Appalachian Folklore & Myths Series – The Roan Mountain Ghost Choir: Unearthly Music on the North Carolina-Tennessee Line
High on Roan Mountain, along the line between western North Carolina and east Tennessee, generations of listeners have claimed to hear strange music in the air. In modern public history and media, that tradition is often called the Roan Mountain Ghost Choir. That exact label appears to be comparatively recent. Older print witnesses use titles such as “Ghostly Choir of Roan,” “Ghostly Choir of Roan Mountain,” and later “The Unearthly Music of Roan Mountain.” As far as the printed record I could verify online goes, the earliest direct attestation of the choir story itself is John Parris’s Asheville Citizen-Times piece from November 20, 1955, followed by a collected version in his 1957 book My Mountains, My People and another newspaper treatment in December 1960.
That dating matters. It does not prove the tradition began in the 1950s. Oral lore is often older than its first surviving print appearance. What it does mean is that the story has to be handled carefully. The older record gives strong evidence for Roan Mountain as a place of wind, clouds, spectacle, and legend. The direct ghost choir trail, however, becomes clearly visible only in the mid twentieth century.
Roan Mountain before the choir appeared in print
Long before anyone in print called it a ghost choir, Roan Mountain already had the kind of landscape that invited supernatural explanation. In the 1799 North Carolina and Tennessee boundary survey, the diarist described the summit in vivid terms, noting that the wind had such force that the ground was “blowed in deep holes” along the northwest side. He also called the prospects from Roan more conspicuous than from any other part of the Appalachian Mountains. That is not a ghost story, but it is exactly the sort of environmental testimony that helps explain why later listeners might imagine uncanny sound on the mountain.
By the nineteenth century, Roan had also entered recorded folklore. In North Carolina Folklore, the 1878 piece “Roan Mountain Legend” by Maria Vogler preserves a separate summit legend about conflict among Native peoples. It is not the ghost choir story, and it should not be treated as proof of the choir tradition. Still, it shows that Roan Mountain had already become a place where dramatic stories adhered to the landscape.
Then came the hotel era, which matters enormously for the later legend. The 1900 Cloudland Hotel brochure advertised the resort at 6,394 feet above sea level on top of Roan Mountain and described a grand approach, vast views, and nighttime scenes in which the hotel lights cast “weird shadow” effects on floating, shifting clouds. The brochure was selling scenery and altitude, not hauntings, yet it captures the atmospheric setting that later versions of the choir tradition would attach to Cloudland visitors.
The earliest direct printed witnesses
The firm printed trail begins with John Parris. A Newspapers.com index for the Asheville Citizen-Times identifies “Ghostly Choir of Roan” on November 20, 1955. That is the earliest direct printed witness I could verify from the accessible online record. Two years later, WorldCat’s contents listing for Parris’s My Mountains, My People includes “Ghostly choir of Roan Mountain,” showing that he carried the story into book form. Then, on December 15, 1960, the Citizen-Times ran another Parris piece titled “Ghostly Choir Serenades the Roan.”
That sequence is important because it gives the legend documentary footing. Roan Mountain may well have had oral reports before 1955, but Parris is where the story becomes clearly traceable in print. For a historian, that is the safest starting point. Everything earlier is context. Parris is the first direct witness.
Cloudland Hotel and the setting of the legend
The legend became especially durable because it fit the mountain’s best known public setting. Cloudland Hotel promoted Roan as a lofty resort above the ordinary world, reachable by rail and carriage, with enormous vistas and a sky so close that shadows seemed to drift on the clouds. Even without any ghost story attached, that was already a theatrical landscape.
Modern PBS coverage keeps that connection alive. PBS describes the Roan Mountain Ghost Choir as a long running tradition of strange noises on the summit and notes that the sounds especially frightened visitors to the Cloudland Hotel resort in the late nineteenth century. That is a good example of how the legend is now framed in public memory. The hotel and the mountain top acoustics have become inseparable from the story, even though the clearest direct print witnesses come later.
From “Ghostly Choir” to “Ghost Choir”
After Parris, the legend moved steadily into broader folklore circulation. Nancy Roberts helped fix it in twentieth century North Carolina ghost literature under the title “The Unearthly Music of Roan Mountain.” Her papers at the University of Southern Mississippi preserve both a typescript and galley under that title, which shows the story was being developed in manuscript before or alongside publication. Modern editions and listings for North Carolina Ghosts and Legends continue to identify “The Unearthly Music of Roan Mountain” as one of the book’s named chapters.
The story also moved into regional folklore collections. Bibliographic records for Randy Russell and Janet Barnett’s 1988 Mountain Ghost Stories and Curious Tales of Western North Carolina place Roan in a wider body of mountain legendry, and publisher descriptions explicitly tell readers they may never stand atop Roan Mountain during a storm without thinking they hear a ghostly choir. By 2019 and 2022, PBS was using the exact modern label “Roan Mountain Ghost Choir,” which suggests that the current title is the product of later public history and media packaging rather than the oldest name for the tradition.
Why the story lasted
The endurance of the Roan Mountain ghost choir tradition makes sense once place, tourism, and print all come together. Roan is a high, windy, exposed mountain. The 1799 survey already noticed the force of the wind there. The hotel era turned that mountain into a destination for outsiders looking for sublime scenery. Mid twentieth century writers then gave the mountain’s strange reputation a memorable narrative form and a portable title. Once that happened, later retellings had something stable to repeat.
There is also a deeper Appalachian pattern at work. Mountain people have long attached story to sound, weather, and elevation. A ridge that whistles, a bald that glows, a gap that carries voices, these are exactly the kinds of places where folklore settles. Roan Mountain did not need the phrase “ghost choir” in 1799 to feel uncanny. It already had wind, spectacle, clouds, and isolation. What the twentieth century added was a name and a repeatable story.
A careful way to remember the legend
So the safest historical conclusion is this. Roan Mountain had a documented uncanny setting long before the choir story appears in print. It had nineteenth century legendry. It had the drama of the Cloudland years. But the earliest direct, verifiable printed witness to the choir itself that I could confirm online is John Parris in 1955. From there the story grew through Parris’s collected work, Nancy Roberts’s ghost literature, late twentieth century folklore collections, and modern PBS retellings that standardized the newer name, the Roan Mountain Ghost Choir.
That does not make the tradition less interesting. In some ways it makes it more interesting, because it lets us watch a mountain legend develop in stages. First came the place. Then came the atmosphere. Then came the printed story. And finally came the modern title by which most people now know it.
Sources & Further Reading
J. G. M. Ramsey, Annals of Tennessee to the End of the Eighteenth Century. Charleston, SC: Walker & James, 1853. Includes the 1799 North Carolina-Tennessee boundary line survey journal used for Roan Mountain’s wind and summit context. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/America/United_States/Tennessee/_Texts/THM/6/2/NC-TN_Boundary_Line_Survey%2A.html
Maria Vogler, “Roan Mountain Legend.” 1878. Reprinted in North Carolina Folklore 13, nos. 1–2 (1965). https://archive.org/stream/northcarolinafol1316univ/northcarolinafol1316univ_djvu.txt
Cloudland Hotel: 6394 Feet Above Sea Level on Top of Roan Mountain, Highest Summer Resort East of the Rockies, Daily Mail, Telegraph and Hack Line, Season of 1900 Begins July 1st and Ends September 30th. [Cloudland, N.C.], 1900. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/50/University_of_North_Carolina_at_Chapel_Hill_%28IA_cloudlandhotel6300clou%29.pdf
Hart Ephemera Collection M2024.02. Special Collections, University of North Carolina Asheville. Includes “Cloudland Hotel, on top of Roan Mountain” booklet and an 1886 Cloudland Hotel promotional card. https://go.unca.edu/specialcollections/manuscripts/hart-ephemera-collection-m2024-02/
John Parris, “Ghostly Choir of Roan.” Asheville Citizen-Times, November 20, 1955. https://www.newspapers.com/article/asheville-citizen-times-ghostly-choir-of/190221232/
John Parris, My Mountains, My People. Asheville, NC: Citizen-Times Publishing Company, 1957. https://search.worldcat.org/es/title/my-mountains-my-people/oclc/3430506
John Parris, “Ghost Choir Roan Mountain.” Asheville Citizen-Times, December 15, 1960. https://www.newspapers.com/article/asheville-citizen-times-ghost-choir-roan/190220972/
Bruce and Nancy Correll Roberts Papers. de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection, University of Southern Mississippi. Includes typescript and galley for “The Unearthly Music of Roan Mountain.” https://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/degrum/public_html/html/research/findaids/DG0821.html
Nancy Roberts, North Carolina Ghosts and Legends. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. https://uscpress.com/North-Carolina-Ghosts-and-Legends
Nancy Roberts, North Carolina Ghosts and Legends. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. JSTOR edition with “The Unearthly Music of Roan Mountain” in the table of contents. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvgs0bb3
Randy Russell and Janet Barnett, Mountain Ghost Stories and Curious Tales of Western North Carolina. Winston-Salem, NC: J. F. Blair, 1988. https://books.google.com/books/about/Mountain_Ghost_Stories_and_Curious_Tales.html?id=W9FhDM3fViMC
Jennifer A. Bauer, Roan Mountain: History of an Appalachian Treasure. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011. https://books.google.com/books/about/Roan_Mountain.html?id=_7l2CQAAQBAJ
PBS North Carolina, “Roan Mountain Ghost Choir,” My Home, NC, January 15, 2019. https://www.pbsnc.org/blogs/lifestyle/roan-mountain-ghost-choir/
PBS, “Roan Mountain Ghost Choir,” My Home, NC, Season 4, Episode 7, January 14, 2019. https://www.pbs.org/video/roan-mountain-ghost-choir-zslbsq/
PBS, “Legends & Lore,” My Home, NC, Season 7, Episode 3, April 21, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/video/legends-lore-dvv6dw/
Author Note: This piece follows the printed trail carefully, because Roan Mountain’s atmosphere is older than the first direct choir reference I could verify. That gap between place and print is part of what makes the legend worth preserving.