According to the book The Horseshoe People by Dan Crowe, the Deer Pen Cut was the western entrance to the forgotten Horseshoe Community of Elizabethton. People walking the train tracks through the cut from Siam were told to always look down, or they may see the spirit of a headless lady who is looking for her lost love, who had cut her head off in a jealous rage when he believed she was seeing another man. She would often follow people until they reached old Tom Crow Trestle (also called the Headless Lady Trestle) that was destroyed in a flood in 1940. Some skeptics believed this ghost story was created by an old moonshiner, only known as Corn Squeezer, who attempted to keep the law away from his still by spreading rumors of ghosts and that the area was infested with rattlesnakes.
But the cut may indeed be fraught with death. Suspending from ropes above the Watauga off the cliffs of the cut, Nat Estep was killed by falling rocks on Valentine’s Day, 1942 at the same place where Henry Wilson was killed during a dynamite explosion during the Wilbur Dam construction of 1910.
After the flood of 1940, a road was built over the crumpled railroad track; Wilbur Dam Road now runs through the cut.
