Appalachia is a region in the Southern United States—it has a rich culture and a handful of scary urban legends that have been passed down through many generations.
The Appalachian mountain range runs along the continent’s eastern edge—segregating the interior from the seaboard. These mountain ranges are some of the oldest on the planet—ranging between 400 million to over a billion years old. The ancient mountain ranges combine with the African, Native American, and European cultures—which have resulted in the creation of countless urban folktales, legends, ghost stories and myths that still make rounds in the region. Keep scrolling to gather more knowledge about some of the most popular Appalachian superstitions and urban legends.
This bizarre phenomenon started in 1966, in Ohio and West Virginia—when two couples spotted an enormous man-like figure with bird wings and glowing red eyes—flying alongside their car. The wingspan of the creature was almost ten feet.
After arriving in the city, the couples reported to the police about the strange sighting. Soon, newspapers published the story and dubbed the odd creature “the Mothman.” The native city-dwellers of Point Pleasant spotted the Mothman nearly eight times the following year, and the physical description was uncannily similar. However, many people dismissed the claims suggesting it was just a sandhill crane that people had spotted.
This phenomenon from North Carolina’s Blue Ridge Mountains—known as the Brown Mountain Lights—is a baffling mystery. Both tourists and locals have reported sightings of orb-like glowing lights in white, red, orange and blue—hovering nearly 15 feet over the ground near Morganton NC—in the Brown Mountain region.
The first sighting was reported in 1771 when John William Gerard de Brahm—a German engineer, wrote in his journal about spotting the strange lights every night at a consistent time— which many people believed were train lights at a distance.
Conversely, other people have suggested that those unexplained lights are UFOs. There is also a popular Cherokee legend that says, the lights are the spirits of Native American women wandering in the mountains, searching for their dead husbands.
The tale of Bigfoot is common in mountain folklore, but it started in California’s Humboldt County in 1958. Jerry Crew, an employee of a logging company found a set of massive footprints in Six Rivers National Forest and soon rumours of the existence of “Bigfoot” spread like wildfire. Thousands of people have reported Bigfoot sightings since the mid-1800s—all across the United States (even in the North Georgia mountains).
Another interesting Cherokee tale suggests the existence of a race of people that lived a long time before the tribal community had settled into the Appalachian mountains. This small group of people had blue eyes and very pale skin. It is believed, they couldn’t see during daytime and headed out at night to do their work. As a result, the Cherokee dubbed them “The Moon-Eyed People.” But, the race mysteriously disappeared and was never found again in the region.
Some people believe that The Moon-Eyed people were a small group of European forest dwellers while others speculate that they were albino descendants of another tribe. Unfortunately, very little information about the Moon-Eyed People exists.
In 1952, two brothers from the village of Flatwoods in West Virginia, and their friends spotted a strange object flying across the sky and later landing on a farmer’s property in the vicinity. Accompanied by their mother, the young boys visited the farmhouse and spotted a tall (almost 10-foot) monster with a green body, red glowing face, clawed hands and glowing orange eyes. A thick mist hung around the mysterious creature, which made many members of the eyewitnesses fall ill in the following days. That was not the only sighting of the Flatwoods monster, many other people had reported seeing a similar creature in the days to come.
These five spooky tales are only a snippet of the Appalachian region’s creepy folklore. However, there are several other mysterious legends that still keep many residents up at night!
