B — partly documented

Brown Mountain Lights

the United States
Burke County, North Carolina, Appalachian Blue Ridge

Brown Mountain Lights — point-like reddish, yellowish or white lights that appear on the flank of the mountain, move, divide and go out.

From a Blue Ridge overlook, at night, a man in a hat sits with his back to us and watches: above the ridge of Brown Mountain several point-like lights, reddish and white, hang suspended and divide, under the full moon.

Variants and names: Brown Mountain Lights, in the singular the Brown Mountain Light; no dialect variant documented
What is told: Point-like reddish, yellowish or white lights that appear on the flank of the mountain, move, divide and go out. There is no creature at all: the tradition is a luminous theophany, and the narrative explanations have been grafted on afterwards, such as the ghosts of a murdered wife or of a slave with a lantern searching for his lost master. The canonical observation points are Wiseman's View, milepost 310 of the Blue Ridge Parkway and the NC-181 near Jonas Ridge.
What it was forthe author’s reading: It marks a place as a threshold and organises a precise social practice, the legend trip, that is, the collective night-time outing to the overlook. It further serves as a local identity narrative and, since the Second World War, as an explicit tourist resource.
Where it is attested: First attestations in print around 1910, coinciding with the electrification of the valley and with the adoption by the Southern Railway, in 1909, of headlights of 600,000 candlepower. USGS investigation of 1913 by D. B. Sterrett and USGS investigation of 1922 by George R. Mansfield, carried out with a plane table and checked against the train timetables, republished as USGS Circular 646 in 1971: 47 per cent motor-car headlights, 33 per cent locomotive headlights, 10 per cent fixed lights, 10 per cent brush fires. National diffusion through the bluegrass song by Scotty Wiseman, 1961.
Caution: The claim that the Cherokee observed the lights from 1200 appears for the first time in an article in the Asheville Citizen of 1938, with no indication of sources, and is considered by scholars of native traditions a myth invented by white authors: it is material of grade C. The supposed sighting by the Wiseman family «around 1854» was likewise published only in 1971 and is not verifiable. The local tradition is genuine but recent, of the early twentieth century, not of the nineteenth.

Reality checkestablished

What has been established today.

The Brown Mountain lights have been investigated twice by the United States Geological Survey. In 1913 D. B. Sterrett established that the headlights of Southern Railway locomotives heading west were visible from the observation point, and the railway timetables coincided; in 1922 George R. Mansfield redid the survey with map and alidade and concluded that trains, motor-car headlights and brush fires accounted for the observations. A modern check came from Appalachian State University, which kept two low-light cameras trained on the mountain and on the Linville Gorge, accumulating by 2014 about 6,300 hours of footage without recording any unexplained light.

G. R. Mansfield, «Origin of the Brown Mountain Light in North Carolina», USGS Circular 646, 1922; D. B. Sterrett, USGS, 1913; Appalachian State University, observation campaign up to 2014

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Brown Mountain Lights

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