“There are six places in Oak Lodge (one of the Highland Hospital patient buildings) I have picked out that could be set (on) fire. I have thought about it so much, I am afraid of what I might do and I want you to lock me up.” Willie Mae Hall, night supervisor at the...

Carl Sandburg, the prolific and widely-admired poet, Lincoln biographer, reporter, singer, folklorist, critic, and champion of the working class, has largely fallen from public or scholarly attention over the decades since his death. Western North Carolina audiences...

“I tried one out and wore it three days, cleaned the house, mopped, waxed the floors, washed five girls’ heads, bathed the dogs and did everything else necessary in a house with five bedrooms, two baths, ten people and two dogs and it was still in one piece,” wrote a...

“Are you aware you have a spirit at this inn?” Nancy Schnepp, the then-proprietor of Black Mountain’s Inn Around the Corner bed-and-breakfast, remembered a guest saying to her at breakfast one morning in the late 1990s. Surprised and having never experienced the...

Ghost stories give us glimpses of our past. Often in these stories, real people from the past inhabit present-day spaces, living on in legend as ghosts long after their demise. One such ghost is Petunia, who is said to haunt Abbott Hall at Blue Ridge Assembly in Black...

“To shorten a bend in the Tuckasegee River just west of Dillsboro, the (Western North Carolina Railroad) planned Cowee Tunnel. Each day hundreds of convicts, camped along the east bank of the stream, were ferried across to the site of the cutting. ... On that fateful...

“I had the privilege of meeting Martin Luther King (in 1964),” Black Mountain resident Inez Daughtery recalled in an early 2000s interview. “And he talked to me at length about the things he was going through and the things he was doing. And he told me … ‘Mrs....

On Friday, Oct. 28, 1904, an Englishman “of refinement and culture” died in a boarding house on Montford Avenue in Asheville. His death certificate, noting a death date of Nov. 10, 1902, was not completed until May 18, 1910. The local health official noted in 1910...

The Glades as it appeared c1950 after many additions. The section on the left is the original home.   “Disguised as an old woman, and riding horseback, she went from her home … near the Catawba River (in North Carolina) to the Fort at Ninety-Six, South Carolina....

“I don’t know whether my brother Tom will get here tomorrow for my body or not. Tonight’s his night off,” 22-year-old Martin Moore, a tall and lanky Black man, mumbled to the cadre of reporters stationed outside the bars of his cell in Raleigh’s Central Prison. It was...

This year marks the 80th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, signed by President Franklin Roosevelt in February 1942, and the resulting interment of predominantly Japanese American citizens or residents from the West Coast into camps scattered across the California...

“I didn’t set fire to the jail,” Bettie Sims calmly told a representative from The Charlotte Observer on Dec. 11, 1906. The reporter had tracked down the 29-year-old Polk County native the day before she was to appear on bond in front of a federal judge on charges of,...

The mountains of Western North Carolina occasionally experience earthquakes and seismic activity. These instances often pass without much notice or damage. In 1874, however, the mountains at the eastern edge of the Hickory Nut Gorge — along the northern arm of modern...

On Tuesday evening, Sept. 14, 1819, Bob, a 14-year-old “familiar artful fellow … (with) a good countenance” liberated himself from his captor, James Smith, in Asheville. He traveled north along the Buncombe Turnpike toward Paint Mountain and into Tennessee. Bob took...

“A female convict on the (Western North Carolina Railroad), emptied a phial of sulphuric acid into the coffee of Mr. Griffin, the newly appointed Steward, but he did not like the taste, so the poison did no damage,” reads a blurb in the Sunday, April 15, 1877, edition...