The Mysterious Brown Mountain Lights Finally Are Solved.
By Frederic J. Haskin
WASHINGTON, March 7.
The influence of United States Senators and the scientific skill of the United States Geological Survey were required to lay a ghost which has been haunting a North Carolina mountain for half a century. The ghost has just been laid, its manifestations have been ascribed to the most commonplace causes, and another fine old myth which gave an elusive air of legend to a romantic region has been coldly explained and bereft of its supernatural interest.
It is the ghost of Brown Mountain and it took the form of curious lights.
There are shadowy records running back to the Civil War of the appearance of the Brown Mountain light. Brown Mountain is a sort of ought loaf activity in the northern part of Burke county, N. C. The mountain rises out of the Catawba Valley. The valley itself is encircled by ranges somewhat higher than the Brown Mountain on the west and lower on the east.
To the westward of the mountain are the little towns of Lovens and Spencopine. To the north is Blowing Rock. These places are higher than the summit of Brown Moutain and therefore a man at any of these towns can look to the eastward, his line of vision extending over the top of Brown Moutain rising from the valley, and over to the hills beyond. Brown Mountain is a rather desolate mass, tree covered and haunted by game. There is no settlement upon its stones but there are a weather observatory, a forest fire watch tower and, here and there, lurking in its wilder ravines, the secret stills of moonshiners.
Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, nor any other apostle of the weird and supernatural could find a more fitting piece for the scene of some strange and alarming occurence. The colored folk of the valley, the more superstitious whites and, as will appear, oven the more enlightened population have found Brown Mountain full of creepy thrills.
As time passed the people of the region became accustomed to the Brown Mountain light and paid only occasional attention to it. It was remarkable and inexplicable but there was no record of its having done anyone harm. It merely was a series of curious lights which glowed over Brown Mountain with quite punctual regularity every night of the year. Now at one spot and now at another, a luminous sphere would rise from behind Brown Mountain, hover in the air imponderably for a few seconds or, in some cases, minutes, and then abruptly disappear. The Brown Mountain light had a different appearance from anything with which the people were familiar. Frequently, the nebulous ball of light would have the seething appearance of a newborn star: sometimes it would glow as fitfully as a firefly, then it would be an augry red, then a cold blue.
It came from nowhere and it went nowhere. It was the Brown Mountain light and that was all anyone could say about it. There was no valid explanation.
Explanations offered and rejected with good scientific reason were that it was a gigantic manifestation of the will-o-the-wisp, phosphorus, radium emanations, mineral, chemical reaction. St. Elmo's fire, mirage or Andes light. For a long time the latter explanation was received with considerable confidence. The Andes light is an electrical phenomenon which coccurs in the Andes Montains in South America. It is produced by fugitive electricity dancing between the sky and the mountain peaks. In North Carolina, this was discovered to be the wrong theory because all the conditions were wrong for such a manifestation of electricity. The various theories based upon phosphorescent exhalations had to be rejected because these invariably occur in marshy places and never in the mountains. it was suggested that the Brown Mountain light might be produced by the fires of the moonshiners, busy at illicit stills, but investigations showed that this could not be true.
To some observers the light seemed to rise from the top of Brown Mountain, ascend into the air and vanish. Others were cerisin the lights rose from behind the mountain, merely appearing above it as from behind a screen. This finally was clearly demonstrated to be the case. Somewhere in the broad Catawba Valley of beyond was the origin of the light.
Many parties of residents with inquiring minds sepent nights on Brown Mountain and in the valley and attempted to track down the places from which the light arose. It was like seeking the end of the rainbow.
Finally the people of the region appealed to United States Senators Simmons and Overman asking that they employ their influence to obtain a solentino investigation by the Federal Government. At first the suggestion seemed rather bizarre. It looked as though the good people of Burke county were "seeing things at night." But the moet solid citizens of the county pressed the request and finally George Rogers Mansfield of the United States Geological Survey was dtailed to conduct a special inquiry into the phenomenon.
Equipped with alidade, telescope, camera and other scientific paraphernalia, Mr. Mansfield went to Burke county. He turned himself into a Sherlock Holmes and began thinking in wide circles all around the problem. Then he did what seemed to many of the natives a strange and unnecessary thing. He spent some time in studying and charting the lines of the many railroads which thread the Catawba Valley and the country beyond. He compiled a list of time schedules of night trains.?He studied the highway maps and traced the routes of automobile traffic. With his instruments he made trigonometric calculations. Next he made a study of the effect of the heat of the day and the cool of the mountain night on the air currents in the Catawba Valley and the smaller valley between Brown Mountain and the Lovens heights. Then he laid the Brown Mountain ghost.
What the bewildered observers saw were locomotive and automobile headlights miles away across the Catawba Valley?in some cases 45 miles distant.
This, of course, is only half the explanation. Any normal person, in ordinary circumstances, can recognize a locomotive headlight. The real solution of the mystery was Mr. Mansfield's discovery that at nightfall, the cold air currents on either side of Brown Mountain crept down into the valleys, producing extraordinary atmospheric effects which resulted in refracting magnifying, sometimes coloring and at all times distorting any light seen through this strange veil. A headlight instead of showing a beam as usual, would, through the veil, of twisted air, show like a ball of seething light. Two automobile headlights would show as one nebulous and fartive illumination. Strange effects would be produced by the locomotives turning curves.
Some scientific societies do not believe that ghosts are responsible for the lights but they do not accept the headlight theory and declare that the mystery will be solved sooner or later with some explanation related to the mineral and chemical products to the region, since the vicinity has a number of relatively rare minerals such as mico, garant, aquatoarine and radium, and also deposits having important chemical properties.