The Ghost of Smokies

In the backcountry of the Great Smoky Mountain National Park is an old wooden cabin. Some say it’s haunted. Some say it’s possessed. Hikers have reported strange sounds and sightings near it for years. Animals won’t go near it. And Park Rangers have logged equipment failures as they have passed by it.  No one remembers whose cabin it is — there is no record of it in the Park Service’s files.  Unlike most structures in the park, it was not removed when the Park was formed.  For some reason it just sits there, never decaying.

The cabin was owned by Oliver M. Sydney, trapper, hunter and storyteller. He was a tall, thin man who possessed the deepest, most piercing eyes of anyone in East Tennessee. He roamed the mountainside, trapping for fur and killing for meat.  He built a small, one bedroom Chestnut-log home on his claim in the shadow of Mount LeConte.  The timber barons never messed with him.  They called him “The Devil,” because of his legendary meanness. He just lived his life in peace trapping and hunting until that fateful day in October 31, 1935. That’s the day when the man from the U.S. Government knocked on his door with an eviction notice.

The man from the U.S. Government left with a gunshot wound to the leg.

No one was takin’ his land, Oliver swore. He’d stay on that land forever.

He might have been permitted to stay, but the U.S. Government is kind of funny about people who shoot their agents.  The don’t like it. So the next day, several more agents hiked up the knoll and surrounded old man’s cabin.  He promptly sent them diving behind trees and into ditches with a barrage of gunfire.  The Siege of LeConte had begun.

Four days passed and the agents held their ground. So did Oliver.  As the world went on its merry way, time stood still in the Great Smoky Mountains.  There are few things more stubborn than a mountain man.  Oliver M. Sydney was going nowhere.

Or so he thought.

Fred Whitehorse, a tracker from the Cherokee reservation in North Carolina, was brought in to sneak up to the cabin to smoke him out.  Fred crawled behind it and then climbed on the roof.  Oliver, tired from being awake for so long, did not notice that his chimney had been covered. His cabin quickly filled with smoke.

Oliver came out with guns blazing.  But there was only one of him. And a dozen U.S. agents.  Oliver M. Sydney was buried where he fell.  The Government, not wanting bad P.R., swept the incident under the rug. Reports were burned and careers were threatened. No one was to hear about the mountain man’s death.

So to this day, when you walk by the old cabin in the woods you might see Oliver M. Sydney’s ghost on the front porch and hear his cries. Or if you are a Park Ranger, you might have your radio or phone die.  Because the old mountain man was right about one thing — he will stay on his land forever.