October, of course, is the month for haunting, when lawns become littered with skeletons and witches fly in through branches of trees shedding their leaves. Store shelves are stocked with masks and makeup and an array of costumes, all designed to terrify. But on “Where Shadows Walk,” Franklin’s haunted history tour, you won’t find any of that. No masked hatchet men will jump from behind gravestones; black-eyed zombie undertakers will not be your guides, because, said Gregg Clark, the tour’s owner and guide, you won’t need them. The stories themselves elicit enough scare power on their own. 

General Grant knew from a young age he was an artist.

“I was gifted, it was a gift from The Creator,” he said. “He gave me multiple talents and I was not afraid to experiment with them. Through my experimentation, I’ve become very good at this and have able to make a living doing it.”

A new traveling exhibit is using technology to teach people about traditional Cherokee culture.

Charged with stealing, 15-year-old Charles Eason was sentenced to work on a prison chain gang.

It was 1882, and the teenager from Martin County soon found himself side-by-side with other convicts, many two and three times his age. Mostly from the eastern part of the state, the gang was sent to construct the railroad lines in Western North Carolina.

We Americans sometimes forget how new we are to the history of the world.

Here in Western North Carolina, for example, we live like other Americans. We drive cars on expressways, live in towns and cities, buy or build homes and apartments equipped with electricity and running water, erect schools, churches, and fast-food restaurants, build shopping malls, buy meat, vegetables and milk from large grocery stores, vacation at the coast or overseas, gather local information from papers like The Smoky Mountain News, and commune with the world via the internet and television.

Lately, it seems Ann Melton was born in the wrong century.

During the past two years, Melton has spent more time living in the late 1800s — the days when boarding houses and hitching posts lined Waynesville’s Main Street, when general stores still had butcher counters and bartering was a way of life — than the comparatively humdrum trappings of the 21st century.

The death of Haywood County Sheriff John Phillip Noland — a murder story set against the backdrop of the American Civil War — sounds as if it belongs in the pages of Charles Frazier’s Cold Mountain.

As Don Casada veered off-trail and began bushwhacking his way over fallen logs and through overgrown shrubs along the shore of Lake Fontana, he barely glanced at the trusty GPS unit in his hand.

He’d been this way before, many times, and knew just where he was going. Casada finally stopped at a clearing marked by a looming stone chimney, all that is left of a cabin that early Appalachian settlers had once called home.

By Peggy Manning • Correspondent

Tim Hall relishes in the history and folklore of the mountains but also knows when a little embellishing is in order — especially when it comes to ghost stories.

Swain County is permanently etching its history in stone.

In the next couple of months, the first of about 60 black marble panels will be installed along the wall outside the county government building and courthouse in downtown Bryson City. The panels will detail important points in Swain County’s history and also list the names of its veterans from various wars and conflicts.