his chance and hightailed it for Ohio and freedom.

As for the lights themselves, many different possible scientific explanations have been offered, from swamp gas to the reflections of automobile headlights from the valley below. But every explanation offered up so far seems to be too easily disproved. The lights have been observed since before automobiles existed, so headlights are an unsatisfactory explanation, and the lights were even observed during the 1916 flood that shut down all automobile and railway traffic in the valley below. The swamp gas theory seems to be slightly hobbled by the complete absence of a swamp on Brown Mountain. Some have theorized that the lights may be a naturally-occurring electrical discharge caused by the slow movement of the geological fault line below the mountain.

Whatever their cause, people still flock to see the Brown Mountain Lights, but spotting them is never guaranteed. Reportedly, your best chance to see the lights comes on a dry, clear night in October or November, after all the leaves are off the trees.

Where to go to see the lights

Brown Mountain is located in the Pisgah National Forest, and there a few nearby overlooks commonly used to observe the lights.

Brown Mountain Overlook, located 20 miles north of Morganton on NC highway 181, 1 mile south of the Barkhouse Picnic Area.

Wiseman’s View Overlook can be found 5 miles south of Linville Falls on Kistler Memorial Highway, which is also Old NC 105 and State Road 1238.

Lost Cove Cliffs Overlook, which is found on the Blue Ridge Parkway, at mile-post 310, 2 miles north of the NC highway 181 junction.

The lights are most commonly seen on clear, dry nights in the autumn. Moonless nights can be a boon to visibility. The lights are a relatively rare occurrence, and many people have sat on a car hood late into the evening staring into the darkness and seeing nothing. But it’s definitely worth a look.