I died in the nineteenth century. I did not expect, in the intervening years, to have occasion to write an op-ed. And yet here I am.

My name, for those who require introduction, is Anna Ruby Nichols. My father, Colonel William Easter Nichols, named the falls on his property after me sometime around 1870, when he determined that the two-strand waterfall on his homestead near Unicoi was worth naming. I was his daughter. I was young. The falls were, at that time, on private land in a part of White County that was not easily reached and was not, in any meaningful sense, being managed for tourism. The water fell. The rhododendrons were very large. There were no interpretive signs.

I am not opposed, in principle, to the falls being a public attraction. The land was transferred to the federal government eventually, and then to the State of Georgia, and the Georgia DNR has administered it as part of the Chattahoochee National Forest corridor since the 1960s, and I understand that the falls are now among the most visited attractions in the state, with approximately 800,000 visitors per year coming up the trail from the Unicoi State Park parking area to stand at the observation platform and take photographs. I am not a hermit. I am a ghost. I understand that waterfalls are appealing.

What I am writing about is the specific, accumulated grievances of recent years, which have become, in whatever the ghost equivalent of a patience is, more than I can continue to absorb silently.

The first matter is the "Anna Ruby Falls Mist."

There is, in the visitor center gift shop at the base of the trail, a product currently being sold for $8.99 under the name "Anna Ruby Falls Mist," which is a small spray bottle containing what I can only assume is water, possibly water from a municipal source, possibly water from a spring somewhere in the general Anna Ruby watershed, certainly water that has been placed in a branded bottle with a photograph of the falls on the label and a tag line I will not repeat here because it mentions being "refreshed by the falls' eternal spirit" and I find it personally objectionable. I am the spirit in question. I was not consulted. I do not endorse the product. I do not want my name, or the name of the falls that carries my name, used to sell small spray bottles of water to visitors who are, at the moment of purchase, standing approximately 1,200 feet from an actual waterfall that is producing considerably more mist than any retail container could approximate.

If you want the falls' mist, walk up the trail. It is a 0.4-mile paved walk with a 175-foot elevation gain. The mist is free. It is produced continuously. You do not need to purchase a bottle.

The second matter is the trail paving.

The trail to the falls is, as I have noted, currently paved. It was paved in stages beginning in the early 1990s to improve accessibility and reduce erosion damage from the high visitor volume. I understand the reasoning. I was here when the trail was not paved. I was here when the trail was, for most of the year, a red-clay path through mountain laurel and hemlock that required some attentiveness to navigate. I understand that 800,000 visitors per year cannot reasonably be expected to navigate an unpaved trail, and I understand that the ADA requirements for accessible recreation facilities apply to federal lands, and I am not, in principle, opposed to accessibility.

But the paved trail does something to the quality of the experience that I want the record to reflect. When my father's surveyor first described the approach to the falls in an 1871 letter, he wrote that the path "requires one to attend, somewhat, to one's footing, which has the effect of making the arrival at the falls a surprise, for one is looking down at the path and then suddenly one is looking up at the water." That quality — the looking-down-at-path followed by the looking-up-at-water — is no longer the experience of most visitors, because the paved surface requires no attention, and because the path curves in such a way that the falls are partially visible from about 200 feet out, and because there are now three interpretive signs in the final approach section that give visitors approximately 90 seconds of reading material before the falls come into full view. The surprise is not a surprise. The arrival is narrated in advance.

I want to be fair. Visitor safety is important. The erosion damage in the pre-pavement era was real. I am not asking anyone to unpave the trail. I am noting, for the record, that something was lost, and that the thing that was lost was the quality my father's surveyor described, which was the quality that made the falls worth naming after someone in the first place.

The third matter, and the one I feel most strongly about, is visitor number 847,423.

Visitor 847,423 — I know the number because the Georgia DNR visitor-count clicker at the trailhead is accurate to within a few dozen, and the count was at 847,421 when this particular visitor arrived in October of 2024, and she was the second member of a group of three — stood at the lower observation platform for approximately four minutes, said "it's pretty but honestly kind of small for how long the hike is," and posted a TikTok review rating the falls two stars, citing what she described as "mid energy."

I have thought about this for several months. I have, in whatever capacity a nineteenth-century ghost has to process a TikTok review of her own waterfall, processed it. And what I want to say is this: the falls are not "mid energy." The falls are Carroll Fork and York Creek dropping a combined 150 feet over two separate strands of cascading Appalachian gneiss into a shared plunge pool in the White County mountains, and they have been doing this continuously for longer than any measurement system you currently use could adequately convey. They were doing it before my father named them. They were doing it before my father was born. They were doing it before the Cherokees named the surrounding geography. They will be doing it after every person who has ever posted a TikTok review of anything is gone.

"Mid energy" is not a category that applies to the falls. "Mid energy" is a category that applies to the observer's attention span.

I want to be clear that I am not, in writing this, asking for a higher volume of praise. I am not asking visitors to perform enthusiasm. I am asking for a degree of attention proportional to what the falls are actually doing, which is, as I have described, something that has been happening for a very long time without any regard for how it will play in a 30-second video.

The fourth matter is the naming.

When my father named the falls, the act of naming was not complicated. He had land with a waterfall on it. He named the waterfall after his daughter. The name was used locally, then regionally, then in state park materials, and now in federal recreation designations, visitor-center signage, a gift shop product line, and, as of last spring, a half-marathon race series that includes a bib category called the "Anna Ruby Express." I have mixed feelings about the race series. I am not, in principle, opposed to people running near the falls. But the bib category name makes me sound like a train.

I am not a train. I was a person. I am now a ghost. The waterfall is a waterfall.

I do not want the falls renamed. The name is mine and I am, for whatever this is worth, attached to it. But I would like to be on record that the name was given to a thing that deserved quiet attention, and that the accumulation of product lines, race bibs, and TikTok reviews has created an ambient noise around the name that my father did not intend when he stood at the plunge pool in 1870 and decided his daughter's name was the right name for what he was looking at.

It was a good waterfall then. It is a good waterfall now. That is all it needs to be.

Please stop selling the mist.

— Anna Ruby Nichols