The Painted Man of Paint Rock

From Ancient Mysteries
From Paint Rock
The Painted Man of Paint Rock is a creature described as both a physical and ethereal spirit that haunts the area around the painted rock cliff face of Paint Rock NC, and has been described in several oral traditions in addition to some written texts of the area, the most prominant being of a Andrew Ransom from Sheltonstead in the 1850s, who described an oral tradition in his collection of local legends.

"Back in the days before where there was tree and stone and the people according to the native tribes of the Blue Ridge Mountains, there was also the painted rock. It's always been older than anyone knows, despite the best assumptions being that it is of Cherokee, Creek, or some other, smaller, and heretofor unknown tribe of the area's design. As far back as anyone has found record, it's already existed in it's full form from a sense truely emprical, however there are legends of how they came to be.

On the one hand, there is the legend that the "Painted Man" is in fact the ethereal remains of the originator of the designs of the cliffface, his savage spirit not finding peace in the equivalent heaven of the Natives, but instead doomed to walk the material world at the site of his creation through some sort of offense offered to the spirits of the stone and river that his mural now stands upon.

This place has been a place of great ceremonial value to the historical tribes of Natives, but to the caucasian there have always been... problems. It seems like accidents, disappearances, and misfourtune all are at a premium at the site, as if the bloodsoaked spirits of the natives have come back from their graves to avenge past wrongs of the fathers upon the sons and grandsons of the Americans who call this area home. It's infrequent, however there are described sightings, such as one made by a Messer. J. W. Yancey of Jewelled Hill, who described having seen red and white markings in the trees, almost as if a camoflauge while he and his dogs were out hunting one late fall day in the year 1847. He described the sense of being observed and followed, as if whatever what in the trees was no mere animal, fully aware of him, and moving him from the position of being the hunter to being the prey. Mr. Yancey seemed convinced and was unassuaged of his opinion that this was a spirit of a native, stalking him.

Mr. Yancey isn't the only individual to chronicle such an encounter, as a Mr. James Bowman of Medicine Creek also described a feeling of being watched while he travelled, taking sundries from his farm in the poorly defined Medicine Creek area and across the State line into Greene County Tennessee. As he travelled past the famed Indian mural, he describes seeing the red and white markings shifting mysteriously, causing his mule to startle, and begin a much faster pace past the cliffs into Tennessee."

— - Andrew Ransom, The Lost Legends of the Kingdoms of the Smokey Mountains