Weird World Adventures Season 2 Spotlight: Episode 10 Unveiling the Myths of the Great Smoky Mountains, Part 1

I grew up hearing stories. My background in mythology and folklore means that I’ve spent most of my adult life tracing the routes that stories travel — from their origins in lived experience and cultural necessity, through generations of retelling, into the form they take when we encounter them. It’s one of the things I love most about what I do. And the Great Smoky Mountains, I can tell you from firsthand experience, are one of the most storied landscapes in North America.

The Smokies sit at a particular intersection of cultural histories: Cherokee tradition — the mountains are ancestral Cherokee homeland and hold a depth of indigenous mythology and spiritual significance that predates European contact by millennia — and the Appalachian folk tradition that developed in the centuries following European settlement, with its own rich catalog of ghost stories, creature legends, and cautionary tales. Layer those two traditions on top of each other, over hundreds of years of human life in one of the oldest mountain ranges on earth, and you get a landscape that is genuinely haunted in the most meaningful sense of that word: full of stories that have shaped the people who live alongside them.

Michael and I were in the Smokies for this episode of Weird World Adventures in part because we’re writing a book — Haunted Hikes of the Great Smoky Mountains — and the research process for that project meant spending serious time with the legends of the region. Not as curiosities. Not as Halloween content. As legitimate historical and cultural records that reveal something true about the communities that produced them.

The Smokies have their share of classic hauntings: Spearfinger, the Cherokee witch who could shift her appearance and preyed on children and whose stone finger could pierce flesh; Nunne’hi, the immortal spirit people who are said to live beneath the mountains and have occasionally been heard drumming in the passes; various Civil War-era ghost stories attached to specific roads and buildings. They also have legends that are harder to categorize: disappearances in areas that shouldn’t be confusing, lights in the forest that don’t correspond to any known source, the particular atmospheric quality of certain trails at certain hours that makes even seasoned hikers want to turn around without being able to explain why.

I want to be clear that I approach all of this as a scholar first. I document. I analyze. I trace the cultural and historical conditions that give rise to particular kinds of stories in particular kinds of places. But I also want to be honest: the Smokies are genuinely strange in a way that is difficult to quantify, and I say that as someone who has stood inside a dormant volcano and attended school about elves.

In Part 1, we also visited the Titanic Museum in Pigeon Forge, which is one of the more unusual museum experiences I’ve had: a building shaped like the bow of the Titanic, where you’re handed a boarding pass with the name of an actual passenger and spend your visit discovering, at the end, whether your historical counterpart survived. The museum manages to make the abstract statistics of the disaster — 1,517 people dead — into something personal and felt. That’s a pedagogical feat worth acknowledging.

We also visited the Gatlinburg SkyPark and made our way toward the longest pedestrian bridge in North America, a subject we’ll return to with full commitment in Part 2.

Part 1 of Unveiling the Myths of the Great Smoky Mountains is streaming now on Amazon Prime, free for Prime members internationally. Watch it free on the Fawesome app via Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and other platforms. The mountains have been keeping their secrets for a very long time. We’re working on getting them out.