Appalachian Folklore & Myths
A lantern in the dark above town
On autumn nights in Jenkins, it is easy to see why stories grow on Pine Mountain. The coal camp lights pool in the narrow valley, U.S. 23 climbs toward Pound Gap, and above everything the black outline of Raven Rock hangs over town.
From time to time, people say, a single light appears on that high flank of the ridge. It swings or drifts as if someone is walking with a lantern. Locals call it the Restless Soldier of Raven Rock, a Confederate sentry who fell asleep at his post, was shot for dereliction of duty, and who now paces the mountain with his lamp, trying forever to finish a watch he failed during the Civil War.
The legend ties a modern ghost light to a very real battlefield landscape. Jenkins sits almost in the shadow of Pound Gap, a pass through Pine Mountain used by Native peoples, longhunters, surveyors, Civil War armies, and, in the twentieth century, coal companies and highway engineers.
Like many Appalachian ghost tales, the Restless Soldier story mixes a specific place, a fragment of wartime memory, and a strange light whose cause no one can quite pin down.
Raven Rock and the view from Pine Mountain
Raven Rock is a huge rock outcrop on the crest of Pine Mountain directly above Jenkins. Letcher County promotional material describes it as looming over both the town and Pound Gap, with a view that reaches far into Virginia.
Twentieth century residents knew exactly how commanding that overlook was. In the early 1950s, when Jenkins residents brought television into the valley, they chose Raven Rock for the receiving antenna. A local history compiled for Jenkins Independent Schools recalls that the rock rises roughly 850 feet above town, and that a long line of equipment was run up what people nicknamed the Gonset Trail to carry the signal down into the camp.
Company photographers had recognized the same viewpoint decades earlier. A series of images taken on July 5, 1923, now in the collections of the National Museum of American History, are titled simply “View of Jenkins from Raven Rock.” The glass negatives show the young coal town laid out below the cliff, with houses, tipples, and rail lines threaded through a basin of newly cut hillsides.
All of that makes the Restless Soldier easier to picture. From down in Jenkins, anyone looking up at night can see the shoulder of the mountain where a lantern would move, and from the rock itself a sentry could watch nearly everything that approached Pound Gap from the Kentucky side.
War on the Ridge
Pound Gap slices through Pine Mountain on the Kentucky and Virginia line between Jenkins and the town of Pound. Modern highway signs and tourist material emphasize that it has long been a crossing point. Early surveyors for the Ohio Company, possibly including Christopher Gist, came through in 1750, and Daniel Boone reportedly used the gap to warn surveyors of a threatened Shawnee attack in 1774.
When the Civil War reached eastern Kentucky, the gap became a military objective. In the winter of 1861 and early 1862, Confederate brigadier general Humphrey Marshall brought Kentucky and Virginia troops into the Big Sandy Valley. Before marching deeper into the state he had men occupy Pound Gap, using it as a base and supply route.
Union forces returned the favor in March 1862. Colonel James A. Garfield led an expedition into the mountains that culminated in a surprise attack on Confederate positions at Pound Gap on March 16. The Kentucky Historical Society’s summary and related marker texts describe roughly 800 Union troops storming the summit and routing about 500 Confederates, destroying camp supplies and briefly closing a Confederate line of communication through the gap.
Official army records compiled later list the action as the “Expedition to Pound Gap” and “Action at Pound Gap,” part of Garfield’s broader campaign in eastern Kentucky. Although those documents do not mention Raven Rock by name, they confirm what the landscape suggests. In 1862, Confederate pickets watched from the ridgeline, and Union scouts studied the same passes with an eye for surprise.
Modern memorials at the gap remember both the battle and other violence on the mountain, from Civil War skirmishes to the 1892 Pound Gap massacre and later tragedies. Together they reinforce a sense that Pound Gap and its heights have long been places where danger and death felt close.
Whether anyone was actually shot for sleeping on sentry duty at Raven Rock is another matter. Surviving wartime reports and later county histories do not identify a specific soldier or execution that matches the legend. That absence does not disprove older oral tradition, but it does remind us that the Restless Soldier, as told today, is a folk story built around a real wartime landscape rather than a documented biography.
From ghost tour to named legend
The earliest clearly dated print mention of the Restless Soldier that I have been able to locate appears not in a nineteenth century diary, but in a twenty first century newspaper. In October 2016, The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg ran a feature inviting readers to “meet the ghosts of Letcher County” on a guided tour.
That short piece described a ghost walk that included sites around Jenkins and Pound Gap. In one section the writer mentioned people seeing a lantern swaying on the mountain near Raven Rock and connected it to a Confederate sentry who had dozed off, been killed, and whose spirit still wandered with his light. The details line up closely with the version told on tours today.
Within a few years that paragraph had become the anchor for a fuller written version of the story. Kentucky Tennessee Living, a local history and folklore site, published “Letcher County Haunted History: Part Three – The Restless Soldier,” which focuses on Raven Rock and explicitly cites the Mountain Eagle article as documentary support for the tale. The blog post emphasizes that multiple witnesses claim to have seen a light moving near the rock and frames it as a kind of ghost light, while also noting that weather and atmospheric conditions provide more prosaic possibilities.
Other entries in the same “Haunted History” series draw on Mountain Eagle archives and public records, and they, too, treat the 2016 ghost tour article as a touchstone for modern Letcher County ghost lore.
The story has also moved in the opposite direction, from print back into spoken tradition. In a Letcher County Facebook group, one post asks if readers have ever heard of a will o wisp and then answers by pointing to “Raven Rock’s very own” Restless Soldier, describing it as a ghostly light on the mountain and linking to an online write up of the tale.
A YouTube series on “Haunted Letcher County History” devotes an episode to the Restless Soldier, situating the lantern story alongside other county legends that show up on ghost tours. The video description again mentions the Mountain Eagle ghost tour piece and even recommends material on “ghost lights” and weather folklore.
By the late 2010s, in other words, the Restless Soldier had become one of the core stories people used to explain strange lights around Jenkins.
Raven Rock as park, project, and memory
While the legend was taking shape, the physical site was changing. A Mountain Eagle nostalgia column in 2016, “The Way We Were,” recalled earlier efforts to develop Raven Rock Park above Jenkins. Those memories included local leaders and clergy who promoted the overlook as a community space.
In 2023 another Eagle article reported that the city had “high hopes” for a new Raven Rock resort project that would take advantage of the cliff’s view of Jenkins and Pound Gap. The accompanying photograph looked down from the rock toward town, echoing the old Pittsburgh Consolidation Co. images and underscoring how strongly local people continue to see this outcrop as Jenkins’ balcony above the world.
Regional hiking and tourism sites describe the Pine Mountain State Scenic Trail crossing U.S. 23 at Pound Gap and running along the ridge past overlooks known as Raven’s Nest and Austin Gap. Local bloggers and hikers post photos of views very similar to those in the 1923 coal company photographs, though taken now from state scenic trails rather than company roads.
Even in an era of coal’s decline, Raven Rock and Pine Mountain continue to tie together geology, industry, recreation, and memory. The Restless Soldier legend nests inside that larger history.
Ghost lights in the Appalachian imagination
KyTnLiving’s Restless Soldier article explicitly links the lantern above Jenkins to wider “ghost light” traditions. That is a big world. Across Appalachia and beyond, people report mysterious lights that float, bob, or flare up with no obvious source.
One of the most famous examples is the Brown Mountain lights in western North Carolina. For more than a century, visitors to an overlook near Morganton have described glowing orbs or flares on a distant ridge. Mahayla Waldrop’s 2023 overview of “Appalachia’s ghost lights” notes that reports of Brown Mountain lights have been attributed to Cherokee witnesses, settlers, and Civil War soldiers, and that the phenomenon has been investigated by the United States Geological Survey and by modern physicists with cameras and instruments.
Closer to the Great Smokies, the Thomas Divide ghost lights have attracted attention from writers at Southern Spirit Guide, who describe first hand sightings of strange lights and review proposed explanations such as car headlights, ball lightning, and other natural effects.
Folklorists have long lumped these stories under the older European term will o the wisp, an “atmospheric ghost light” that leads travelers astray. Modern summaries of that tradition point out that such lights are reported around the world and that scientific speculation has ranged from swamp gas and phosphine to electrical phenomena in the air.
Raven Rock fits many of the same patterns. The reported light is seen at night, often at some distance, in a landscape where there are roads, modern lighting, and complex weather conditions. Explanations range from the purely supernatural to the strictly physical.
Skeptics point to headlights on the highway near Pound Gap, four wheelers or hikers on the mountain after dark, aircraft lights, reflections of town lights on low clouds, or even rare electrical effects in the air. Believers stress that some sightings look too isolated or too strange to be car lights and that they move like a person walking with a lantern rather than like traffic.
So far, no one has set up monitoring equipment on Pine Mountain long enough to test particular theories. That puts Jenkins in the same position as Brown Mountain and Thomas Divide. People see something. They reach for whatever explanation fits their own experience, and stories follow.
Legend, landscape, and the Restless Soldier
For a historian, the Restless Soldier legend around Raven Rock is most interesting where it touches firm ground. We can document that Pound Gap was a genuine Civil War site, occupied by both Confederate and Union forces and fought over during Garfield’s March 1862 expedition.
We can show that Raven Rock has been used repeatedly as a lookout and communication point, from early company photography to the 1951 television antenna and now to tourism and trail development.
We can name the mountain towns below the rock and the coal company, Consolidation Coal, that built them and commissioned the 1923 “View of Jenkins from Raven Rock” photographs.
We can also track how a local ghost story that may have circulated orally for some time first appears in accessible print in a 2016 Mountain Eagle ghost tour article, then is expanded by a local history blog, and finally spreads through Facebook groups, YouTube videos, and modern ghost tours.
What remains undocumented are the personal pieces that give the legend its emotional force. We do not know the name of the supposed sentry, when or where he was executed, or whether nineteenth century residents of Jenkins and neighboring hollows told an earlier version of the story. That absence of evidence does not demolish the tale, but it sets boundaries on what we can claim as verifiable history.
At the same time, the way the Restless Soldier has already seeped into local historical writing is telling. Your own earlier piece on the abandoned Whitesburg water treatment plant, for instance, cites the 2016 Mountain Eagle ghost article as an example of how Letcher County groups use spooky lore to raise money for civic projects. In another Mountain Eagle article, the proposed Raven Rock resort is framed as a tourism project that will likely lean on the rock’s ghost stories as much as its scenic overlook.
In that sense, the Restless Soldier belongs to the same family of stories as Florence Reece’s “Which Side Are You On?” in Harlan or Brown Mountain’s lights in North Carolina. Whether or not a spectral sentry truly paces the rock, the legend gives people in Jenkins a language for talking about their landscape, their history, and the uneasy mix of tragedy and beauty on Pine Mountain.
Sources & Further Reading
The Mountain Eagle, “Now’s your chance to meet the ghosts of Letcher County,” October 19, 2016. The Mountain Eagle
Kentucky Tennessee Living, “Letcher County Haunted History: Part Three – The Restless Soldier,” plus Parts One and Two of the Letcher County Haunted History series. kytnliving.com+2kytnliving.com+2
Letcher County Facebook group post beginning “Ever heard of a will o wisp? Here is Raven Rock’s very own,” describing the Restless Soldier of Raven Rock as a local ghost light. Facebook
“Haunted Letcher County History: The Restless Soldier,” YouTube video and related “Haunted Letcher County History” episodes. YouTube+2YouTube+2
Letcher County Tourism, “Pound Gap of Pine Mountain,” and Pound Gap entry on Wikipedia. Letcher County+1
“Pound Gap,” ExploreKYHistory (Kentucky Historical Society), and related historical markers at Pound Gap Civil War Memorial, the Teardrop Monument, and Caudill’s Army, as transcribed by the Historical Marker Database and regional tourism sites. HMDB+5Explore Kentucky History+5HMDB+5
National Park Service, “Kentucky Battles,” listing the Expedition to Pound Gap and action on March 16, 1862, and American History Central’s narrative of Humphrey Marshall’s eastern Kentucky campaign. National Park Service+1
Nora Figger, “Jenkins History,” Jenkins Independent Schools history site, and related Jenkins history articles at Kentucky Tennessee Living. kytnliving.com+4classcreator.com+4kytnliving.com+4
Pittsburgh Consolidation Coal Company photographs, “View of Jenkins from Raven Rock,” 1923, National Museum of American History collections and accompanying finding aid. National Museum of American History+6National Museum of American History+6sirismm.si.edu+6
“The Way We Were,” Mountain Eagle nostalgia column mentioning Raven Rock Park, August 17, 2016, and “Jenkins has high hopes for Raven Rock project,” Mountain Eagle, February 1, 2023. The Mountain Eagle+2The Mountain Eagle+2
Mahayla Waldrop, “Appalachia’s ghost lights,” OverlookedInAppalachia.org (2023), and related coverage of Brown Mountain lights in Wikipedia and regional tourism material. Romantic Asheville+3OVERLOOKED+3OVERLOOKED+3
Southern Spirit Guide entries on the Thomas Divide ghost lights. Southern Spirit Guide+1
“Will o the wisp,” overview of atmospheric ghost lights and associated folklore. Wikipedia