We Should Have Left After the First Light

My husband and I were spending a few days in the mountains of North Carolina and decided to drive out to one of the overlooks where people have reported seeing the Brown Mountain Lights.

I’d heard about them before, but I wasn’t really expecting to see anything. We figured we’d enjoy the view, maybe take a few pictures, and head back to our cabin.

There were a couple of other cars there when we arrived, but by the time it got properly dark, we were the only ones left.

We stood near the railing for a while looking out over the mountains. Every now and then we’d see a distant light that we assumed was a car or something from a house farther down in the valley.

Then my husband pointed out a light that looked different.

It was a small yellowish light, not particularly bright, and it seemed to be hovering just above the dark outline of the mountain across from us.

At first, I thought it was probably a vehicle coming around a bend in the road. But it didn’t move the way headlights normally would. It drifted slowly to one side, stopped, and then seemed to move back in the other direction.

We watched it for maybe a minute before it disappeared.

A few seconds later, another light appeared farther to the left. This one was a little brighter, almost orange.

My husband asked if I thought we were actually seeing the Brown Mountain Lights. I told him I had no idea, but I was glad we hadn’t left yet.

We watched for another ten or fifteen minutes and saw a few more lights appear and disappear. None of them lasted very long.

Eventually we decided to head back to the car.

We had only walked a short distance from the railing when I noticed a light through the trees beside the parking area.

I assumed it was another car pulling in, but then I realized the light wasn’t coming from the road.

It looked very similar to the yellowish light we’d been watching across the valley.

I stopped and pointed it out to my husband.

He saw it too.

The strange thing was that it seemed much closer than the lights we’d been watching from the overlook. I could make out individual tree trunks in front of it, and the light appeared to be somewhere behind them.

It moved slowly between two trees, then disappeared.

We waited for it to come back, but it didn’t.

My husband walked a few steps toward the edge of the parking area to see if there was a road or a house down there. I asked him not to go any farther because it was dark and we didn’t know the area.

We got into the car and sat there for a minute talking about what we’d seen.

He thought the light near the parking lot might have been a flashlight, although we hadn’t heard anyone walking around and hadn’t seen another car arrive.

I wondered if we’d simply misjudged the distance. It was so dark out there that it was hard to tell how far away anything was.

But what bothered me was how similar that last light looked to the ones we’d been watching across the valley.

I don’t know if we saw the Brown Mountain Lights or just ordinary lights that looked unusual from where we were standing.

I do know that when we were at the railing, I felt completely comfortable watching them.

When I saw that same kind of light through the trees near our car, I suddenly wanted to leave.