Modern mythology: Brown Mountain Lights
When one thinks of mythology, one tends to think of ancient tales of Zeus or Odin battling great foes or being interwoven into strange events, one may forget that mythology is still a common and driving force of modern society. A romantic view would say that people never stopped dreaming and wondering about the world, and indeed while several modern myths are derived from this idyllic notion, just as much, if perhaps more, aspects of modern mythology are devised from boredom, creativity, greed, or paranoia. This is the first in a planned series of articles covering stories, figures, and places of modern mythology.
Being a woman from North Carolina (what my girlfriend often refers to as “Lame Carolina”), I grew up on local stories of haunts and spooks, and having the misfortune of being reminded of the horrible film “Alien Abduction” (2014), I decided to do my first piece on the Brown Mountain Lights of North Carolina.
As a brief introduction to the phenomena, The Brown Mountain Lights (for now on just referred to as the ‘lights’) are spherical “orbs” of light often spotted over the mountain that have been speculated to be UFOs or ghosts. The lights are mostly associated with “mysterious disappearances”, though according to the 1979 book “Southern Ghosts”, the lights were initially believed to have been a rare and new phenomena of poisonous gas, or even the spirits of Cherokee and Catawa warriors who had sense fallen.
The lights were mentioned in any known publication around 1912 (we’ll come back to that later), though the oldest source I could find with my extremely limited resources was a 1971 issue of “Selected Sources of Information on United States and World Energy Resources”, which unsurprisingly took a very scientific approach and simply relayed the attempts by a party of researchers in studying the lights. In 1913, it was believed that the lights were simply locomotive lights from a distance, but a flood that shut down activity spoiled that theory when the lights were still spotted in the years to com.
In the early1920s, a USGS scientist by the name George R. Mansfield proved the lights were merely electric lights, as speculated as early as their discovery, and while this was generally accepted, several storytellers came up with truly outlandish stories to keep the legend of the lights alive, contributing to modern mythology in the process. Despite all reliable sources pointing to 1912 as the inception of these lights, stories were written claiming that scientists have been puzzled by the lights since the 1800s, how soldiers of the Civil War encountered these lights, and how the local Cherokee tribe spotted the lights long, long ago.
Still, to this day, the idea of the lights being aliens observing and abducting us, ghosts haunting our lands, or mysterious orbs merely floating proves to be alluring to so many, the aforementioned film “Alien Abduction” furthers the lie that these lights were spotted by the Cherokee and continue to torment locals to this very dy.
But, that is the appeal of mythology, part of it at least. A story doesn’t have to be real to be captivating, Mythology is loose without canon or form, every story stands on its own as both its own unique tale, and also a contribution to the greater body of legends. While my tone may have sounded cynical in writing this, I assure you that I’m largely happy to live in a place with such a bonafide mythical tradition.