Reports of mysterious red lights above Brown Mountain, near Linville Gorge, began appearing in newspapers around 1912 and 1913. This was the same time electric lighting was spreading through the area, and Southern Railway was fitting its locomotives with very bright headlamps.
In 1913, a US Geological Survey employee was sent to look and concluded the lights were the headlights of westbound trains. Locals were not convinced, so in 1922 the USGS sent George R. Mansfield, who used maps and a surveying telescope to show that the lights people were seeing were trains, car headlights and brush fires.
The legend kept growing anyway, helped by Scotty Wiseman's 1961 song about the lights. Appalachian State University later set up low-light cameras overlooking the mountain; by 2014 they had recorded 6,300 hours of footage with no unexplained lights.
