North Carolina's Ghost Lights: Background information when reading The Caretaker

North Carolina's Ghost Lights

This article relates to The Caretaker

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 luminous sphere, often close to the ground) as a cause. But the mystique has remained, and the lights have been associated with many ghost stories over the years. Scotty Wiseman's 1961 bluegrass song "The Legend of the Brown Mountain Lights" perpetuated the legend, and the lights feature in a 1999 episode of The X-Files, the 2014 movie Alien Abduction, and Kathy Reichs's 2015 novel Speaking in Bones.

Matthew Vollmer's All of Us Together in the End is a recent memoir following the author's mother's 2019 death from Alzheimer's and Parkinson's. Not long after, his father called to tell him he'd seen flashing lights in the woods near their family's cemetery in southwestern North Carolina. Vollmer looked for every possible explanation for the lights, from magnetic fields to supernatural activity. Many people opined to him that the lights were a sign that his mother was still a ghost wandering the earth because her spirit was unsettled.

He also corresponded with Charles Gritzner, the author of North Carolina Ghost Lights and Legends, who was eager to investigate the report for himself. After three decades of studying the lights, Gritzner was adamant that they remain unexplained. For Vollmer, a lapsed Seventh-day Adventist, the experience was a sort of spiritual awakening. "I couldn't help but imagine existence was bigger—and more mysterious—than what I'd been taught to believe," Vollmer writes. North Carolina is a hotspot for ghost lights and, however they're explained (or not), they continue to intrigue with their hint of the supernatural.

Brown Mountain, North Carolina viewed from Beacon Heights
Photo by Thomson200

Filed under Places, Cultures & Identities

This article relates to The Caretaker. It first ran in the October 18, 2023 issue of BookBrowse Recommends.