All good mystery stories should have a satisfactory ending with a clear explanation, but in real life, some mysteries can never be solved. One of these is the unexplainable happenings in the Brown Mountain Lights, which appear and disappear across a wavy summit of Brown Mountain in the foothills of the Blue Ridge. Even in our advanced scientific age, this is one of the most baffling of North Carolina’s mysteries.
These eerie little globules of colored and hazy-white lights have been seen by countless people for generations. No two persons agree on exactly what they have seen. Some say the lights are red at first, then change through the colors of the spectrum to fade out in pale blue. Others say they are misty white, others, yellow, and still others say they are like big shining stars. However they appear, they do exist, as has been reported for well over a hundred and fifty years, and rumored for far longer.
People who have grown up in the mountains tell several legendary stories of their origin. One is that many years ago, in about 1850, a girl was living in a remote cabin with her parents. She had a sweetheart who went through the wild country every night to visit her. One night they decided to get married, so the young man left to make plans in the village for the wedding. Soon after he left, a terrible storm came up. The lightning and the lashing winds toppled trees and created havoc in the woods.
The next evening, when the time came for the young man’s arrival, he did not appear. They had no flashlights in those days, so the girl took a torch of flaming pine wood and went out in the night to light his way. Her sweetheart never did appear. Every night, as long as she lived, she went wandering over the hills, searching for her lover. When she became an old woman, she died. Everyone said the lights would go out, and they did—for a time. But they reappeared and can still be seen, on nights when conditions are right, flickering across Brown Mountain.
What do you think the Brown Mountain Lights are?
Can you write a story about the Brown Mountain Lights?
Would you like to see the lights? They are rising, falling, wavering globules of light, some reddish, some bluish, some hazy-white, dancing across the summit of Brown Mountain, ask your mom to go up to Wiseman’s View just off the Blue Ridge Parkway in Avery County near Linville Falls, NC. Wait patiently on some night, preferably in the early fall. The lights, “like fluttering fairy candles,” may appear and they may not. If you are fortunate enough to see them, you will marvel at them. You will go away with a feeling of awe and frustration. What are those lights? How can they appear out of a clear sky, hover in the air, dance across a mountain top, then disappear? And why in just one particular place over Brown Mountain? No one knows!
In Caney Fork Township in Jackson County, about fifteen miles from Sylva, North Carolina, there is an enormous rock with myriad strange markings covering its surface. Among the curious symbols is a huge, seven-fingered handprint. This, say the old men, is the handprint of Judaculla, the slant-eyed giant, and the scratches and other markings are his signs and directions.
Judaculla, so legends say, was a real giant with slanting eyes and fierce countenance who lived in the Judaculla Old Fields on the slopes of Balsam Mountains. His mother was a flashing comet, his father the thunder, and he fearsome to behold. He was taller than the tallest pine, could step from one mountain to the next, and could drink up a whole stream at one draught. He had a voice that made the heavens rumble and earth-people tremble. His bow was the arc of heaven, his arrows the shafts of lightning, his face was so ugly that all men turned from him in horror.
Judaculla was the god of the hunt. When he wished to go from his home to the lower levels to secure the game, he would make one leap from his mountain top and land upon the Rock, thus making the marks one sees there today. The handprint was made when the giant caught a mortal hunter in his preserve, snatched at him and missed, leaving the impression of his huge hand on the surface of the Rock. Other tales say that Judaculla was a kindly giant, who changed himself into a will-o-the wisp to avoid the hostile stares of men, then wandered away, but left a written message on the Rock to tell hunters where to find game.
One man said that as a boy, he heard from old men that large bands of Cherokee, even from as far away as Oklahoma, gathered to assemble periodically at the Rock. They remained a day or two at a time, performing rituals and "reading“ the pictures. Whatever may be the meaning of the markings on Judaculla Rock, their very existence there forms a fascinating mystery item of ancient North Carolina history.
One night in the early spring of the 1920s, a young man, John Harper, was on his way home to High Point from Raleigh, North Carolina. The weather was cloudy, and as he drove along, the mist and fog became thicker and thicker. Finally, he could scarcely see the road ahead, but he kept on, eager to get home and to bed, because he must be at work in the morning. No cars met him on the road, not did any pass him. He felt he was the only person on the highway. Two o’clock on a foggy, misty morning with no other human in sight or hearing gave John the creeps. He sang snatches of song and whistled tunes to dispel the loneliness.
Suddenly, as he neared an underpass near Jamestown, the fog lifted, and his feeling of eerie solitude vanished. He speeded up, thinking that now he could make up for the time he had had to drive so slowly: but something or someone was standing by the side of the road. He had to brake suddenly, stamping hard to stop. He rolled down his window and peered into the gloom. Could he be seeing right? Surely no beautiful young girl would be out alone at this hour on a deserted road.
But there she stood, in plain view by the side of the highway. She seemed a lovely vision, in a long, white evening dress with a halo of dark hair framing her beautiful face. In great distress, trembling, and sobbing she came forward. John opened the car door, and the girl ran toward it. “Please, oh please,” she cried as a flood of tears rolled down her cheeks. “Please won’t you help me get home, I am lost!”
“Of course, I will,” John assured her. “I’ll be happy to drive you home. Get in and tell me where you live.”
The girl crept into the car, and a cold, wet burst of fog seemed to blow in with her. John could scarcely see her face as the cloudy mist settled around them once more. She gave him an address in High Point in a plaintive, tearful voice. “Oh, I know where that is,” John said. “I have to go right down that street to get to my home. But tell me, why are you alone at this time of night? What is your name?”
The girl mumbled something that sounded like “Lucy,” but her voice was so faint John could just make out the word. Then she said in a clearer whisper, “My mother will be so worried. It’s so late, and I’m lost.”
“Where have you been?” John asked, “and why are you alone?”
“Oh, it doesn’t matter!” she murmured. “!” she ended in a thin wail. “I’m lost!”
“I’m so sorry, but don’t worry, I’ll soon have you home.”
“Well stop asking me questions,” said the girl. “I’ll be all right as soon as I see my mother.”
John did not question her further, and soon they reached the address she had given him. There was the house, just as she had said, with black numbers on a white post, and a dim light shining through the glass in the front door. John got out of the car on his side, and being a Southern gentleman, he was prepared to open the door for Lucy. He opened the door, but in the thick mist he could not make out even the blur of the girl’s white dress. He peered into the car but still could see nothing!
He struck a match and held it out. There was no passenger. He gasped and choked on the fog that surrounded him. He could scarcely see the beams of his headlights for the mist. He shivered in the sudden chill that seemed to strike to his very bones.
“She must have slipped out while I was going around the back of the car to open the door.” He told himself. “But I don’t see how she could have gotten into the house so quickly. I’ll just find out for my peace of mind.”
John made his way through the thick fog toward the dim light from the house. He bounded up the steps and quickly pushed the bell. Nothing happened. He rang again, but still, there was no sound from within. Then he knocked loudly with his fist. At the third knock, an elderly lady opened the door.
She was disheveled and looked as if she had been crying, but in some strange way, resembled Lucy.
“I’m John Harper, ma’am,” John said. “I brought your daughter, Lucy, home. I don’t know how she got out of my car and into the house so quickly. She did come in, didn’t she?”
The woman didn’t answer for a moment, then her face crumpled into a mask of grief, and tears slipped down her wrinkled cheeks. “Lucy,” she murmured, “my little Lucy. Where did you find her?”
“She stopped me at the underpass near Jamestown,” John replied, “and asked me to bring her to this address. She said she was a lot, and you would be worried.” He finished with the question. “But where is she now?”
The woman began sobbing, then she tried to wipe away her tears with an old lace handkerchief. “I did have a daughter named Lucy once. She was a lovely sweet young girl, and oh how she loved to dance! One night, when she was just eighteen, on her way home from a dance, she was killed in a wreck. It happened at that Jamestown underpass.”
Tears rolled down her cheeks, and John Harper felt his own eyes filling as she said. “You’re not the only person who has tried to bring my Lucy home.” With that, the lady closed the door sadly, leaving John amazed and bewildered.
When he told the strange story later, one of his friends said, “The story of the girl who could never get home has been told many times in the last fifty years—not just here but in many places. Doubtless, the incident will happen again and again, for the story of the lost girl who tries to get home seems to be a part of the ghost lore of many states in outland. But it did happen to John Harper!