by Graham Averill

The hitchhiker with the hook for a hand....the grave where you say the name “Mary” five times and a woman in white holding a baby appears...Most logical people dismiss these ghost stories as legends passed around campfires to scare kids into behaving themselves. But this is October-the month of All Hallow’s Eve when shadows become ghosts, old ladies are witches, and that crumbling house on the corner with the ivy crawling up its spine is the scene of a mass murder that happened just before you moved into the neighborhood.

There’s no better place to indulge in the paranormal than the Appalachian Mountains. From antebellum ghosts to Native American legends, these peaks are layered with spooky tales and strange occurrences.

“We live in the oldest mountains in the world, and there’s a lot of geographical isolation in this region,” says Joshua Warren, the regional guru of paranormal investigations. “Stories and legends are captured and passed down easily from one generation to the next, so you live with history in these mountains.”

Warren insists there’s more to the paranormal sightings than just good storytelling. The composition of our mountains is predominantly quartz, which has a strange relationship with electricity. “There’s usually some electromagnetic component to many of the documented phenomenon,” Warren says, explaining that there’s a geographical line that extends from the mountains into the Atlantic where strange things have been happening for centuries. “The Brown Mountain lights, the Devil’s Campground, the Lost Colony of Roanoke, the Graveyard of the Atlantic, the Bermuda Triangle-all of these paranormal hotspots are located on the same line.”

Scientific proof of a world beyond our five senses, or just a bizarre coincidence? Here are a few of the more spooky tales from our region that continue to go unexplained.

Brown Mountain Lights: It’s one of the most curious unexplained phenomenon in the country. Bright, glowing spheres of light occasionally rise from this North Carolina mountain in the middle of the night. Reports of the lights date back 1,200 years to Native Americans who believed the spheres were the spirits of women searching for their husbands who had fallen in a great battle between the Catawba and Cherokee. Civil War soldiers reported seeing the lights, and thousands of spectators witness the spectacle still today. The phenomenon was even the subject of an X-Files episode.

The lights have been formally investigated by the U.S. Government three separate times. Everything from swamp gas to the reflections of moonshine stills has been offered as an explanation, but none stand up to scientific scrutiny. Are the lights the evidence of orbiting UFOs? Or are they a strange form of glowing plasma produced by the core of the mountain, as some paranormal experts suggest?

Mothman: For 13 months in 1966 and 1967, there were over 100 reported sightings of a seven-foot man with huge wings and glowing red eyes in the woods surrounding Point Pleasant, W.Va. The town was hysterical with fear, and the sightings were featured in newspaper articles where the creature was dubbed the “Mothman.” During the 13 months of sightings, many locals reported meeting strange “men in black” as well.

The area of the sightings was used to store weapons during WWII. After the war, biochemical companies purchased the land, leading many people to believe that Mothman was some sort of biochemical experiment that fused man with nature. Others suspected UFO meddling. Still others claimed Mothman was another manifestation of the Curse of Chief Cornstalk, the leader of a Native American army that was betrayed by Americans during the Revolutionary War. With his last breath, Cornstalk placed a curse on the Point Pleasant area that would last 200 years. Since then, the town has seen its share of tragedies. The worst mining accident in American history, explosions, train derailments, airplane crashes, tornadoes, floods, and of course, the appearance of Mothman have all transpired in this small corner of West Virginia.

Mothman sightings ended suddenly with the collapse of the Silver Bridge near Point Pleasant during rush hour, which killed 46 people and was predicted by Mary Hyre, a newspaper reporter who actively pursued the Mothman story.

Judaculla Rock: In the mountains of Jackson County, N.C., sits a soapstone boulder covered with drawings that no archeologist has been able to decipher. Many scientists believe the drawings are 3,000 years old, but none of the markings resemble any known image or symbol. It’s as if the artist or writer was using a language not of this world.

According to Cherokee legend, the markings were created by Judaculla, a giant believed to dominate the mountains centuries ago. Plenty of observers have hazarded a guess as to what the petroglyphs mean. Some say it’s a map; others insist it’s a peace treaty, a battle plan, or a collection of religious symbols. What’s most puzzling is that the artist didn’t use recognizable images from the natural world-no crude drawings of bears, fire, or snakes-like other petroglyghs found across the globe. Some scientists speculate the rock is the tip of a vast iceberg that could be covered in similar symbols.

Pocahontas Parkway: Cops, toll booth workers, and truckers have all reported seeing Native Americans with torches in the middle of a popular highway outside of Richmond, Va. The road was supposedly built through a territory that was sacred to Native Americans. The first trucker to see the torch-carrying tribe thought the ghosts were protestors. Many witnesses have reported the sounds of a pow-wow coming from the highway, and there is rumored to be a Virginia Department of Transportation surveillance tape of a Native American going through a tollbooth on a horse.

Helen’s Bridge: There’s a stone bridge on top of Beaucatcher Mountain just outside of Asheville, N.C., that hasn’t been used for decades. Teenagers and thrill-seekers flock to the area in hopes of catching a glimpse of Helen’s Ghost. According to legend, Helen lived in a home on top of Beaucatcher in the 1800s. She lived a solitary life with her young daughter, whom she lost tragically in a house fire. After the accident, Helen hung herself from the bridge. Today, if you drive to the bridge, turn off your car, and call her name, she’s supposed to appear in white with a noose around her neck. Witnesses insist that after you see Helen’s Ghost, your car will not start and you’ll be stuck on top of the mountain, alone with the mournful mother.