The first group to see it were members of the Morganton Fishing Club. When they spread the news, folks laughed at them “and accused them of seeing things in the night as a result of a common human frailty.” I’m guessing here, but I think the dismissal centered around fishing club members imbibing too much moonshine to accurately see much of anything accurately.
However, other more sober individuals began to see atmospheric lights flash momentarily in the mountains above Morganton around 1910 and the mysterious phenomenon of the Brown Mountain lights was born. In Linville Falls, Joseph Loven claimed he saw lights “much smaller than the full moon, much larger than any star” momentarily show themselves in the night sky somewhere around Brown Mountain and an adjacent rise called Rattlesnake Knob. With some regularity he witnessed all this as far back as 1897 but didn’t think much of it.
Loven’s assertion came over a hundred years after German surveyor and mapmaker John Gerard de Brahm first reported seeing the lights on a trip into Cherokee country in 1771. His claims were discounted because detractors contended he was “much addicted to alchemy” (believing lead could be turned into gold). In other words, they believed he wasn’t scientific enough to be trusted.
“Mobile spheres of glowing light” best describe the mystery and it didn’t take long after the fishing club announced their night of seeing whatever they saw for public attention to fixate on the causes. In 1913 the U.S. Geological Survey sent out a member to document the episodes and determine the origin. He thought the lights might be attributable to a train rolling through the area since sightings noted that they always seemed to come at specific times but when the 1916 flood interrupted service and the lights persisted, that theory fell by the wayside. The USGS sent out another team in 1922 that came to much the inconclusive conclusions, without a real answer.
So what explains this unexplainable phenomena? Over the years, theories have evolved. That’s the thing; no one has ever been able to accurately pinpoint the cause of the lights. Researchers have debated what phenomena took place to produce what only a few saw. Atmospherics? Substances that exist uniquely on that mountain? In the era of Flash Gordon, a popular Saturday morning movie serial that kids flocked to, the idea of a UFO landing somewhere around Table Rock as the source has been asserted. Searching for the lights has over decades become a popular pastime. If you drive up Highway 181 north from Morganton, an overlook has been created so folks can stop and wait for the mysterious lights to twinkle.
Are they real? Dunno. Ever seen them? I haven’t. But their are two surprising works of art that have sprung from the tale that do not explain the origins but celebrate the phenomena. More once I get back from the Overlook.
Photo: Shot of the Overlook, courtesy of Destination McDowell. They call it a “Blue Ridge Mystery.”
