North Carolina Ghosts and Legends

Nancy Roberts

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781643360461
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Folklore & Mythology
• Index: Social Sciences

Nancy Roberts has often been described to as the "First Lady of American Folklore" and the title is well deserved. Throughout her decades-long career, Roberts documented supernatural experiences and interviewed hundreds of people about their recollections of encounters with the supernatural.

This nationally renowned writer began her undertaking in this ghostly realm as a freelance writer for the Charlotte Observer. Encouraged by Carl Sandburg, who enjoyed her stories and articles, Roberts wrote her first book in 1958. Aptly called a "custodian of the twilight zone" by Southern Living magazine, Roberts based her suspenseful stories on interviews and her rich knowledge of American folklore. Her stories were always rooted in history, which earned her a certificate of commendation from the American Association of State and Local History for her books on the Carolinas and Appalachia.

THE WHALER’S RETURN

He wondered with a frightened, empty feeling if she had married.

Most seafaring men have their superstitious side, and so did Edward Pond. But he had no premonitions when his ship headed out to sea from its home port at Stonington, Connecticut.

His heavily muscled arms and rough, scarred hands were used to hard work for he had been a whaler for some thirty years before signing on with the crew of the Charles Sprague. Pond was unusually happy about this voyage just before Thanksgiving in 1886. The Sprague was a fine new three-masted schooner with a long quarterdeck. His only son would be serving with him as third mate—the first time they had ever sailed together.

On board he watched the boy with pride. A tall blond young man, Sylvester Pond was born and raised to go to sea. Only twenty, he had a keen eye for how a sail should be bent and a strong, skilled forearm that could make a coil of rope leap and twist like a writhing snake.

They were only a few days out of Stonington when a moderate chop began, but it was hardly felt in a vessel like the Sprague. The crew awakened to hear rain pelting the deck and every direction was a curtain of gray. The sun did not rise that day. By afternoon the schooner Sprague was hurtling down the side of one mountainous wave and up another, scudding before the storm.

Father and son were both on deck when it happened. In one billowing black onslaught the sea boarded the ship! Veteran whaler Edward Pond looked up to see a wall of water high as a tidal wave. Suddenly he became a tiny particle of humanity encased in unbearably heavy wetness, unable to breathe, propelled through endless reaches of blackness with momentum so great he thought it would strip off his very flesh.

His chest was ready to burst, the pressure in his ears was excruciating, and he was almost unconscious when, with tremendous impact, the water hurled him against the side of the cabin. Seconds later a yawl, its davit broken, smote him with such cruel violence that it crushed his limp body against the cabin wall.

Sylvester managed to reach his father while he still lived and release him. He took his father to a bunk and arranged pillows around his bruised and broken body, but mercifully Edward Pond never regained consciousness. Five hours later, with his son’s arms around him, he died.

The fourth day of the storm was Thanksgiving, and the tempest raged on, the Sprague scudding helplessly before hurricane-force winds. About midday a monstrous wave reached up from the tumult of foam and blackness below to seize and crush the vessel. In a second of horror Sylvester Pond saw the towering gray-green wall of water looming high above his head and knew he was doomed.

The water crashed down upon him with stunning force and swept him from the deck into the seething black cauldron below. He fought to come up, reached the surface, only to have the icy arm of a wave push him down again. His body grew numb from cold—his will to live was fast ebbing when he was lifted up in the grip of another mountainous wave, pulled under, battered, swept on with the sand of the shore scraping his flesh raw, and then, miraculously, tossed upon the beach.

The place where the limp, sodden body of Sylvester Pond lay was a narrow golden spit of sand off the North Carolina coast called Shackleford Banks. When he finally opened his eyes he was being cared for in the modest cottage of a fisherman, and it was not until the second day that he felt strong enough to talk.

“My shipmates? Are they alive?” he breathed weakly.

“Aye, almost all of them,” replied John Chadwick. “We’re taking care of them here at Diamond City.”

“And my ship—still afloat?”

Chadwick nodded and Sylvester, spent from his ordeal, fell asleep once more. John Chadwick looked over at his wife and shook his head.

“He will have a long wait before he’s fit to set sail on a whaling voyage again,” said she. “What about the vessel?”

“They’re towing the ship into the bight to repair it. None can say when it will be seaworthy for the mizzenmast lies broken in half across its deck.”

There were good shipwrights at Cape Lookout, but no tall, strong trees. The problem would be to replace a timber the size of the Sprague’s huge mizzenmast.

Like Pond, the first Chadwick was a New England whaler. During the 1700s the Chadwick men had lived in whalers’ huts on Shackleford Banks. Most whalers stayed for the season but the Chadwicks came back to settle. When the New England men who came down for whaling went out to sea to search for whales, the islanders watched, and then stopped waiting for providence to wash the whales ashore. They boated out themselves, harpoons held high, to hunt the animals down.

John Chadwick was a tall rangy man with a sunburned, heavily lined broad face and bright blue eyes. He was also a good man, and he and his wife were soon treating Sylvester as they would have a son. Sylvester Pond would have been dead of exposure had he not been quickly found. His body was battered and abraded from the sand and he was painfully weak. “He may get the pneumonia, you know, John,” warned Ann Chadwick, but the young man was fortunate, and with the couple’s good care, each day he grew stronger.

At the end of the second week Chadwick told him, “You’ve been in the house too much, lad. It’s a taste of the good salt air ye need and a stroll about the island. You’ll want to thank Joe Etheridge, the keeper of the lifesaving station. ’Twas Joe who found you on Thanksgiving Day.”

“I can’t remember it.”

“I’m not surprised. He said you were stretched out on the sand limp as a piece a seaweed, an’ he took you for dead.” Mrs. Chadwick’s gray eyes were moist.

Sylvester Pond soon knew everything about Diamond City on the eastern end of Shackleford Banks all the way to within the shadow of Cape Lookout Lighthouse. Only the year before, Joe Etheridge had named the community for the unusual diamond pattern that made the lighthouse the most prominent landmark for miles.

Chadwick took him on his own daily rounds over the island, and Sylvester became familiar with the few stores, the factory to extract oil from porpoises, the oyster house, the small crab-packing plant, and the church. A town of about five hundred people, Diamond City covered half of Shackleford Banks and melted into a community called Wade’s Shore.

Although it was now mid-December, the days were mild, for here, south of Cape Hatteras, temperatures were warmed by the Gulf Stream flowing up from the south. Shackleford Banks, where Pond now found himself, was one of a string of narrow barrier islands off the North Carolina coast and was separated from the mainland by shallow sounds.

Created by narrow, ribbonlike patterns of ocean beaches, sand dunes, luxuriant forests, and salt marshes, islands like Shackleford extended along the coast for several hundred miles. This world inhabited by Chadwick and the other Bankers, as the natives of the Outer Banks islands were called, was tranquil, but it was also a place of strong winds, blowing sand, and glaring sun drenching the sand dunes, green meadows, and marshes.

Sylvester had spent his life on the coast of New England. He was at home on the busy streets of Stonington and he loved the noisy docks ripe with the odors of fish, spices, and citrus fruit from the tropics. He had watched the ships washed down before they went out for more cargo, and he had seen the loading of flour, barreled beef, pork, and other commodities heading out for Jamaica and Barbados. It was a bustling port. Unlike the people of the Outer Banks, he had never really lived close to nature.

While he was regaining his strength, he and Chadwick took long walks through the half light of the island’s forest of myrtle, pine, dogwood, oak, and cedar. One day, at the forest’s edge, he gazed out over a grassy meadow at a wild pony, and its soft brown eyes stared back at him unafraid.

Sylvester was fascinated. “I’ve heard these ponies descended from Spanish horses.”

“Yep. Swam ashore from ships wrecked off the Cape.”

The two men knelt down and, thrusting cupped hands into the water, they drank from one of the small freshwater ponds. Sylvester grimaced. His mouth rebelled at the rotten-egg taste that came from the marsh grass giving off hydrogen sulfide to flavor the water on most of the islands.

They climbed sand dunes covered with thickets and shrubs. A cottontail rabbit streaked off, and a startled catbird feeding in wind-twisted trees emitted its peculiar squall. They plodded through soft, coarse sand mixed with broken bits of shell, and Sylvester realized he had not fully regained his strength.

Once there was a frenzied screeching and fluttering of wings all around them. They were surrounded by a dark cloud of birds, and Sylvester covered his face with his arms until the beating wings had fled. They had disturbed nesting terns.

Beyond the dunes the sea was calm and blue and he could see a necklace of mullet fishermen pulling in their long net filled with a shimmering silver treasure of fish. The bearded young seaman began to experience a sense of peace. Here there was no hurry, but time for everything.

At first the quiet and absence of bustle, the lack of concern over the passage of time frustrated him, but gradually a subtle change came about in the New Englander. He waked each morning, and if the weather was gray and rainy, he accepted it and busied himself mending nets, caulking Chadwick’s boat, or feeding livestock. There was always something to be done.

He read the large family Bible, one of the few books owned by the Chadwicks, and he became absorbed in the art of scrimshaw, carving intricate designs on the whale bones he picked up on the beach. He chafed less often at the enforced shaping of his days and began to share the attitude of the Outer Bankers, accepting the reality that his life was entirely in the hands of nature and governed by its moods.

But during the evenings, Pond sometimes grew restive. There was little diversion save a Saturday night gathering in one of the homes or a church social.

“You need to go over to the church and get yourself a box supper and a pretty girl to walk home,” John Chadwick advised.

“What if she won’t let a stranger like me walk her home?”

“Then I’ll vouch for you.”

Saturday night Sylvester and some of his fellow seamen gathered at the small unpainted church. He stared around him at all the shy-looking girls standing stiffly holding the box suppers they had brought. Not one appealed to him, and he attempted to leave but John Chadwick fixed him with a stern eye: “No, ye don’t.”

At that moment a slender girl in a dress the color of pale green seawater slipped in the side door of the church. Her hair was dark and shiny with patches of gold where the sun had gilded it. Chadwick saw him looking at the girl.

“What’s her name?”

“Virginia Davis and her box supper will go for a handsome price.”

Most of the suppers had been put up for bid and purchased by now but not Virginia’s. Sylvester felt encouraged for there were only a few men left to bid on the remaining boxes. Then the auctioneer intoned loudly, “What am I bid for Miss Virginia’s supper? It’s bound to be a fine meal!” Three young men began the bidding and then there were two—Sylvester and a heavyset young fellow named Myers. He had an arrogant, almost brutal face and Pond took an instant dislike to him. Myers made an inordinately high bid and Sylvester topped it. Sylvester saw him start to bid again but apparently change his mind and remain silent.

To Sylvester’s surprise the girl looked over at him and frowned but the box was his and he intended to claim the privilege of sitting with her. He walked over to her table and introduced himself. At first she was quite shy. There were few visitors to the island and Sylvester was an outsider. She treated him coolly as they began eating, but when Sylvester spoke of his liking for the Banks, she was pleased and asked him about New England. He soon found himself attracted by her warmth and interest in his stories of his boyhood, while a short distance away, the disappointed Myers sat glowering at them.

Just after eight they left the church and started off on the path to her home. They had walked only a short distance when Sylvester heard the brush crackle ahead of them and out stepped James Myers, blocking their way. Sylvester felt his face flush with anger.

“You’re a bad loser aren’t you, Myers?”

“Hush!” said Virginia. “What do you mean by following me like this, James?”

“You want this greasy whaler to walk you home?” Sylvester moved toward him threateningly, but Virginia put a restraining hand on his arm.

“He bought my box supper, and he has the right to walk me home. Let us by, please.”

Myers looked furious but he stepped to one side.

From that day on, Sylvester and Virginia often walked the island together. He marveled at the strangely beautiful skeletons of trees killed by the advancing sand and spray, still standing in eerie ghost forests on the ocean side while the forest continued to advance on the growing side of the island. The dunes at Shackleford were the largest on the southeastern coast. The young people played upon them like two children, hiding, climbing, tumbling down into the soft sand below—and sometimes embracing.

Together they watched the antics of the loons, the cormorants, the swans, and the sea ducks. Occasionally an arctic auk would wheel above them, and when it did, Sylvester said nothing but his heart lurched at the sight of that bird, so familiar, and his thoughts turned toward the great whales of the arctic.

The days passed swiftly. Whether he was in love or not, Sylvester scarcely knew. The young women in the life of this tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed whaler, still more boy than man at twenty, had been few. To him, the most important “she” had always been a ship or the sea.

Finally, in late January, he watched the mizzenmast being towed in behind a boat from Florida. As John Chadwick had predicted, it had taken time. A ninety-foot-tall straight pine had to be located at a shipbuilding company and then hauled up the coast. Even in an area with tall trees, it had been a long search to find the right one. Meanwhile, bad weather had set in at Cape Lookout. Sylvester and the crewmen were restless, and in New England the owners of the ship fretted about the money they were losing each day during the long wait.

When the mizzenmast was finally pulled into the bight, it needed to be lashed to the dock until it was time to raise it. Meanwhile the captain was signing on new crewmen to replace those injured or drowned in the storm, those who had wandered off, and the one who had married and swore he would go to sea no more. The captain swore, too, saying he would use muscle, if necessary, to get everyone back aboard, and his threat was all that held in line some of the more timid seamen who had not forgotten the Thanksgiving storm.

Crewmen and islanders watched the lifting of the four-ton mast. A tripod was used to attach and unattach the line as needed while the piece was guided and positioned. Precision and skill were essential for there was ...