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Historical Mysteries: Ghostly lights as common as dew in Dixie

Web posted June 8, 1997

By Randall Floyd
Special Columnist

Fog shrouded the North Carolina mountains one dark night in October 1894, when President Grover Cleveland saw a strange light flickering in the woods off to the right of his Pullman.

Startled, the president called the conductor to his room and inquired about the mysterious glow.

The conductor smiled and said, ``What you have seen, sir, is the Maco Station Light.''

Locals claim the light had been around since 1869, when a train conductor named Joe Baldwin was decapitated in a freak accident.

Some say the luminscent ball is the spirit of Baldwin, swinging a lantern as he searches for his severed head. Others maintained it was the ghost of an Indian warrior killed in battle, while another old legend said it was the phantom of a black ``witch-woman.''

The president's experience was reported in the press. Soon, the Maco Station ghost light was the most famous ghost light in the South.

Over the years, thousands of people have claimed to see the eerie phenomenon, bobbing and weaving alongside desolate stretches of tracks before disappearing as suddenly as it arrived.

Spook lights are nothing new to the folklore of the Deep South. Since Indian times, stories about mysterious flashing lights and wispy halos of color floating on the night wind have entertained and terrified generations of Southerners.

Nearly every county in every state has its own legend about ghost lights - or spook lights as they are frequently called - most of them associated with railroad lines and the spirits of railway workers who met untimely deaths.

After Cleveland's encounter, hundreds of similar sightings were reported in the region. In 1925, two farm boys claimed that the light chased them several miles through the woods.

A soldier home on leave during World War II swore he had to flee for his life when a series of ``ghostly lights'' pursued him down a railroad track.

In recent years critics have tried to debunk the Maco ghost light by claiming that it is merely a reflection from auto headlights on nearby roads or highways. But there were no cars in 1869 when Joe Baldwin lost his head and reports of the mysterious light were first recorded.

Another ghostly phenomenon that continues to astonish visitors to western North Carolina is the Brown Mountain Light. Usually visible on partly cloudy nights when the moon hangs low over northern Burke County, the light ranges in color from yellow to blood-red.

As with the Maco Light, many legends have cropped up about the Brown Mountain Light. The first documented sighting was in 1771.

Numerous sightings have been documented over the years, including many made along the Blue Ridge Parkway and from points between Blowing Rock and Linville, N.C.

Earlier this century, a team of scientists traveled to Brown Mountain to put the legend to rest. Using a wide array of modern instruments, the scientists determined that the lights arose from the spontanious combustion of marsh gases. But locals knew that couldn't be true because there are no marshy areas on or anywhere near Brown Mountain.

In the 1920s, a team of investigators from the Smithsonian Institution discounted the possibility that the lights were a manifestaion of St. Elmo's fire - an eerie, electric glow phenomenon - because such conditions do not occur in mid-sky, as the Brown Mountain lights do.

And the mystery continues.

Randall Floyd is a syndicated writer and a professor of history at Augusta State University.