Scotty Wiseman

Josiah Lafayette.

Bate Wiseman, Scotty Wiseman's great uncle, inspired the song The Legend of the Brown Mountain Lights, which Scotty released in 1961, helping to make them the most popular ghost story in North Carolina.

Blues music will do that.

Josiah's report is also one of the oldest reports of the strange lights near Brown Mountain, though it wasn't well known at the time and played no role in the founding of the legend.

Wiseman found that the same momentary flash would appear at the same place on the horizon at about the same time, varying by only a half hour each and every night.

He would often return to the place, and at the expected time, he would stare into the distance until he saw a glimpse of the light.

This was the story Scotty Wiseman's song recalled, which 79-year-old Fate told him when he was 13 years old, 50 years earlier.

However, the description of the light is consistent with a distant train headlight turning a corner.

Mm-hmm.

So in 1961, there was a musician, Scotty Wiseman, who had a song that helped transform the Brown Mountain lights from a regional curiosity into one of North Carolina's best known supernatural legends.

His song tells of an enslaved man searching eternally for his lost master, and he was carrying a lantern that becomes one of these mysterious lights.

So this story's important because it demonstrates how folklore changes, how the song helps popularize the story as one interpretation, and it, even though the historical phenomenon had already been documented for decades, this didn't help, 'cause now it's bringing it into pop culture.