Brown Mountain Lights: Ghost Lights of the Blue Ridge

This week on Between Myth and Belief, Beth and Michelle head into the Blue Ridge Mountains to chase the Brown Mountain Lights, one of Appalachia's most stubborn ghost light legends. We start with the three stories people tell about where the lights come from: a Cherokee and Catawba battle, a faithful lantern-carrying searcher whose legend got a lot more complicated once we looked at who was telling it, and a woman named Belinda who may not be finished yet.

Then the government gets involved. Two U.S. Geological Survey investigations blamed trains and car headlights, and the locals were not having it, since plenty of them swore they saw the lights before either existed. We also cover decades of cameras, an experiment with a very bright arc light, and a roadside rock shop owner whose encounter with the lights involved a crystal tunnel, the lost planet Pee-Wom, and a ride to Venus.

Is it ball lightning? Piezoelectric glow from quartz in the rock? Refracted headlights bent by wet mountain air? Or something that still hasn't been explained? Beth, your resident skeptical secular witch, lands somewhere between swamp gas and magic, and explains why the stories we keep telling about this mountain matter more than the photons.

Bring a flashlight. Don't touch anything glowing.

Calendar of the Weird: October 4 to 17

WitchFest at Gardner Village All Month Long

Attributions:

Hilltop_meadow_20200328.mp3 by rabban625 -- https://freesound.org/s/511088/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

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