Elkmont Ghost Town

Smokies resort village abandoned to the forest. Hikers hear footsteps, children laughing, and a piano playing in empty woods.

Elkmont is what happens when the federal government takes your hometown and lets the forest swallow what's left. The Great Smoky Mountains National Park bought up the resort village in the 1930s, evicted the residents over the next several decades, and let the cabins, stone chimneys, and the Wonderland Hotel decay in place. Most of it is gone now. Some of it still stands. The standing parts are why hikers keep reporting things they can't explain.

The town started in 1908 as a Little River Lumber Company logging camp. By 1912 a businessman named Charles Carter bought 65 acres and built the Wonderland Hotel and Wonderland Club, drawing wealthy Knoxville families up the Little River for fishing trips and back-to-nature retreats. A second cluster of cottages, the Appalachian Club, went up nearby. For roughly twenty years before the park, Elkmont was the most fashionable summer address in East Tennessee.

When the park boundary was finalized, residents were given lifetime leases on their cottages. The leases ran out one by one through the late twentieth century. The Wonderland Hotel limped along until it closed in 1992, partially burned in 1995, and finally collapsed under its own weight in 2005. The Park Service tore down the rubble in 2006 and put up a sign where the porch used to be. The Appalachian Club lodge and seventeen cabins were preserved. Everything else is foundation stones, fireplaces standing alone in a meadow, and bottle glass in the leaf litter.

The deaths are real and underreported. Logging killed a lot of men in this valley between 1908 and the late 1920s. Train derailments on the Little River Railroad, falling trees, blade accidents at the lumber company, drownings in the river. A 1909 logging-train accident at nearby Townsend killed several Little River employees. Nobody kept comprehensive records of camp deaths, but the Tennessee Museum's history of Elkmont notes that worker fatalities seeded most of the local ghost stories that followed.

What hikers describe along the Little River Trail and Jakes Creek Trail tends to repeat. Footsteps on the old logging-road grade behind them when they're alone. The faint sound of children laughing near the cabin foundations. A piano playing somewhere in the woods near the Appalachian Club lodge, which makes no sense because the piano in the lodge has been gone for decades. People who've spent the night at the Elkmont campground a half-mile downstream report unexplained voices around three or four in the morning, often described as a child's voice calling for a parent.

Park rangers and regular Elkmont hikers agree the Wonderland Hotel site is the spookiest patch of ground in the historic district. The hotel had a long balcony that ran the full length of the front, and former guests in the 1980s described seeing women in early-twentieth-century dress standing on the porch at dusk, then not being there when they looked again. After the building collapsed and was cleared, the Wonderland Hotel sightings stopped getting reported. The footsteps on the trail above the site did not.

Elkmont also produces one of the strangest natural phenomena in the country, which has nothing to do with ghosts and a lot to do with why this place feels off. For two weeks every June the synchronous fireflies, Photinus carolinus, blink in unison across the valley floor. The Park Service runs a lottery for the viewing days. Standing in a dark meadow surrounded by abandoned chimneys while ten thousand insects pulse in time makes the ghost stories feel almost beside the point.

The cottages and the Appalachian Club lodge are open to walk through during daylight hours year-round. After dark, the park asks visitors to be back at their cars, and the rangers who patrol the Little River Trail after closing don't always offer an explanation beyond a nod toward the cabin foundations.