My uncle’s family lived in the mountains North Carolina, and my family used to visit them in the summers. About twenty miles from where they lived was an area known for its mysterious “ghost lights.” Brown Mountain was the original location of the lights, but the place we always went was Wiseman’s View. There were lights there too.
I incorporated the lights into the plot of Season Out of Time but changed the name of the mountain from Brown Mountain to Ghost Mountain and relocated it to Arkansas. (I also called in “Haunted Mountain” in an earlier edition, but thought it sounded too much like the title of a Hardy Boys book. Not that I don’t love the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. They gave me much childhood reading pleasure.)
Did we ever actually see the ghost lights? We definitely saw lights. Whether they came from supernatural phenomena, extraterrestrials, natural phenomena, or hoaxers, I have no opinion, but I enjoyed speculating about them.