The Haunting Mystery of the Brown Mountain Lights

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I love seeing his joy when he speaks of the stories his grandpa read him. You just don’t see genuine people like this on social media all that often. Great video and great medium with the location

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/are95 📅︎︎ Oct 27 2022 🗫︎ replies

From this video it does seem like he's of Native American descent. Does anyone know if this is correct?

👍︎︎ 8 👤︎︎ u/h0lySp1r1t 📅︎︎ Oct 26 2022 🗫︎ replies

This one wasn’t my favorite but still enjoyable

👍︎︎ 3 👤︎︎ u/[deleted] 📅︎︎ Oct 26 2022 🗫︎ replies

I always thought the ghost lights were just fireflies, but the folklore around the Appalachians always intrigued me

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/f-ckingwhy 📅︎︎ Nov 05 2022 🗫︎ replies

Im a stones throw from the lights… never seen them personally but the old stories are so good.

There’s also an old story that during the civil war A slave owners brother freed his brothers slaves in the night and they were fleeing to the North with the former slaves who were now free men. The White was killed (some say Native American tribe got him some say a bear) and the couple of freed slaves stayed looking for him with their lanterns at night and were also killed shortly after. The story says that the lights are from the lanterns of the freed slaves looking for the man that broke them free.

Not sure if he heard of this story or not but if he did I totally understand not sharing it as there’s a whole lot of race relations involved.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Old-Instruction3583 📅︎︎ Nov 07 2022 🗫︎ replies
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hello everybody today I'm talking to you from a place known as wiseman's view one of the most beautiful points in all of Appalachia just behind me you can see a landmark known as Table Rock and the gorge that exist between this point and that one has one of the most intriguing mysteries in the natural world this view is a testament to the Earth's majesty and the age and colors of these Hills tell us that whenever God painted the world his brush must have began in Appalachia during the day these Hills are home to one of the planet's greatest Beauties but at night it's home to one of appalachia's greatest monsters what you're seeing now is the Unexplained Brown Mountain Lights the Brown Mountain Lights of North Carolina are described as a sort of shooting star or floating Spirit stories of these ghost lights have haunted the region for years and to this day their reputation is one of Wonder and Terror the Brown Mountain Lights of the Linville Gorge that's part of the Pisgah National Forest is a to this day unexplained phenomena scientists and locals have spent the past Century trying to determine what these lights are and perhaps just as terrifying as the existence of the lights themselves are the stories that accompany them so today we're going to talk about the stories theories Legends and monsters that inhabit these Hills and as a spoiler some of the answers may be more terrifying than I care to admit something I want to mention before we begin is that this video would not have been possible without the help of some very kind people a lot of the stories about the brown mount Mountain Lights are regulated to local Legend So I've been driving around the area of the Linville Gorge for several days looking for people who had family or may know stories relating to the lights during this time I met a very kind author by the name of tense Franklin Banks who I'll talk about more at the end who invited me into her home and allowed me to comb through her records that her and her mother had taken for decades that had everything from rare photographs of the lights to eyewitness accounts to local folklore she wrote a book regarding the area that will be linked in the description and this video would not have been possible without her also several of the photographs I'm going to use from this video will come from the arc adventures on YouTube who has the best photos ever of the Brown Mountain Lights and a man named Burgess Bell whose favorite pastime is going up to wiseman's view and taking pictures of the lights while I was there getting footage for my video I met him and he was very kind taught me how to use my camera and even offered me access to several of his pictures and videos and I greatly appreciate it and he'll be linked in the description as well several of the stories you're about to hear have never existed in the public record until now so hopefully you're at least half as excited to hear it as I am to tell it so today for the Halloween season we are going to talk about one of Nature's Most haunting Mysteries the Brown Mountain Lights and hopefully I don't fall off a cliff although that would get a lot of views and as an important announcement before we get started ladies and gentlemen I present you him he is finally here this empty vessel I mean uh windagoon YouTube's doll is available to purchase at the link in the description you choose allowed me to design this Pagan Idol I mean a vinyl figure I gotta stop doing that and I couldn't be happier with how it turned out like look how well they did on like the hair and the antlers isn't he just the cutest they even let me design the box which has an entrance to Hollow Earth and a spooky Forest wrapped around it along with several of my stupid quotes that I'm honestly surprised they let me get away with and every time one of these little guys is sold it supports me directly so if you decide to pick one up that really means the world and I greatly appreciate it and know that it will go directly towards funding more of these self-destructive Ventures that I call YouTube videos so again live now at the link in the description at youtubes.com he'll be here for a very short time and then he's gone forever I should also mention that I am not responsible for any chanting or Whispering that you hear while in his presence but don't let that scare you off feel free to put him anywhere in the house and there's never a reason to hide from him he already knows your sins again thank you all so much for supporting me it really does mean the most hope you check him out link is in the description and we are back to the video we are going to go ahead and get into it but as always thank you for watching now there's a lot to cover with the brown Mountain line so it's probably best that I start at the beginning the first official mention of the lights specifically comes from a 1912 article in the Charlotte Observer in that article it says that the locals have begun to see strange lights appear within the Linville Gorge which is as mentioned the gorge here now this wasn't the first written mention of the lights we'll get to that later however it was the first published mention with this announcement the lights became a local Legend and people from all over the country began to come to the Linville Gorge and here at wiseman's view to view the lights for themselves and if you've seen the lights directly there's really no mistaking them these Giant floating orbs of what appears to be fire or lightning that hover in and above the tree line it became a national spectacle and so much of a spectacle in fact that the government got involved in 1913 the United States Geological Survey or the USGS sent an agent named DBC share it to come investigate these claims of the Brown Mountain Lights DB's Sarah walked to the top of wiseman's view took a quick look over the Hillside and determined that people were just looking at train lights legit he gave the official report that these bunch of dumb yokels just saw a train and thought it was God or something which a few notes on that for one people know what trains look like two even though Starrett argued that it could have been Reflections from the train light around the hills Reflections don't look like that and three that that's not a train line so as you can imagine the locals were not convinced especially when a large flood hit the area in 1916 and despite all of the railways and electricity being shut down for several weeks the light still appeared also during this time a local hotel owner and his son George and Joseph Lovin began to gather accounts from visitors who would stay in the hotel who were coming up to wiseman's view to see the lights from several of these accounts of these burning balls of fire rising up above the tree line and then wisping across the canyon at impossible speeds the lights graduated from a local Oddity to a national Legend So in 1922 the USGS sent in another agent this time a man by the name of George Mansfield to stay in the region for two weeks gather hard evidence and dispel the rumors of these ghost lights for good so Mansfield stayed at the Levins hotel for two weeks and while he was there used all manner of charts Maps tell telescopes in order to determine what these lights are now here's the problem with that anyone who's been in the region locals especially can tell you that the Brown Mountain Lights are not a for sure occurrence especially nowadays when several of the areas around the mountains have hiking trails and ATV paths through them it's hard to determine if a light you're seeing is a headlight or maybe the start of what will become a brown Mountain light tense Banks the author I mentioned earlier who wrote a book on the region and has lived here her entire life has said she has only definitely seen the lights five times and again when you definitely see them you definitely see them but it's not an everyday occurrence so just because this guy from the USGS came down here to go fishing for two weeks doesn't mean he was going to catch anything as a matter of fact the Levin's family said they came up here with Mansfield whenever he did his surveys and every night he was there the lights didn't happen so after two weeks Mansfield published a 30-page paper detailing his analysis of these Brown Mountain Lights in his report Mansfield would conclude about 47 percent of the lights that the rider was able to study instrumentally were due to automobile headlights 33 percent to locomotive headlights 10 percent to stationary lights and 10 percent to brush fires which once again not a train the leading theory of the time was that whenever the surrounding counties became electrified and towns like Spruce Pine and Morganton had a power grid for the first time it caused a series of Reflections and refractions across the Mountainside that caused the illusion of the Brown Mountain Lights and to be fair to the USGS official Publications did coincide with the same time that electricity began to enter the area the whole surrounding County was pretty much electrified by 1911 1912 and the first official publication as I mentioned was 1913. another thing that's also fair to mention to them is that in 1911 Jules Verne the author who wrote Journey to the Center of the Earth the Mysterious Island and several other works published a novel called Master of the world and in the book master of the world a scientist who's in Table Rock which is foreign right there and while inside of Table Rock the scientist in the story created all these crazy Contraptions like flying machines that caused these energy balls to float out of the Rock and around the mountain itself so it's really convenient that two years before people started talking about the Brown Mountain Lights a famous author put out a book where Giant floating lights float around the mountain so the government looked down here at Appalachia and said all these people they're getting tore up with you know their electricity and trains and reading and it was just too much for them and their brain conjured up the lights and that would be fine and dandy if the first accounts were in 1913 but the Brown Mountain Lights go back further much further the earliest supposed account of the Brown Mountain Lights goes back to 1771. when a man by the name of Jean William Gerard de Brom was hired by King George forged to come to the colonies which is what is what North Carolina was at the time and surveyed The Land Before reporting back to the king in his statement debraham said this and it's very pompous but bear with me in a heavy atmosphere the nitrous Vapors are swallowed up through the spirituals of the mountains and thus the country is cleared from their corrosion when the atmosphere's light these nitrous Vapors rise up to the arsenical and sulfurous subliming through the expericals of the mountains and when they meet with each other in contact the nighter in flames vulgarates and detonates whence the frequent thunders in which a most volatile vitalized my word Spirit of neither a sins to purify Inspire the upper air and flogastin regeneratum descends to impregnate the bowels of the Earth so you know weird light stuff happens however this account I don't necessarily stand by for one de Braun was never officially supposed to survey North Carolina it was supposed to survey South Carolina down into Florida and while he would have passed through the region it's not likely that's what he was writing about and although it's hard to tell because he speaks the way he does he's probably talking about thunderstorms so I wouldn't put a lot of faith on that one but what I would put Faith on is the account of a man named fate Wiseman around 1854 a young boy by the name of Fate Wiseman climbed to the top of the Linville Mountain to go camping for the night that night while on top of the mountain he said he looked down into the valley and saw these giant burning orbs that floated above the tree line so numerous it was hard for him to count and he watched as they traced their way up to Table Rock and back down to the river several of his friends who he invited to come up here and camp with him over the following years all had the same story of these bright orbs appearing it's for that reason that the Mountaintop I'm sitting on right now is known as wiseman's view decades later Fate's great nephew Man by the name of Scotty Wiseman would become a famous country music singer and in 1961 he wrote a song about the stories his great uncle would tell him we'll talk about the stories in a minute but we're sticking to the timeline for now what's also funny about wiseman's account is whenever Skeptics try to talk it down because remember the leading theory at least decades back was that the electricity around the mountain is what was causing the lights and 1854 is well before any electricity in the area whenever all these official accounts look at it they're like well there was a railroad built there four years later like can we stop talking about the trains So Not only was it a locally known fact that the lights were here among families like the wisemans and the Levins but a book written in the 1930s called the guide to the old North State lists several sightings of the lights dating back to the Civil War and furthermore a local article that was written in 1922 to dispel Mansfield's story of what the lights could be list several sightings that occurred during a trip in 1908 before Jewel Jules Verne's novel before the electrification or the stories of the lights becoming popular and also I don't think I have to tell you this but that's not how electricity works if that was how it works every field or Forest in the country would be full of these giant lightning bolts every night but they're not for some reason so if that theory can be debunked then what are some of the other theories people have come up with for what the lights could be well one of the most popular theories up until recent year was that of the will of wisps also known as gaslights gaslights are a natural phenomena that occurs whenever gas and chemicals inside of a swampy area rise up into the air before igniting they're quite rare but again common in swampy environments however thorough studies of the gorge the minerals the river and the ground around it showed that there was not only no swampy environment but no presence of chemicals that could create a swamp line another theory that was suggested was that of Saint Elmo's Fire a really wild occurrence that can happen in thunderstorms especially out over the ocean where lightning will form on the ground and create these massive balls of hate St Elmo's Fire can also be seen on airplanes as it looks like tiny little strikes of lightning jumping across the windshield however Saint Elmo's Fire is only known to occur in thunderstorms and is once again very rare there's a theory that the lights are a mirage or a sort of optical illusion whenever the light bounces off maybe the water in the rivers or the rock faces around however mirages are most often superimposed over one's eye and it's very clear in videos and photographs of the Brown Mountain Lights that they illuminate the area around them so definitely not some kind of optical illusion because if it was you wouldn't be able to see things in the dark that you couldn't just see with your eye another theory is that a FoxFire FoxFire is a slightly bioluminescent fungus that does grow around the region however keyword being slightly and since you can see the lights from mountaintops across that's a no another theory is that perhaps there's hidden uranium or some kind of radiation deposit in the mountains that cause random lines for some reason but radiation rarely ever does that and normally if it does it's a much bigger problem than just a floating light and also there's no evidence of there being radioactive materials anywhere in these Hills the three theories that seem to have some Merit is for one the concept of ball lightning ball lightning is again a very rare phenomena whenever static that's either in the ground or comes off of some kind of Electric System creates these floating static things that just kind of float around however ball lightning is incredibly rare in places that have Prime conditions for them and unless there's some kind of static producing something underneath this mountain that's a no-go the other is that perhaps there's some kind of chemical reaction that we're not aware of kind of like the gaslights that I mentioned earlier however perhaps this chemical is something that hasn't been traced yet or there hasn't been evidence found yet of it existing in these Hills and it's just some combination that hasn't really been thought of yet in science or physics that just kind of jumps together whenever it feels like it and the third option is maybe these Hills are just weird maybe there is some perfect combination here of this rock facing that rock facing that water facing that rock that causes Moonlight to get magnified or maybe the hills are just quirky for some reason investigations into the explanations for the lights have been going on for decades nearly a century at this point in 1940 a man by the name of Hobart Whitman did extensive studies on the soils geology and biology of this entire Gorge and determined there was nothing out of the ordinary in 1981 a group known as Orion placed a giant half a million candle power light over in Lenoir which is about 22 miles in that direction and whenever they turn the light on people who were standing here on wiseman's view said they did see a reflection of light over the hillside side which duh and again reflections of light are not what this looks like also just to give you an idea of how frustrated everyone is with the lights at this point that same group Orion there was a theory going around that perhaps the ball lightning or something is caused by seismic activity like there's underground plate shifting that causes an energy strike kind of like a match and that makes the lights float up so to test that in 1981 they just started chucking TNT all over the Mountainside just started blowing up the hills but sadly nothing happened although I appreciate their effort in 1998 an Appalachian State Professor named Daniel Caden began a project where he got a bunch of different cameras and placed them all around the gorge that periodically took pictures over several hours and despite gathering over 6 300 hours of footage there were no lights seen that could not be accounted for however considering several of these studies were done under limited times and with older equipment the validity of how well the cameras could pick up a bright thing that was really far away is dubious at best and again since the lights aren't a Surefire thing a lot of people didn't buy into their studies so what gives why is it so hard to figure out what these lights are and do they even exist well for the footage I gathered for this video I used a handy little tool called Night Vision Night Vision for those that don't know works by using ambient light that's in the air and magnifying it so things that are low light become normal light and things that have any amount of light to them become these giant solar flares because of that if there's any light signature Within These Hills if you look at it through night vision it becomes a beacon now while I think a lot of the footage you're seeing is beautiful I can't attest to its validity as mentioned a lot of people go camping in these Hills and it's hard to determine if anything you're seeing now is just a flashlight or a campfire rather than these Supernatural lights and again I've only been up here to record for a few days and the likelihood of me getting a perfect video of a light while I have my night vision is not the best I did see this deer though so that's still pretty cool for what it's worth however I can personally attest that I have seen the Brown Mountain Lights a couple years back I came out here with my friend who originally told me about these lights and of course me being me I had to come up here and while looking down into the gorge I saw what can only be described as a giant flare begin beneath the tree line before floating above it and then turning a sort of yellowish red before it floated its way up towards Table Rock and then circled back down near the river and went out the only thing I can possibly give this an explanation to is someone lit a really long multi-colored flare and tied it to a drone just to be mean but I can attest that whenever you see them there's certainly nothing like them it looks like a giant Spotlight or a UFO hovering just above the trees before snaking its way over the gorge and then making its way down to the river it was so wild that as soon as I saw it I was like wow that was a crazy hallucination but I sympathize with people who just want to Simply know more for those that have seen them it's something incredible and something that you have to figure out but there's also a beauty in the ignorance it seems like nowaday with science being what it is every factor of Our Lives or of The Magnificent World goes from these Fantastic Beasts to documented creatures and the world loses a little bit of magic when that happens so I've always loved the Brown Mountain Lights because in spite of everyone's attempts it still has its magic and it's because of that magic that I want to talk about my favorite details of the lights the stories surrounding them the first night I got here I decided to drive up to wiseman's view by myself which I can say is someone who's native to Appalachia is still a pretty freaky experience the road for one is not friendly if you ever plan to make your way up to wiseman's view the GPS will not help you and you better hope that your car can when I came up there was absolutely no one on the mountain and the fear of being completely by yourself in a national park is incredible I love it but as you make your way up the mountain there's this kind of air that begins to reach into you because these Hills are filled with so many Legends and the lights themselves are such a sacred kept monster to the people around here that going to confront them by yourself is uplifting as it is demeaning you climb this Castle to fight a dragon that may not even be there and that aura that idea of monsters that you can't see is something that permeates Appalachia see we are a very superstitious people at least in our stories and this group of people who spent decades dealing with poverty famine flood and War as you could imagine several of these superstitions are pretty dark I remember as a young boy my grandfather would set me down and he would tell me all kinds of scary stories stories from his family the Cherokee and their legends that ran through these Hills and stories of ghosts monsters Boogeyman that would keep you up at night however the stories he told me never really scared me I understood that objectively they were scary and that the things that happened in them were decisively not good but they never bothered me because whenever he would tell me these things he would just be excited he would be so happy to share them and anytime I'd asked him about that I'd be like how can you talk about this it's such a scary dark story why are you so okay with it and he would always say well I've already heard it and now I get to tell it to you and uh I didn't get what he meant for a long time but a lot of these stories were stories that his grandfather would tell him and his grandfather before him and generations back and like I said earlier a lot of these stories are never written down they never exist outside of one person telling it to another but there's a secrecy to that that that's hard to wrap your head around these Legends these characters they exist in my brain they exist in my soul so to speak and whenever you give them to someone else you're not writing it on paper so that any passerby could see you are putting it in them it is their soul now it is a part of who they are and there's something beautiful about no matter how harrowing or disturbing the subject matter might be that it is a piece of you that you are giving to someone else that will live on forever I mean it was my grandfather who originally told me stories of the windigo and you can see how I took that to heart over the past few days whenever I've just been harassing random people into telling me their stories about the lights none of them were secretive about it no one was like oh well this is a family secret you shouldn't pass it on as soon as I told them what I'm doing they all said thank you for telling these stories and that's not anything to point at me and say how great I am but the privilege to pass these on to tell these stories and to have those pieces now and to get to share them with you to be the order who holds a part of a legacy that outlived the person who made it and will outlive any of us to come and to get to use those pieces to build something as Immortal as these mountains it's an honor so I guess you could say I've already heard these stories and now I get to tell you now many of these stories were born of a spirit of fear and Terror and it's only necessary that I do write by the story and the season and treat them as such and while many have their theories and ideas to what the lights could mean these are the ones that I find the most interesting if you'll remember as I said earlier the first person to see the Brown Mountain Lights was fate Wiseman in 1854 however what I didn't tell you at the time is fate didn't find this as odd as he did terrifying because the Linville Gorge was known to be haunted with the spirits of Old Henry and Jim before the Civil War in the 1840s North Carolina while it would one day side with the Union did hold many slave owners among them was a man by the name of Henry one year in the 1840s Henry bought himself a slave by the name of Jim Jim was a very kind-hearted man and all who spoke to him said that despite his condition he exuded confidence and kindness to whoever he met perhaps it was this kindness that changed the heart of Henry as not long after purchasing Jim he gave Jim his freedom but Jim having nowhere to live and no family to call his own decided to stick around with Henry and the two lived together for several years that was until one particularly brutal winner when a low Harvest from the season prior left Henry's family with nothing to eat Henry see no other option decided to set out one December night and Hunt himself a bear now bears are a dangerous predator and Henry knew this but if a man could get himself a bear he could feed his wife and kid for months on end so Henry grabbed his jacket cap and rifle and said goodbye to his family and goodbye to Jim told them that he would be back in four days time well four days passed and Henry never came home the family and Jim knew what this probably meant but Jim loving the man who gave him his freedom decided that he wasn't at least going to try to save his friend on the fifth night Jim grabbed a lantern and decided to head out to find Henry now he knew that Henry had taken a lanter and enough oil to last a week so he figured if he got out there tonight and stood on top of the mountain perhaps he could see Henry walking somewhere in the tree line so Jim grabbed a lantern said goodbye to Henry's family and set out to find him until after four days it seems the gym was just as long gone as Henry had been eventually Henry's family had to move away from the area and over the next couple years everyone seemed to forget about Old Henry and old Jim I was until in 1854 when fate Wiseman saw their lanterns walking through the tree line from on top of wiseman's view now it had been too long for the possibility of these two being alive and if anything this was their Restless Soul trudging Across The Gorge and as a matter of fact according to fate and those who witnessed it if you waited on a night for the lights to appear and listen close enough as they worked their way up the hill you could hear Henry and Jim calling out to each other both of them forced to Forever Walk The Hills that had long since forgotten them now believe it or not Henry and Jim isn't the oldest legend of the brown mountain lions that honor would go to the story of the unnamed Revolutionary War soldier who came home to find his family lost to the gorge as Legend has it before the Revolutionary War a colonial family decided to settle in The Gorge however when the war came the father whose name's been lost to history but we'll call the Patriot decided that he needed to fight the Patriot kissed his wife and three kids goodbye and decided to set out to fight for his country after a year of fighting he returned home to find that his family had been lost forever the cabin that he had built for them had burned up perhaps in some Act of malice perhaps a simple accident either way the Patriot runs to the charred remains of his home to find pieces of his family dismembered and dragged across the floor for months of weather and animals the Patriot began to scream and well as he grabbed the pieces of his family and dragged them across the floorboard to make sense of what had be fallen on them he finds a leg bone and tries to connect it to a hip he finds a skull and tries to connect it to a neck by the end of his screaming he looks down at this horrific puzzle that he's pieced together to see that he has six arms and six legs and three heads assembled on his wife and two of his children but the third seem to be missing now the Patriot could have been wrong perhaps two of the arms he had misplaced as one of his children and instead it was one from the known child and the unknown missing child and the other two from each had been dragged Away by the weather or hounds but that didn't matter to him he had six arms six legs and three heads that met one of his kids might still be alive with this Revelation the Patriot begins to make a noise something between horror and joy as he runs into the gorge screaming like a hound looking for his Lost Child the Patriot was never seen again but it said that one of the Brown Mountain Lights zigzags its way along the river up the trees to Table Rock and back down the valley screaming all the while for his Lost Child so if you're ever in the Linville Gorge or at wiseman's view with your family it's best to make sure your kid's always inside but perhaps the most famous story of the Brown Mountain Lights is that of Lady Adeline lady Adeline and her husband moved to Western North Carolina around 1840. now it was said that lady Adeline was a joy to be around and everyone in the town took to her instantly but her husband was a no-good drunk he was known for long nights of drinking and a short-tempered match and everyone in the town had a sneaking feeling that one day something bad would happen to Adeline and sadly in 1848 it seems those fears came true one Sunday morning Adeline didn't come to church so her friends decided to go look for her at her home when they got there all they found was her drunk husband who said that Adeline had decided to up and leave him in the middle of the night now this doesn't sound like something Adeline would do sure it may have been best for her but she was determined to help her husband no matter what it would take the next day the townspeople saw a visitor who they noticed strolled to a local Motel only a few days prior leave town riding Adeline husband's horse now this was suspicious so the same people who went looking for Adeline went back to her house to talk to her husband but he said that the man had simply purchased the horse off of him that it was none of their business but people continue to think that perhaps this man wanted rid of his Christian wife and this stranger helped him do it so people began to search for Adeline and whenever they decided to search for her in the nearby Linville Gorge Brown Mountain Lights appeared The Men Who were searching for Adeline were terrified the lights gave off an overwhelming sense of dread that made it hard to even breathe the men ran out of the gorge screaming and straight to Adeline husband's home the hate and fear that exuded from these lights convinced the men that adeline's husband had conjured up the devil so they go to his house with pistols and knives and kicked down the door ready to make him answer for what he's done but whenever they checked the house seems he's nowhere to be found and off in the distance they saw one of the Brown Mountain Lights snaking its way over the hill and back down into the gorge over the next several decades men would disappear from the Linville Gorge area seemingly at random authorities and locals alike would search The Gorge for some kind of answer until one day as they were searching at the base of the cliff that is today known as wiseman's View they found the headless body of Lady Adeline now she was identified by the dress and locket that she was wearing but as mentioned her head was nowhere to be found it seems that either out of pure hatred or just a drunken rage adeline's husband had taken off her head and thrown her over wiseman's view but despite not having any eyes if that light leaving his home the night the men came to find him wasn't a coincidence and it seems Adeline was able to find him just fine Legend has it that if you're a man it's best to never visit the Linville Gorge by yourself especially at night because while it seems Adeline may only be hunting the heads of the men who do women wrong she may not have the best eyesight and if you're anyone in the Linville Gorge at night and you see a headless woman walking through the trees looking for her missing head or hateful men it's best to just let her pass whether you believe in ghost stories or not it's hard to deny that weird things happen around the Linville gorge in the 1980s a man named James Gannett reported having seen the lights after returning to his hotel on his last night in town the next day his car was found in the opposite direction he was said to be traveling but James wasn't in it in fact James was nowhere to be found and he was never seen again but for some reason his car sat abandoned in the Linville Gorge and of course there's the wildlife of the gorge as well not only things like bears and snakes but stories of people called The River Rats who run through the trees and if you're lucky simply scare you away now many people doubt stories of the River Rats and thank them to be the stuff of urban legends but the odd piece of clothing or half eaten food found in the most obscure parts of the gorgeous Wilderness beg to differ so regardless if you believe in the spirit of the Brown Mountain Lights or not the gorge definitely has something that goes bump in the night locals know to stay away from it even if they don't know the ghost stories or Legends surrounding the gorge itself Hunters say that you can never hunt anything up there because anytime you bring your dogs the dog will run out get afraid and come back refusing to leave their owner's side lumbermen try to cut trees around the gorge say that it's useless the ground's sour for some reason nothing seems to grow right now if you believe in any of the stories I've told what's to say that they all can't work together there's been countless battles across the area of the Linville Gorge from the Native Americans to the Revolutionary War to the Civil War seemingly hundreds if not thousands of lives have been lost among those Hills who's to say that Adeline can't walk by the river while the Patriot runs through the hills and Jim and Henry keeps circling each other among the trees some of the most popular stories of the Brown Mountain Lights involve the battles I mentioned earlier from the Civil War all the way back to the native Wars It's believed that after these battles were over the women whose husbands and sons died in the war would go out at night with torches and lanterns looking for the bodies of the men they loved and that those who found them slain on the battlefield were forever cursed to continue to haunt those Hills to this day what's interesting about all the stories that I've said is that they all derive from real world tragedies there were people murdered and thrown into the gorge there were people who died of starvation in the hills and there were people whose families were lost while they were helpless to stop it and what all of these stories do is they take these tragedies these real world experiences people had and they make them the stuff of Legends they make it to where their suffering meant something greater something that still affects us to this day other than a pointless tragedy one of the reasons that I love horror and scary stories like this is because it elevates human suffering to something that means something and whenever I think of these stories I think about the beauty that lies in all the evil however while I do love the scary stories of The Gorge there's a special place in my heart for the stories that show love rather than fear one of those stories is that of the Catawba woman and the Cherokee man hundreds and hundreds of years ago before white settlers ever came to the land the Cherokee People and the Catawba people were at war with each other now during this war the Linville Gorge was a highly contested spot that both sides fought over constantly despite this however a Catawba woman fell in love with a Cherokee man and at night they would slip down into the Linville Gorge the middle ground between their two people and through the night they would share their intimacy and time together before going back to their tribes the next morning now if either side ever figured out what they were doing they would want the other one dead so they had to keep it secret and night after night they would meet each other at the river in The Gorge that is until one day when the Cherokee man told the woman that he would have to go fight in the war now of course they were devastated by this but she decided she would make the most of it and make sure he knows that her love Carries On so she went to the top of what is now wiseman's View and built herself a small house and every night she would go to the window of that house and light a torch now the Cherokee man would be on the other side of the gorge and she couldn't know if he was able to see it but every now and then he would pass through the trees and see that torch on top of Linville mountain and know that his love lives on some nights he would even sneak up to the hills to get away from the other soldiers and light his own torch so that even if a little bit her love could be reciprocated and she would know that her love was still out there he was still alive until one night the torch didn't light back and as a matter of fact it never came back it seems that perhaps he died in some war or of some Illness but the worst part is she can never know because she was still separated by the war of their people and the river at the bottom of the Gorge however she had promised him that she would light that torch so every night she lit it continuously she eventually became an old woman but she never forgot the love she had for that Cherokee man and as Legend has it even though she's long gone if you look for the Brown Mountain Lights at night you can see that that love still lives on see several young couples will say that the Linville Gorge is a wildly romantic spot and if you've seen the scenery you know it's at least a breathtaking one perhaps the reason that it still holds such a great love despite all the evil that surrounds it is because of the light of that Catawba woman another story and I think the best one to end on comes from the 1930s in the nearby area of Jonas Ridge there was a man who for all intents and purposes was similar to the husband of Adeline he was a hateful drunk who was no good for anyone especially his young wife Belinda after Belinda gave birth to their child he got drunk one night and simply decided that it wasn't his and in a fit of rage depending on who you asked he either killed them and dumped their body into the gorge or chased them into the gorge and nature did what nature does over the next several days search Crews began to look for Belinda and her child however it seems they couldn't find a trace of either of them that was until night began to fall and for the first time to at least some the Brown Mountain Lights appeared now while all the other stories I've mentioned tell the lights as being this possibly demonic hateful force of evil this time they seem to be a source of compassion they appeared above the search workers heads and worked their way through the tree line the search workers decided to follow them and sure enough found freshly dead bodies of Belinda and her child now while this story is of course in parts of tragedy because their lives were lost it seems the lights didn't want them to suffer the same fate that the lights themselves might have in fact there are several stories of young children being separated from their parents while in the gorge when just as the sun sets the lights appear and guide them back home whenever I was driving around the county half crazed looking for people to tell me about the ghost lights which is pretty on brand I guess I met this guy who asked what I was doing because you know it's kind of weird to go into a business and ask for someone by their full name and I told him that I was going to do a video about the Brown Mountain Lights and this man immediately perked up and said oh the Brown Mountain Lights one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen something like that will make a man think of God and uh it sure will regardless of if you believe these stories between all the tales of war and death I think it's safe to say that Appalachia has enough monsters and are definitely all too real so when it comes to the Brown Mountain Lights I like to think that maybe it's got a few angels regardless of if you believe the Brown Mountain Lights to be some lost soul or simply a trick of the light it's hard to deny that they are certainly a spectacle and I think we can all agree that these Hills full of their stories and legends aren't going to give up their secrets anytime soon but hey who would want to ruin the magic and if you stuck around this long hopefully you think the Brown Mountain Lights are at least a little bit as interesting as I know they are and that's really cool because I do too and after all of that I just want to say thank you for watching also I forgot to mention it in the outro but remember to check out this guy he's really cool and only bites on occasion I swear this was a very big project for me all of my research released like 99 of it up until now is just sitting in my room reading info online but getting to spend several days driving around this small town asking for local Legends and stories regarding the lights was insane I loved it I had such a great time doing this uh obviously it was more involved and not something that I could reliably do on a quick basis um but for a project every now and then absolutely I loved it and hopefully you guys enjoyed it at least a little bit um and hopefully this is something you may want to see more of in the future if you don't that's also fine I you don't have to like the videos that I like making but I had a lot of fun doing this it was fulfilling in a way to take these stories and then to put them out there for everyone and I always love being the Storyteller so it meant a lot um so something I want to do for this video that is not something I've done for any other videos but since the Brown Mountain Lights are a almost well not non-existent but the stories and like ideas around them are not known to the public as much as other Cryptids like Mothman or Bigfoot um and I know it's weird to call them a Cryptid but it's the closest thing I could think of since there's not a ton of information about them and since I may be would I be the YouTuber who I'm definitely the only one who made a video like this on them at least to my knowledge anyway since I know a decent amount about the lights and it may be hard if someone's interested to find out more information if you have a question about the lights leave it in the comments and I will pick out a few and then on my second Channel wind a gang that I almost never use again it'll be linked in the description on my second Channel I will make a video responding to your questions about the lights and we'll try to answer them for the best of my ability because I feel decent enough in my knowledge about them that I could probably answer most questions so if you have any questions about them or just want to know more again leave it in the comments and I'll pick out a few for that video over on when to gang again the second Channel um and also once again 10th Franklin Banks she wrote this book about the Linville Falls which is an area right next to the Linville Gorge this has its own lore and murders and crazy ghost stories and all that and she also wrote a book about the Wiseman family which if you'll remember is fate Wiseman the one who originally saw them in 1854 and all of that so she's very knowledgeable about the area and she writes a lot of interesting stories about the Region's folklore and what have you and she's also an incredibly kind woman the way I got into contact with her is I had I had drove around the county looking for members of the loving family and the uh the Wiseman family and I eventually go to the museum uh in the county and the lady at the Museum who was very kind she thought it was cool that I was doing a video about the lights put me in contact with tints and tints was like oh well just tell him to come to my house so I go to her house um and she's an um older lady now and she spent her entire life gathering information about the region and her mother did the same thing collecting photographs and documents so she has an entire room of her house that's just like these folders of information and she hands me two giant folders about the Brown Mountain Lights and just it has all the stories that you can't find anywhere online and all these photographs that don't exist anywhere online and it was just like a wealth of information and the entire time I was talking to her I kept being like can I can I pay you somehow can I do anything to you know make up for this it means the world and she said it means enough that you're telling the stories uh and I really as someone who who like really appreciates the value of a good story that meant a lot to me uh she's very cool and again wherever I can find her stuff for sale I'll link in the description if they're not linked there when the video goes up check back again I will find them I'm determined to um but no she's incredibly kind uh and to just allow me to do that she even offered to like give me a lot of the stuff she was like do you want to take or at least borrow some of the folders I'm like no that I cannot take these away from you so I just took pictures of them and all that but she was a blessing also uh Bill Burgess who I mentioned earlier he's a very cool guy uh he has a YouTube channel and an Instagram he does a lot of mountain biking stuff uh again he'll be linked in the description but whenever I got up there to film The Lights he was already set up with a camera to do the same thing and uh I started asking like how often do you do this and he's like oh like at least once a week I was out here on Christmas in the snow at four in the morning trying to get pictures of the lights like they really do have a culture all to themselves and it was it was great that all these people allowed me to take part in that and it met the world um so yeah I'm a little excited if you couldn't tell uh but yeah happy Halloween I hope that this was a satisfactory Halloween video for you all I was thinking what I want to do for Halloween like a couple months ago and I thought like campfire stories would be good and this seemed like the perfect rap to do it so hopefully you enjoyed I definitely enjoyed it uh and yeah if you ever want to see investigations like this in the future let me know because I really enjoy making them I can't do them all the time again but every now and then they're a lot of fun uh but I believe that should do it that covers about everything uh so I guess before we leave I just want to say Happy Halloween thank you for watching I hope that you enjoyed and I will see you in the next one bye
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Channel: Wendigoon
Views: 2,118,006
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: iceberg, explained, scp, analysis, breakdown, scary, spooky, horror, creepy, comedy, funny, laugh, humor, cringe, intel, deep web, dark web, hidden, tier list, secret, top ten, top 10, countdown, compilation, meme, memes, meme compilation, internet horror, reddit, ask reddit, redacted, childhood, trauma, Mary Celeste, Flannan Isles, Eilean Mor, Island, Lighthouse, Kaz 2, Kaz II, Leviathan, Kraken, conspiracy, theory, mystery, sci fi, true crime, unsolved, hysteric, hell, shootout, arg, arg analysis, murder, unknown
Id: 4T6mwZd1T9M
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 50min 24sec (3024 seconds)
Published: Tue Oct 25 2022
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