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In Ron Rash's The Caretaker, characters claim to have seen unexplained lights in Blowing Rock's cemetery and its environs: The previous graveyard caretaker, Wilkie, told Blackburn, the current caretaker, about a mysterious light that led a man to find his brother's grave after searching in vain in six other county burial grounds; and Jacob Hampton took his wife Naomi to see the Brown Mountain Lights from the lookout point where he later proposed to her.
Brown Mountain is in Pisgah National Forest, in western North Carolina. Its "ghost lights," rumored to have been noticed by Native Americans and Civil War soldiers, are first known to have been recorded in writing in, of all places, Jules Verne's late novel The Master of the World (published in English translation in 1911) — then explained away, in 1922, by a US Geological Survey investigation as being from car headlights, train lights, or brush fires. Others have suggested ball lightning (lightning that appears as a ...
