On the evening of January 8, 1959 a tragedy occurred on Holston Mountain on The edge of the Virginia and Tennessee border. A plane carrying ten people crashed into the mountain killing all on board. But the question remains: If everyone on board was dead, who was shining the light that brought the rescuers?
There is a house near Fayetteville in Cumberland County, North Carolina that has been empty since World War II. The owners have done what they could to rent out the house, but it seems likely that the house will stay empty forever. Let’s hope that it does. Because each of the tenants of this house have paid a terrible price.
At the Woodruff house near the town of Seaboard in NorthHampton County the light from a fire can be seen from time to time. No one knows where it came from, but some of the old timers just except it as Ephraim’s Light after a slave that was burned at the stake years ago. While some people are afraid of it, others are not. Yet no one has tried to find out for sure what it indeed is.
If you happen to pay a visit to the quaint little town of Vander, located in Cumberland County, you may be welcomed with a well known ghost story. But if you’re really lucky, you might actually get to witness the Vander Light, which appears on the train tracks in town, for yourselves.
The phenomenon, which has been observed since the 1800’s, is thought to be the ghost of Author Matthews, a resident of Vander. Matthews was employed as a ticket master at the railroad, where he later met his untimely death.
Of the ‘haunted railroad’ stories in North Carolina, the Pactolus light has the distinction of being the only one with out a train wreck. What is does have, is a tale of love broken by greed and death that leaves a man spending eternity trying to get back to the woman he loves.
Pactolus is a small township in Pitt county near Greenville and ECU. The students there have taken to using the Pactolus light as a hazing ritual without any knowledge of it’s heartbreaking origin. But while the light shines brightly, the details of the story have faded in the years.
