Category: Coast

Bath town sits on the mouth of the Pamlico River. In the Eighteenth Century, Bath was an important port for the Carolina colonies. Ships traveling across the Atlantic Community would stop there, selling, resupplying, and trading. And not all of this traffic was legitimate. Bath was a favored haunt of pirates. The pirates appreciated Bath Town’s habit of not asking too many questions about where a cargo came from. It was also very conveniently located with easy access to both the open sea and the mazes of inlets and hidden coves that shape the North Carolina coastline. This gave those with reason to hide many routes to quietly sail off into when the British Navy showed up. The most famous of North Carolina’s pirates, Blackbeard himself, is said to have had a house and a wife or two in the town.

With all of this money pouring into the town, Bath soon developed a reputation as a freewheeling, easygoing kind of place. Liquor flowed freely, parties lasted all night long, and there was a good time easily had by anyone who wanted it.

But, as is the way with these things, inevitably someone shows up who not only doesn’t want a good time, but who doesn’t want anyone else to have one, either.

The traveling evangelist George Whitefield was one of the first celebrities in the American colonies. This staunch, cross-eyed, strictly Calvinist evangelist was reputed to have a voice that would carry for five miles. He used that voice to preach a grim vision of hellfire and damnation all up and down the American Colonies.

Whitefield was one of the prime movers of the wave of religious fervor that swept the American Colonies just before the Revolution. His sermons and the passion they inspired came to be known as “The Great Awakening,” and those who were generally concerned with just getting on and enjoying life instead of worrying so much about hellfire and damnation were a particular target of his.

Like many of these preachers to this day, Whitefield was also a showman. One of Whitefield’s pieces of evangelical stagecraft was to always travel in a wagon in which he carried his own coffin. Whitefield used the coffin to illustrate that he was prepared for death and confident in his own salvation. To drive the point even further home, Whitefield always slept in that coffin.

When he heard about the fun going on in Bath, of course it made his list. Needless to say, a strange, cross-eyed preacher who slept in a coffin and shouted about eternal damnation was not a welcome presence in a town that had come to accept the idea that doing what you wanted, when you wanted, was actually a pretty good way to go through life.

When Whitefield visited Bath, he was met by a delegation of locals who suggested that he might just want to turn around and head back the way he came. They may even have suggested that should he choose to stick around, he’d have an opportunity to put that coffin he was so fond of dragging around with him to its proper use.

Whitefield took the hint. But he couldn’t leave without at least making some kind of show. Whitefield climbed back on his wagon, took off his shoe and waved it at the assembled crowd, and proceeded to place a curse on the town.

“If a place won’t listen to The Word,” Whitefield said, “You shake the dust of the town off your feet, and the town shall be cursed. I have put a curse on this town for a hundred years.”

Shortly thereafter, the nearby town of Washington and its larger and more easily accessible port began to suck away Bath’s prosperity. The money stopped rolling in and the good times came to an end with them. By the middle of the Nineteenth Century, Bath had dwindled to a small, sleepy backwater, the same quiet little hamlet that’s there today. Whitefield took this as evidence that his curse had had an effect, and smugly spread the story of how he had brought down the town.

Hurricanes are a fact of life on the Carolina Coast. Every few years, one of these tremendous storms is going to blow in from the Atlantic and flood the coast, doing tremendous damage. These storms always move on, but while the hurricane is blowing it’s certain that homes will be lost, and terribly likely that people will die.

No point in the state is more vulnerable to hurricanes than Cape Hatteras. Hatteras Island sits right on the edge of the Gulf Stream, the massive current of warm water that circles through the Atlantic. This current is powerful enough to have shaped the island itself into the distinctive point that Cape Hatteras sits at the edge of. The Gulf Stream is also a path that hurricanes coming in from the Atlantic often follow, drawing their energy from the warm waters flowing beneath them. With the Gulf Stream pointed right at Cape Hatteras, there’s a good chance that any hurricane blowing in will hit the island.

But there’s something on Hatteras that lets the islanders know when a storm is coming.

The Grey Man of Hatteras is an indistinct, shadowy figure who walks the beaches of Cape Hatteras as a hurricane is approaching. He appears as the first winds of the storm touch the island whenever a hurricane is a threat to the island and it’s inhabitants.

He never speaks, or at least no one has ever heard him speak. No one has ever gotten close enough. If anyone approaches the Grey Man, his form slowly fades into the salty air, completely vanishing before the curious onlooker can reach where he was standing.

But his presence alone is enough to warn the islanders. If he’s seen on a beach, it’s a sure way to know that the oncoming storm will be a bad one. He’s a warning that nature is still something to be taken seriously.

Who is the Grey Man? Some people say that he’s the ghost of a sailor from the island who died at sea in a hurricane. They say that he comes back to warn his fellow islanders of the danger, because his soul was so terrorized by his windy, watery end that he can’t bear to go on from this world while he can still prevent others from sharing his fate.

Some others will tell you that he never was a man, that he’s just a force of nature. That he’s not so much a ghost as a spirit, an expression of the force pushing the wind and waves towards the vulnerable island.

Even in today’s world, where we can watch the storms form from space and fly airplanes into the storm to measure the winds, we still give each hurricane a name when it’s born. We may name them because some part of still thinks that anything so powerful and so willful must be alive. Maybe the Grey Man is just the hurricane itself talking to us, the voice of that living force born out of the deep ocean.

Whoever he was, whatever he is, the Grey Man of Hatteras still walks the beaches under the shadow of the tallest lighthouse whenever a hurricane is heading towards the island. Even as Cape Hatteras has gone from being a lonely little island to a crowded tourist beach, the Grey Man still warns us of the coming storm.

So if you’re ever on Hatteras and you turn in the TV and they’re talking about a storm, stroll down to the cloud-covered beach and look out towards the waves as the first few drops of rain begin to fall. Look for a shadowy figure, prowling the beach where the high waves hit the sand.

And if you see him, pack up and get off the island as quick as you can. This storm is going to be a big one.

Dymond City is no more. This once-thriving but briefly-lived North Carolina community stood near Jamesville from 1868 until it faded away in the 1930s.

The town’s beginning was the formation of the Jamesville and Washington Railroad and Lumber Company. The company began buying substantial tracts of land in Martin County in 1868 with the goals of extracting the large stands of virgin timber in the area, and of building a railroad to make it easier to ship the timber out and move passengers around Eastern North Carolina.

The railroad was completed around 1877 and was soon carrying travelers between Jamesville and Washington and named the J&W line. Because of the notoriously rough condition of the tracks, the J&W in the J&W line quickly came to be said to stand for “Jolt and Wiggle.”

Dymond City was the town that sprung up with the railroad. Dymond City was very much a company town. The houses were owned by company, the workers paid their rent to the company, and did all of their shopping at the company store. By 1885, the town had a hotel, a school, and houses for the workers and families. Why it was named Dymond City isn’t known, but local legend has it that the city was named after the Eastern Diamondback Rattlesnakes that were then still common in the woods. Given that there have been well-documented cases of rattlesnakes caught in the area that exceeded seven feet in length, it’s certainly a memorable enough thing to name a town after. The spelling of Dymond instead of Diamond may simply have been because there was already another Diamond City in North Carolina, this one along the Shackleford Banks, which has also faded away. Perhaps it’s just an ill-fated name.

The town thrived for nearly a quarter of a century, but by the 1920s the shine had worn off of the diamond. Most of the old-growth timber had been extracted, and other, less bumpy, railroad lines had been built through the area, drawing away passengers. The town’s population slowly began moving away, to the extent that by the 1920s the town’s post office had been closed. The final blow came in April 1927, when a fire swept through the town, destroying the hotel, the school, and the remaining homes.

Dymond City came to an end. The Jamesville and Washington Railroad and Lumber company ceased operations, selling off the the land. the railroad tracks were torn up, and the company town was slowly reclaimed by the forest.

But some say that more remains of the town than just its memory.

As the town disappeared and the woods around it once agin grew thick, travelers along the old road that led past the city began to report seeing strange things happening in the woods. They said that on certain nights mysterious lights could be seen dancing and rolling through the forest.

There were those who said the lights resembled the light of a lantern bobbing up and down along the path of the old railroad. Others said they had seen something like a fireball rolling along the tops of the trees in the area. The lights all seemed to move with intent and purpose, and often seemed to be beckoning people to follow them.

Some said that the lights were the ghost of one of the old railroad men, perhaps a watchman or signalman who still clung to his duty, even though the company he had worked for was long gone. Others say that it was the memory of the town itself, the spirit of the place surprised that its life had been cut short, and that it was pleading for people to come back and settle the land again. Whatever the cause, people soon agree that something mysterious was happening in the woods which had once been a town.

The ghost lights of Dymond City are still seen to this day. The lights are said to be anywhere from blue to orange in color, and will often appear floating ten to fifteen feet off the ground. They’re most often seen on clear nights.

One there were two men who had been friends all their lives. They married two beautiful women about the same time and everything seemed fine. But one day, one of the men came to his friend and asked him “When you wake up a night, is your wife in bed with you?”

“She sure is,” said his friend, “Why do you ask?”

“When I lie down in bed at night, my wife is with me. But when I wake up in the middle of the night, she’s gone. But then come morning she’s back in bed.”

“Man,” said the friend, “I think you married a boo hag!”

Now they knew this was serious. A boo hag is a kind of witch that can slip out of her skin and fly around at night and cause all kinds of trouble in the world. A boo hag can kill a man just by sucking all the blood from his body out through his nose. They’ll get on a man and ride him at night so he can’t move and he can’t breathe. A boo hag is not something you’d ever want to meet, and sure not something you’d ever want to be married to. So the man asked his friend what he should do.

“You got to wait until she slips out of her skin in the middle of the night, and then you find that skin. Look under the stairs. That’s where boo hags like to hide their skins. You take that skin and you pour salt and pepper all over it. Then she won’t be able to get her skin back on.”

And so that night the man went to bed with his wife and pretended to sleep. About midnight, he felt her slip out of bed beside him. He waited for her to get downstairs and then got out of bed and then quietly hid where he could see her. He saw his wife pull off all of her skin and roll it up into a ball and hide it under the stairs. Then she flew right up the chimney, going out to cause trouble in the world.

Well, that man didn’t waste any time. He went and got that skin and salted it and peppered it real good, then rolled it back up into a ball and hid it put it back under the stairs where he found it. Then he went back to bed and waited until early in the morning when he heard a noise of something coming down the chimney and he heard his wife’s voice speaking softly.

Skin, skin, you know me?

Skin, skin, this is me.

Skin, skin, you know me?

Skin, skin, this is me.

But he knew that with all that salt and pepper she couldn’t get back into her skin. He waited and heard his wife speak again.

Skin, skin, you know me?

Skin, skin, this is me.

Skin, skin, you know me?

Skin, skin, this is me.

And he knew that she was stuck without her skin. He heard her coming up the stairs and pretended to be asleep. He felt his wife crawl into bed with him and wrap herself up tight in the sheet. But he reached his hand over and could feel something warm and raw and rubbery in the bed next to him. After that, he didn’t need to pretend not to sleep.

When the morning broke, the man got up and said to his wife “Time to get up. Time for breakfast,” but she said “I ain’t getting up. I’m sick,” and lay there wrapped up tight in that sheet, not showing one inch of herself.

The man said he’d go get the doctor, but she said the doctor cost too much money. So the man said he was going to go hoe the garden.

The man went outside and hid under the window. Sure enough, he heard his wife come down the stairs and call out again.

Skin, skin, you know me?

Skin, skin, this is me.

Skin, skin, you know me?

Skin, skin, this is me.

That was enough for the man. He went down to fetch the conjure man who would know what to do. He told the conjure man his story and the conjure man told him to go home and start a big barrel of pitch boiling and he’d be by shortly.

So the man went home and built a fire in the garden and started a big barrel of pitch boiling on it. Soon, the conjure man walked up the road and the two of them went inside and went upstairs to where the woman was back in bed, all wrapped up tight in her sheet again. The conjure man said “what ails you, woman?” and she said there was nothing wrong. But the conjure man wasn’t having none of that. He ripped the sheet right off of her and there she was, lying there all raw and bloody.

“Man, you done married a hag!” said the conjure man, and they grabbed her and carried her out to the garden where they threw her in that big barrel of boiling pitch and burned that hag alive.

What else could they do?

More About This Story

Boo hags are part of the African-American tradition from the coasts of North and South Carolina. According to tradition, one of the best ways to keep a hag out of your house is to lay a broom across the front of your door. A boo hag can slip into a house through the keyhole, but if she sees a broom she has to stop and count every straw on that broom. By the time she’s done the dawn will have come and she has to return to her skin.

A conjure man, sometimes called a conjure doctor or a root worker, is someone experienced in the art of hoodoo, the African-American magical and spiritual tradition. Conjure men can help not only with dealing with hags and other supernatural entities, but a good conjure man is knowledgable in spells to help with such mundane matters as finding love, a good job, or winning in a court case. Hoodoo is a living tradition and there are root workers practicing in North Carolina to this day.

The Great Dismal Swamp stretches across Northeastern North Carolina up into Southern Virginia. The swamp is one of the largest natural areas in the Eastern United States, with over 100,000 acres protected by state and federal preserves. But despite its appearance as an untouched, primordial landscape, the swamp has a long and complex history of human settlement and exploitation. The swamp was home to Native American bands for over 13,000 years. And when Europeans arrived in the area, the swamp almost immediately became an object of fascination.

None other than George Washington was one of the earliest men dedicated to transforming the swamp into something other than a swamp. Washington was a major investor in the Great Dismal Swamp Company, a company that attempted to colonize the swamp by draining it and transforming it into farmland. When that proved impossible, the company turned to harvesting timber from the swamp. This industry eventually led to the creation of the Great Dismal Swamp Canal to transporting the logs from the deep forests, and the canal remains the oldest man-made waterway in America still in use.

Prior to emancipation, the Great Dismal Swamp served as home to a small number of Maroon communities. Maroons were enslaved people who freed themselves and fled into the wilderness to avoid recapture. These communities began springing up almost as soon as the slaves were brought into the colonies, and the importance of the Dismal Swamp as a place to escape to was widely understood. The abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in her second anti-slavery novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Today the presence of these communities is commemorated in the recently-added Underground Railroad pavilion located on a trail near the Great Dismal Swamp National Park headquarters in Suffolk, Virginia.

The swamp is stunningly beautiful, but also wildly dangerous. It’s easy to get lost in the mazes of islands and waterways. There are dangerous animals in the swamp, but also dangerous geography. The waters can be deceptively deep and impossible to climb out of, and over the years many lives have been lost beneath its waters. So with this long, complex, and dangerous history, it’s not surprising that there are more than a few stories that have attached themselves to the swamp over the years.

There seems to be an air of mystery throughout the whole swamp. Mysterious lights are often seen floating through the woods and over the waters at night. Hunters have passed down stories of shooting a bear or a deer, only to find that the body has vanished and left no trace, not even a drop of blood, when they go to retrieve it. There are multiple stories of people encountering phantom figures in the woods of the swamp, people dressed in everything from colonial-era clothing to that of early 20th century lumberman.

Perhaps that spirits of the swamp are even reaching out to help others from joining their ranks. There’s one legend from the swamp which speaks of a mysterious, traveling graveyard which can’t be found when you’re looking for it, and will only appear to warn someone that they’ve lost their way.

The most famous legend from the Great Dismal Swamp comes from slightly north of the border in Virginia, where Lake Drummond stretches for five miles through the swamp. This is the the story of a pair of American Indian lovers who were pledged to be married, but the bride-to-be died on the morning of the wedding day. The girl was buried in the depths of the Dismal Swamp. Driven mad by grief, her young lover became convinced that he could still see her paddling a white canoe across the surface of the lake. He made a makeshift raft and followed the vision out onto the lake, but drowned in the attempt to reach her. Ever since then, the vision of the two lovers paddling together in a white canoe can sometimes be seen on Lake Drummond.

This story was the inspiration for the Irish poet Thomas Moore’s A Ballad – The Lake of Dismal Swamp, where he sums up the whole situation thus:

They made her a grave, too cold and damp

For a soul so warm and true;

And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,

Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp,

She paddles her white canoe.

Moore’s sentimental Ballad was wildly popular at the time, and actually spurned a small tourism boom for the Great Dismal Swamp.

Recently, the ballad took on a somewhat odd second life. The illustrator and writer Edward Gorey, wel-known for his slightly macabre illustrations, was also a playwright and a great lover of the opera. Upon his death in 2000, an libretto for an opera based on Moore’s poem and written to be performed by hand puppets was found among his papers. The White Canoe: An Opera Seria for Hand Puppets was Gorey’s final theatrical work, music was written for it by Daniel J Wolf and a production staged at the Cotuit Center for the Arts in Massachussets five months after Gorey’s death.

Gorey and Wolf weren’t the first to give a musical voice to the swamp, either, in 1933 composer William Grant Still wrote a tone poem titled Dismal Swamp, inspired by the long history of African-Americans with the swamp. So it appears that the Great Dismal Swamp is still inspiring people, and that there are more stories about the swamp to be told, and even more ways to tell them.

On Ocracoke Island is a small channel of water known as Teach’s Hole. This inlet is reported to be the spot where the pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, preferred to anchor his ship. It’s also said to be where he met his end, and some say his ghost haunts the spot to this day.

Blackbeard roamed the Atlantic from around 1716 until 1718, robbing ships from the West Indies to the Carolinas. He had a reputation for unbridled ferocity. When Blackbeard went into battle, he strapped multiple pistols and multiple cutlasses to his body. Most frightening of all, he wove fuses into his long, black beard and set them on fire just before he stepped on to the captured ship. This towering figure, armed to the teeth, sporting a sparking, flaming beard must have been absolutely terrifying. Ships’ captains would surrender without a shot being fired.

Blackbeard’s reign on the high seas came to an end on November 22, 1718. Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood sent a ship commanded by John Maynard down to the North Carolina coast to track down and kill Blackbeard. Maynard surprised Blackbeard and a skeleton crew anchored at Teach’s Hole. In the ferocious battle that followed, Blackbeard was shot five times and stabbed no less than twenty. The pirate crew was all killed or captured.

Blackbeard’s head was chopped off and hung from the bowsprit of Maynard’s ship. The pirate’s headless body was thrown overboard. Legend has it that the headless body swam around Maynard’s ship three times before sinking below the waters.

Ever since then, it’s been said that Blackbeard’s ghost haunts the spot known as Teach’s Hole. Many people have reported seeing a strange light moving beneath the water in the cove. This ghostly light is thought by some to be Blackbeard’s spirit, swimming through the waters, searching for his missing head.

There are those who believe that on stormy nights you can hear Blackbeard’s voice calling out in the wind. On nights when the angry wind is roaring and the hard rain coming down, many people have heard a horrible roaring coming from this hidden cove. They say that it’s a unearthly noise that sounds like a pained human voice bellowing “Where’s my head?”

While his reign as terror of the seas was short, Blackbeard’s legacy lives on in the legends of North Carolina. We’re also learning even more about this frightening pirate every day, ever since the discovery of the wreck of The Queen Anne’s Revenge. Archaeologists and historians have been working on recovering and restoring artifacts from this sunken ship captained by the notorious pirate, and we’re discovering fascinating details of what life was like on an 18th Century pirate ship.

While Blackbeard’s viciousness has gone down in history, these stories may be a fact of history being written by the winners. Except for the final battle, there’s no record of Blackbeard ever having killed anyone. The show with the massive arsenal and flaming beard may have been deliberately designed to avoid a fight. Blackbeard seems to have understood that having a reputation for being a bloodthirsty murdered could save you the trouble of actually being a bloodthirsty murderer.

And while pirates are considered that bad guys of history, it’s hard not to sympathize with the pirates over the British Navy. Pirate crews were better treated and better paid that Navy crews. Furthermore, pirate crews were on their ships by choice, as opposed to the Navy crews, many of whose members would have been pressed into service.

Pirate ships were also essentially democratic institutions. The pirate captain would be elected by the crew, and generally selected on the basis of competence and fairness as a leader. The captain’s decisions on where and when to sail would be put to a vote, and his authority became absolute only during battle. This was a stark contrast to the British Navy at the time, where the captaincy of a ship was based more on being born to the right family than on any ability to competently lead a crew.

It’s also important to remember what the pirates were stealing and from whom. A large portion of the vessels passing through the Atlantic at this time were holding enslaved human beings as cargo. When intercepting a slave ship, pirate crews would routinely free those otherwise destined for a life of unimaginable misery. These men would be offered the opportunity to join the ship’s crew. With chances of their being able to return home being tragically small, it’s an offer many of them took up. Records show that as much of half of any given pirate ship’s crew in the early Eighteenth Century would have been composed of freed Africans. Even Blackbeard’s trusted second-in-command who died fighting with him at Teach’s Hole was one of these men, known to us only as Black Caesar.

While many pirates did kill and plunder, they were killing and plundering from people who were themselves killing, plundering, enslaving, and exploiting lands which had been invaded and were held by force. What seemed to offend the authorities so much about the pirates was not their tactics, but that somebody else was getting a cut of the action.

On the night of November 20, 1901, a young woman named Ella M. Cropsey, called “Nell” by her family and friends, disappeared from her home in Elizabeth City. Thirty-seven days later, her body was found floating in the Pasquotank River. Despite a man having been convicted of her murder, many questions about her death remain unanswered. And some say that her uneasy spirit still haunts her home in Elizabeth City.

The Cropsey family had moved to Elizabeth City in 1898 from Brooklyn, New York. Young Nell Cropsey was a beautiful woman from a wealthy family, and in her new home she was soon attracting the attention of suitors.

Nell began being courted by a local man named Jim Wilcox. At the time of her disappearance, Wilcox and Cropsey had been courting for nearly three years, and it’s said that Nell was growing impatient with Jim Wilcox’s hesitancy to propose marriage. Nell Cropsey began flirting with other men in public in an attempt to spurn Wilcox into proposing.

But her plan seems to have gone awry. On the evening of November 20, 1901, Cropsey and Wilcox had an argument. The fight was loud, and everyone in the household could hear that the two lovers were yelling at one another, even if what they were saying couldn’t be understood. Some of Nell’s family who were in the house at the time did say that she and Wilcox had tentatively made up by the end of the evening, but no one ever learned where the lovers stood at the end of that night. When Nell Cropsey steeped outside the door with Wilcox around Eleven that night, it was the last time she was ever seen alive.

Ollie Cropsey, Nell’s sister, heard something bang against the back of the house shortly after Jim Wilcox left. Going out to investigate, she found that the screen door had been broken. She saw no sign of who or what had broken the door. Ollie Cropsey went upstairs to see if Nell was already in bed, but found her sister’s room empty. Uneasy about her sister’s absence, she nevertheless returned to her own room and attempted to sleep.

Shortly thereafter, a neighbor woke the entire house. The neighbor was yelling that someone was trying to steal the Cropsey’s pig.The entire family rushed downstairs, where they found the front door hanging wide open. And the entire family realized that Nell was not there. Jim Wilcox’s umbrella, a gift from Nell, was standing inside the door. No one had noticed it there earlier that night.

When morning came and Nell Cropsey was still missing, the hunt began in earnest. The police were summoned and the entire town was searched high and low. But no trace of Nell was found.

Suspicion for Nell’s disappearance immediately fell on Jim Wilcox, who maintained that he had no idea what had happened to her. This wasn’t good enough for the police. Wilcox was arrested on suspicion of kidnapping and held in the local jail.

With Wilcox sitting in jail and Nell still missing,the family remained in limbo. This ended on the night of December 27th, more than a month after Nell’s disappearance.

Mrs. Cropsey spotted something floating in the Pasquotank River near the family home. Sending some boatmen out to investigate, she crushingly realized that her long vigil was over. What she had seen floating in the river was her daughter’s body.

In one of the most astounding occurrences in the case, a few days before Nell’s body was discovered the family had received a letter with a New York postmark containing what claimed to be a detailed account of the events of the night of Nell’s disappearance. The letter stated that Nell Cropsey had interrupted a vagrant attempting to steal the family pig. Upon being discovered, the man grabbed a heavy stick and knocked Nell unconscious. The unknown man carried Nell down to the river and stole a convenient boat. He rowed out into the river and dumped Nell Cropsey in the Pasquotank. The letter included a map which marked the spot where the body could be found. The spot marked on the map was very close to where Nell Cropsey’s body was eventually discovered. Who sent this letter and if the events it recounts were what truly happened that night remain unknown to this day.

With the discovery of Cropsey’s body, the town went mad. A lynch mob descended on the jail, demanding Wilcox be released into their hands. Nell’s parents refused to join the mob, and pleaded with the crowd to let justice be served in the courts. Eventually, Governor Aycock sent in a small naval reserve group to disperse the crowd.

Wilcox was tried twice for Cropsey’s murder. At the first trial he was found guilty, but this conviction was overturned when the NC Supreme Court declared a mistrial. A second trial convicted Wilcox on a charge of second degree murder and sentenced him to thirty years in prison. At neither trial did Wilcox take the stand in his own defense.

Wilcox was pardoned by Governor Thomas Bickett in 1920. To the end of his life, Wilcox maintained his innocence.

Shortly before his death in 1932, Wilcox spoke with W.O. Saunders, the editor of the Elizabeth City newspaper, and revealed everything he knew about the murder. Saunders walked away from the interview convinced Wilcox was innocent, and planned to publish the full details. Two weeks after that interview, Jim Wilcox committed suicide. Saunders died shortly thereafter in a car accident. Whatever Wilcox had told Saunders would now never be heard.

For the past century, those who have lived in the Cropsey home have reported strange happenings. Lights have gone on and off by themselves, doors open and shut of their own accord, and strange gusts of cold air move through the house.

The pale figure of a young woman has also been seen moving through the house. Many people passing by on the street outside have reported seeing the ghostly figure of a girl looking out of an upstairs window. Residents even say that the figure of Nell Cropsey has appeared in their bedrooms at night.

Is the unfortunate victim of one of North Carolina’s most famous and sensational murder cases still wandering through her home in Elizabeth city? Will the true facts around Nell Cropsey’s murder ever be known? This enduring mystery has become part of the living history of Elizabeth City, and no visit to this quiet coastal town is complete without a walk by the Cropsey home.

A long time ago, back deep in the piney woods where the Neuse River empties into the Pamlico sound, there was an old shack where an old woman lived with her son. The old woman was blind, and she depended upon her son for everything. The two of them made their living gathering what they could from the waters. Every day, the son would go out and throw his nets into the briny river water to pull up fish and shrimp and crabs. He would pull clams from the mud. He would gather berries from the woods and snare rabbits in his traps. This way they kept themselves fed and happy.

The old woman hardly ever walked much further than the front door of their shack. She guided herself around with a long old stick which she would tap on the ground. And whenever she needed anything, she would say in her soft, creaky voice “Where are you my son?”

No matter how softly she spoke, or how far away the boy was, he would always seem to hear her and come to her side.

If the old woman needed water drawn from the well, she spoke the words “Where are you my son?” and the boy would be there with a bucket in his hand.

If the old woman needed more logs on the fire, she said in her creaky voice “Where are you my son?” and the boy would be there tending the flames.

If the old woman was lonely and wanted her son’s hand, she would only have to say “Where are you my son?” and he would be there holding her hand.

But one day after the boy had left to go down to the riverside, the old woman called out and he did not come. It had been raining hard all week, and the water was high and flowing rough and fast. The wind was high and waves on the river waters were topped with white caps. When the boy walked down by the riverside, the soft banks gave away under his feet. He fell out into the river. He was drawn into the current and swept out into the sound and he was never seen again.

The old woman waited by the cabin, saying “Where are you my son?” time and time again. But the boy did not come. So the blind old woman picked up her stick and went out looking for her lost boy. She tapped her long stick on the ground in front of her, and walked into the rain calling in her creaky voice “Where are you my son? Where are you my son?” time and time again.

Some men found her body a few weeks later, laying not too far from the river. No one knows if she had gotten lost and couldn’t find her way back to her home, or if she had just fallen into despair and died when her son never answered her cries.

The old woman was buried, and the shack where she and her son lived was forgotten and swallowed up by the forest. That the two of them had ever lived there would have been forgotten, except that as the towns around where the old house had stood grew, the people who lived there kept hearing a creaky voice on the wind, calling out “Where are you my son?” And sometimes at night, they would hear a tapping on their floors, and feel a hand shaking the foot of their bed, and a creaky old voice saying “Where are you, my son?”

Not too far from where the old house stood is where the Camp Sea Gull boy’s camp was built. And they say that the old woman’s ghost may still be drawn to the sound of boys laughing, and that she still may be looking for her lost son. And that sometimes at night, when the cabins are dark, the boys at the camp will hear a tapping sound walking from bed to bed in the dark room, and a feel a hand gently shaking the bed as a creaky old voice whispers “Where are you my son?”

Who knows what will happen if a boy ever answers?

Cedar Grove Cemetery in New Bern has its beginnings at the end of the 18th Century. Originally it served as the graveyard for Christ Episcopal Church. Christ Episcopal is the third-oldest church in North Carolina, founded in 1715 as Craven Parish, and the graveyard originally served first church building which was constructed in 1752.

By the end of the century, this ground was already becoming full, so in 1799 the church acquired a nearby field to make more room for the dead. The church gave control over the cemetery over to the city of New Bern in 1853. The mid 19th Century was something of a golden age for cemeteries. Sentimentalism and Romanticism were very much in fashion across the English-speaking world. The city immediately set off with a series of improvements to transform the simple burying ground and bring it more up-to-date with the elaborate, ornate, style that was the height of mortuary fashion at the time. They also renamed it with the romantic title of Cedar Grove Cemetery.

The crowning glory of the remade cemetery was the wall made of locally-quarried coquina, along the Queen Street side of which was the grand entrance through, a towering triple-arched gateway. Coquina or “shell stone”, is stone made of calcite derived from the buildup of centuries of mollusk shells which has a lovely soft-grey color.

It’s this Queen Street gateway that has taken Cedar Grove Cemetery into the realm of legend. Soon after the arch was constructed, people began to notice that there were small drops of water dripping from beneath the archways.

These drops seemed to occur whenever there was funeral party traveling through the gateway. And it was remarked that the small drops were very much like tears. The citizens of New Bern began to say that it was if the stone itself were crying in mourning for the dead. This earned the gateway to the cemetery the name “The Weeping Arch.”

The legend of The Weeping Arch also grew to include a slightly more sinister note. It’s said that when a group of people pass through the gate, whomever a drop of water from the arch falls on will be the next to die. It’s been a long time dare among New Bern children to run though the arch to see if they can avoid getting hit by a falling drop.

The Weeping Arch is still standing, and still crying to this day. And while someone will always be the next person to die, you may want to bring an umbrella when you walk under it, just in case.

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It should be noted that the tears of the Weeping Arch may very well have a perfectly natural explanation. Coquina is a highly porous stone, and the top of the arch is a broad, flat surface. The tears may simply be the rainwater that collects on the top of the arch leeching through the stone.

Theodosia Burr Alston was one of America’s first great women of learning and accomplishment. The daughter of scandal-ridden Vice President Aaron Burr, Theodosia was widely acknowledged to be intelligent, cultured, and sophisticated. Her disappearance, and the mysterious appearance of her portrait in a home on the Outer Banks, remain one of the most intriguing unsolved mysteries of the first days of the American Republic.

in 1801, Thedosia Burr was married to Joseph Alston, a wealthy South Carolina planter and later governor of the state. The marriage was not a happy one. It was marriage more of economics than affection. Aaron Burr is said to have offered his beautiful daughter to the wealthy South Carolinian to provide some security for his declining family fortune.

Burr may also have been seeking dynastic allegiances. In 1807, Burr was put on trial for treason for allegedly forming a plot to lead a portion of the southern states in secession and have himself installed as king of the new country. Burr was acquitted, but he fled to Europe for four years to avoid further scandal. It would be 1812 before he returned to New York.

In South Carolina, Theodosia Burr Alston suffered from long bouts of ill health. She frequently traveled to spas seeking treatment, and would often withdraw from the social life in Columbia and Charleston for months on end.

In 1812, Theodosia’s young son died. Grief-stricken, Theodosia fell into a deep depression and it was months before she felt well enough to travel to meet her recently-returned father in New York. On December 31, 1812, Theodosia Burr Alston boarded the schooner Patriot in Georgetown. She was never seen again.

The Patriot disappeared somewhere between South Carolina and New York. Various explanations have been offered offered for the disappearance. The War of 1812 was raging, and some say the Patriot was sunk by enemy action. Others say that the ship fell victim to a group of wreckers known as the Carolina Bankers. These men operated out of Nags Head, and set up false signal lights to draw ships aground in the treacherous waters around the Outer Banks. They would descend on the wrecked ships, murder the passengers and crew, and take anything worth plundering.

The fate of the Patriot will probably never be known. We do know that years later, a fine portrait said to be of Theodosia Burr turned up in a humble fisherman’s cottage near Nags Head.

The story goes that in 1869, a Dr. William Pool was called in to treat a poor fisherman’s elderly wife who was near death. The doctor offered what treatments he could to ease the woman’s pain, but there was little else he could do for her. The fisherman was grateful, but had little money. Instead, he produced an unusually fine oil portrait of young woman and asked if the doctor would accept it as payment.

Shocked at finding such a valuable piece of art in a poor man’s house, Dr. Pool asked the fisherman how had come by it. The fisherman told the doctor that many years ago a young woman had drifted ashore in a rowboat near Nags Head. The woman had no memory of who she was or where she was from, and the only item in her possession was the fine portrait which she would not allow to be removed from her grasp.

The members of the village cared for the young woman and nursed her back to health. Eventually, she settled down in the isolated community and the fisherman had taken her as his wife. The portrait that was the only evidence of her past life, whatever that may have been, had hung in their small cottage ever since.

The doctor said he would gladly accept the painting as payment, but upon hearing this the old woman rose out of bed, saying “It is mine! You shall not have it! I am on my way to visit my father in New York, and I am taking this picture of his darling Theodosia!”

The old woman seized the portrait and ran into the waves. She was never seen again. But the next day, the portrait floated back onto the beach.

William Pool’s family kept the portrait and told the story for years. Now called The Nag’s Head Portrait of Theodosia Burr, the painting can be seen in the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut.