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Has anyone ever heard of Carolina Bays? I’d never heard of them until 30 minutes ago. They’re clusters of elliptically shaped landforms (often overlapping each other) found all over the eastern tidal areas of primarily North and South Carolina. (They’re also found in eastern Virginia and Georgia.) No one seems to know what they are.
Like the Nazca Lines of Peru, they’re only detected from the air. They were first discovered in 1933 during a Roosevelt administration aerial survey.
The odd thing is that I was raised in Sampson County, NC, right smack dab in the middle of these bays, and neither I nor any of my relatives ever noticed them.
Here are a couple of links. http://www.georgehoward.net/cbays.htm
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/cbaymbsc.html
Here are a couple of quotes from the first web site:
“Allow me to pass along the following accounts of legends passed down among Native Americans concerning the origin of the Bay lakes on whose shores they long lived:
“Of Lake Mattamuskeet:
“…..kneeling at a sacrificial alter, she prayed to the Great Spirit to save the brave and her perishing people. After her invocation, a star fell to the earth, and rain soon followed. Days and days of rain quenched the fire. Great holes burned in the earth by the fire were filled, forming a great inland sea.” (Algonquin Indian legend, Touring the Backroads of North Carolina’s Upper Coast, p.268)”
“Of Lake Waccamaw:
“The local Indians are known as the “People of the Falling Star,” and they believed the lake was created by a falling star, perhaps a great meteorite.” (Waccamaw-Siouan Indian legend, Wild Shores, Exploring the Wilderness Areas of Eastern North Carolina. p.150)”
Here are links to more photos of Carolina Bays
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/recentcb.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/remorcb1.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/remorcb2.html
http://abob.libs.uga.edu/bobk/remorcb3.html
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