We had a first this week at Kings Mountain:  a visitor brought in an unusual picture she took out on the trail.  Could it be the Ghost of Kings Mountain?  The other pictures she took with her phone camera, those directly in front and behind this picture, were perfectly clear and recognizable.  But this one was different.

The day she took the picture was beautiful, not a cloud in the sky.  She was walking along between the monuments when she decided to take a picture of the ridgeline.  Her pictures of the monuments turned out really well – we knew exactly what they were.  But this one is different.  It appears to be a person but Megan and the person she was with swear there wasn’t a person there.  There isn’t a trail in the woods between the two monuments.  I went out shortly after they showed us this picture and Tom and I couldn’t find anything in the woods that was blue or red or could have caused this ghostly image.  Hmmm.

Megan’s history with Kings Mountain is also fun.  A young man came up to the desk and told us that he was there on his first date with a woman and he had promised her lunch and a nice hike.  They were going to hike at Kings Mountain, but he needed to take her to lunch first.  We recommended Rhonda’s, at the entrance to the park, and they took off.  Later they came back (saying Rhonda’s was wonderful) and hiked.  The next day they were back on their second date!  That is when Megan took this picture.  When Megan sent me this picture she said they would be back this weekend for another date.  Could Kings Mountain be where they fall in love?

We have lots of wonderful visitors at Kings Mountain.  We love to talk to kids who are excited about history.  We had a 4th grade girl who came in with her dad the weekend after her class had spent the day with us.  Her dad said she was so excited by Kings Mountain that she insisted he bring her back so they could see it together.  They live near Columbia, two hours away.

Last week another man and daughter came in.  It was his 65th birthday, and for his birthday his daughter had taken the week off, flown from Salt Lake City to Virginia, and they rode their bikes the 300 miles of the Overmountain Victory Trail:  from Abingdon, Virginia, to us.  We were the last stop on their journey and she was flying back to Salt Lake City the next day.

This week a woman came in from Iceland with her family.  She lives in North Carolina now, and we only found out about the Iceland connection because her daughter did the Jr. Ranger program and I asked about the unusual spelling of her name – Arora.  Mom answered that in Iceland “Arora” means visions of dawn but “Aurora” means visions of mud.  She also gave us a little history lesson on Iceland which was fascinating.

We love to talk to the visitors here.  We learn something new every day and we are constantly reminded how fascinating people are in all their diversity.  I guess the ghost of Kings Mountain is just one more example of the unusual visitors we get to meet.