CITIZEN-TIMES.com
Brown Mountain Lights spur festival
By Dan Testa
dtesta@ashevill.gannett.com
June 9, 2006 12:15 am
LINVILLE FALLS ? The Brown Mountain Lights ? the unexplained phenomena of floating, flaming, multicolored balls visible from the rim of Linville Gorge ? have been part of area residents? lives for generations.
Jean Taylor-Thomas remembers camping as a child on Wiseman?s View lookout with her family and watching the lights hover and dart along the ridges of Brown Mountain in Pisgah National Forest.
?They?re kind of eerie, especially if you?re a kid,? she said. ?But so was the ?Wizard of Oz.??
Taylor-Thomas? brother used to hunt on Brown Mountain. He told her there was something strange about that forest.
?He just said they didn?t smell like any other woods he?s ever been in.?
Visitors will have the opportunity to look for the lights themselves and draw their own conclusions at the first Brown Mountain Lights Heritage Festival this weekend in Linville Falls.
Throughout North Carolina, legends explaining the phenomena abound: One describes a slave who searches eternally for his missing master, his lantern still burning. Another story says the lights are the lanterns of Indian maidens looking for lost loved ones after a battle between the Catawba and Cherokee.
In the late 1990s, agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigated the lights in an episode of ?The X-Files.?
Tonight, people can describe their observations of the lights at a bonfire and open mic session. On Saturday, buses will ferry crowds up to Wiseman?s View to try to glimpse the mysterious lights. Sunday features an interdenominational church service on Wiseman?s View.
The festival celebrates not only the lights but the history and heritage of the region?s pioneering families.
Other activities include genealogy, crafts, bluegrass music and a camp set up on Kings Mountain by Revolutionary War re-enactors, the Overmountain Men.
Whether the lights will be visible is anyone?s guess. Observers claim they appear at irregular intervals over the top of Brown Mountain, according to the Web site www.westernncattractions.com: ?They are said to move erratically up and down, visible at a distance, but vanishing as one climbs the mountain. They at first appear to be about twice the size of a star as they come over Brown Mountain. Sometimes they have a reddish or blue cast. On dark nights, they pop up so thick and fast it?s impossible to count them.?
Attempts to explain the lights by the U.S. Geological Survey have been unsuccessful. This weekend, numerous experts will provide the latest scientific explanations for the lights in a lecture series as part of the festival.
Daniel B. Caton, professor of physics and astronomy at Appalachian State University, says he believes in science, not ghosts.
He initially sought to debunk the Brown Mountain Lights as a myth. Based on many eyewitness accounts, however, he sees similarities to a rare phenomenon called ball lightning ? electrically-charged, spherical lumps of gas. Caton hopes to set up a streaming webcam at a lookout point in Linville Gorge to test this theory.
Joshua P. Warren, a member of the Asheville paranormal investigation group LEMUR (League of Etheric Materialization and Unexplained-Phenomena Research), has similarly concluded that the lights are charged balls of plasma, but that still doesn?t explain where they come from.
?What is the deeper foundation behind how these plasmas are formed?? he asked.
?The implications are quite vast.?
Where can I see the lights?
Brown Mountain Overlook, 20 miles north of Morganton on N.C. 181, one mile south of the Barkhouse Picnic Area.
Wiseman?s View Overlook, five miles south of the village of Linville Falls on Kistler Memorial Highway or Old N.C. 105 or State Road 1238.
Lost Cove Cliffs Overlook on the Blue Ridge Parkway, at Milepost 310, two miles north of the N.C. 181 junction.
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