I found some historical aerial photos of the site here.
Plot twist - the markings appeared between 2010 and 2012. That’s about 20 years after Big Brutus was shut down.The surface mines for coal to the SE were mined from the 1920s to 1974, and those mines make a lot more sense: intersecting straight-ish lines on a much larger scale.
I think these features are too late, too small, and the wrong geometry to be old strip mine remnants. I think they purposely made on previously marginal bottomland for another purpose - art, wildlife habitat, dozer practice.
Whoops - I see the aerial photo link should be this one instead for 2015. Contrast it with this one for 2010. The ‘aerials’ button in the upper left lets you change the year.
There should also be some satellite imagery available on https://earthexplorer.usgs.gov/ (likely the same but without the watermarks). I’ll try to dig some up if I can manage to get my account password reset.
Thank you to everyone who contributed on this! I thought it seemed like a weirdly incomplete segment on “What On Earth?”. The actual answer to what the “symbols” are is far more satisfying than the gibberish their talking heads spouted. In a segment in an earlier season, they looked at spiraling sand dunes on the edge of an African desert. After their usual goofy conjectures, they did send someone to go look at them, only to find there was a guy with a tractor plowing the patterns into the sand. He told them his family had been doing that to help water collect in the grooves in an attempt to reclaim tillable ground. They should have done the same thing on the “Ghost Town Terror” episode, and asked the landowner about his funny shaped holes.
one can look up the property ownership information by a short google search for Cherokee county plat maps. It includes personal enough data that the owner can be contacted by mail for information on the property.
