Betsy Teter is a founder of Spartanburg, South Carolina’s Hub City Writers Project, which publishes books and operates an independent bookstore in downtown Spartanburg. She is the 2017 winner of the Elizabeth O’Neill Verner Award for contribution to the arts in South Carolina.
I know exactly what pulled me into the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was those 1960s television commercials for Ghost Town in the Sky, a Wild West theme park on a western North Carolina mountaintop. Even more than the images of the steep chairlift or the cowboy gun battles in the streets, it was that haunting jingle I heard as a child and still remember today: GHOOOST TOWN IN THE SKYYYYYY. The place called out to me, dangerous, remote and above the cloud line.
We were flatlanders, and mostly we watched flatlander television: stations in Spartanburg and Greenville that came in clear as a bell and where the nightly newsmen—Huntley & Brinkley and Cronkite—had gravitas. Watching WLOS, the ABC affiliate on channel 13 at the top of the dial, sometimes required a twist of the rabbit ears and a redirection of the aluminum foil flags.
To this piedmont girl, tuning in to the Asheville station felt like peering into another world. Occasionally, as we searched for local news, the dial would stop at WLOS, and there, standing in front of a big map, would be weatherman Bill Norwood pointing to places with musical, exotic names: Banner Elk, Maggie Valley, Cataloochee, Blowing Rock, Grandfather Mountain. These were places that captured my imagination (unlike the towns on our maps—Union, Gaffney, and my own, the plebian-sounding Spartanburg). Norwood and his nightly weather report was part of the same Blue Ridge siren song that included Ghost Town in the Sky.
Ghost Town opened in Maggie Valley in 1961, and after a nearly 50-year run, finally closed during the recent recession, doomed by money problems, mechanical failures and mudslides. In all those years, I never got to go. Instead, my parents chose to take my brother and me to Tweetsie Railroad, Ghost Town’s smaller, friendlier cousin. Its advertisements were filled with happy children pouring off the historic steam train. I remember riding the train in a wide circle and the bank robber who stuck his gun in my younger brother’s face, shouting, “Give me all your money!” Tweetsie was fun and memorable, but I didn’t come away feeling like I’d made a trip into the sky, or seen any ghosts.
When I was 14, I found a scout troop that would take me there. Well, not there exactly. Our intrepid, all-girl troop hiked every mile of the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina. We climbed the Chimney Peaks and danced on the edge of the earth. We rode horses to the top of Mount LeConte in a dense fog. We raced each other to the top of Clingmans Dome. Lugging 40-pound packs, we camped in the valleys and skipped across the grassy balds. In the end, I found my ghost towns in the sky. To this day, they keep calling.
