Tennessee Shadow Chasers

06/05/2026

Here’s another new team needing some love and support! Give them a follow and show them that we see them and we got them!!!

I've been drawn to the paranormal since I was a child growing up in a haunted house.

06/05/2026

With Spirits of Marco – I just got recognized as one of their top fans! 🎉

06/05/2026

🎉 Facebook recognized me for starting engaging conversations and producing inspiring content among my audience and peers!

06/05/2026

06/05/2026

06/05/2026

06/03/2026

Join us to learn more about Heather and Bob and their location! We are excited to have them on the show!!

06/03/2026

When the first European settlers pushed into the mountains of what is now Tennessee and Virginia they found people already there.
Not Cherokee. Not any tribe anyone recognized. A community of dark complexioned, light eyed people living in the isolated ridges of Newman's Ridge and Snake Hollow who spoke English, practiced Christianity, and could not or would not explain where they had come from.
They were called Melungeons. Nobody knows for certain where that word came from either.
The theories have never stopped coming. Portuguese sailors shipwrecked on the Carolina coast in the 1500s who walked inland and disappeared into the mountains. survivors of Sir Walter Raleigh's Lost Colony of Roanoke. Free African Americans and Native Americans who had retreated into the hills to escape persecution. Remnants of a pre-Columbian Mediterranean settlement that history never recorded. Turkish or Moorish sailors. A mixing of peoples so complex and so old that no single origin story could ever fully account for it.
DNA studies in the early 2000s gave partial answers and raised entirely new questions. Melungeon descendants carried genetic markers from sub-Saharan Africa, the British Isles, and the Middle East in combinations that did not fit neatly into any single narrative.
The state of Virginia classified them as free persons of color in the 1800s which stripped them of their right to vote, to own property, and to testify in court against a white person. Families who had been in those mountains for generations longer than the state of Virginia itself were suddenly legally invisible.
They knew who they were. The mountains knew who they were.
The rest of the world is still working on it.