Valley View Worms has an origin story that’s about as unusual as the vermiculture business itself, with plotlines hinging on a Facebook post, a felony conviction and 60 pounds of red wiggler composting worms. 

In a county as old as Haywood, there exist all manner of half-remembered places and faces long gone from the physical world yet immortalized through penciled notes on the backs of dog-eared, sepia-toned photographs.

Sunburst, in southeastern Haywood County, is one of those places; the subject of intense historical research, it’s been documented better than most ghosts of Haywood past, but the story of Sunburst has always been short one chapter. 

With his thick Brooklyn accent, Danny Mannlein isn’t exactly the type of “local” most Haywood County residents are used to seeing, but as Waynesville’s downtown business district continues to boom, more and more people like him are making Main Street their commercial home. 

The longstanding brouhaha over a makeshift dwelling near Frog Level has escalated to the point where enforcement action is likely in the coming days. 

The table is set — all you have to do is come sit down and be served.

Editor's note: some names in this story have been changed to honor a request from the family of the deceased. 

At 13, Tuscola High School freshman Zemra Teuta was like almost any other American teenage girl — she liked popular music, boys, hanging out with friends and chatting on social media. 

Zemra, however, wasn’t like every other teenage American girl. She was different. 

Tucked up along a hillside overlooking Richland Creek and the Frog Level district of Waynesville is a cozy bungalow. 

The walls are covered with all types of artwork collected over the years. Shelves filled with books on world travel and Appalachian culture. Dozens of vinyl records lean against the corners of the back room. 

The organization charged with maintaining and revitalizing Waynesville’s downtown core is setting an ambitious plan of work for 2019, to an extent not seen since the major streetscaping projects of the late 1980s-early 1990s. 

On Jan. 15, The Smoky Mountain News contacted almost every elected official in Haywood County for whom an email address was listed with the county’s board of elections. Around half failed to respond, but those who did were sometimes too verbose for print, so an excerpt from their response was used in the Jan. 23 edition of The Smoky Mountain News. In the interest of transparency, their full responses are included here.

Like the region’s opioid crisis, if Western North Carolina’s affordable housing crisis could have been solved by meetings, panel discussions or task force recommendations, it would have been over long ago. 

But last week, the town of Waynesville finally became the first Haywood County government to take concrete steps that could rid the county of a troublesome, underutilized asset — or liability, as some have called it — while at the same time transforming a blighted area just north of downtown into a vibrant, rejuvenated economic center.