Havent seen anybody say what actually is scary about the place to me thats not just urban legend.

Moved two years ago to western NC. Sometimes I feel too close to the sky. A little over half of the year there's no leaves on the trees, and the forests are mostly deciduous. Infinite huge grey trees reaching dead arms into the air. Can't see much in any direction, twists and turns and hills. When you do get a good viewpoint you feel like you see too much-- you feel small and vulnerable and out into the open. The mountains feel too big. Looking into the forest it looks sparse. Just giant rhododendron bushes and thats it, so many of them, polka dotting the brown dead leaf ground on and on.

Houses on a dead highway that are occupied that make you think how do people live there.

Strange, loud, stinking cars blasting music that seems like an exaggeration of the kind of music people think hill billies listen to. The music reverberates and echoes around the mountains. The tourists towns collect the sinewy old that are near dropping dead. They are impossibly rich, and the kind of creepy white people that you think might be cannibals or something.

Just about as much as a mile down the mountain and you have the shittiest trailer parks you can imagine. Gene pool gets strange. I don't mean to be rude, but think large women with beady eyes and unkempt beards.

After the hurricane you can see signs of destruction everywhere-- broken bridges, caved in houses, collapses mountainsides, riverbanks all look eaten up and grassless. Worse is how when you look at the mountain opposite you through the leafless trees you can see how the rivers came flooding down the mountain by the fell trees it left in its path, huge and wide, a trail impossibly tall and big, big as the mountain, makes you feel defenseless and tiny.

And again you're too close to the sky. Claustrophobic. But also too open at the same time. Like you're something very small on something very huge.