Category: Piedmont

Chatham County sits in the heart of the North Carolina piedmont, over a hundred miles from the ocean. It’s not the first place you’d go to expecting to see mermaids. But according to one old North Carolina legend, Chatham County was just the place to see them.

Mermaid Point is the name of the spot in southeastern Chatham County where the Deep and Haw rivers meet to form the Cape Fear River. From Mermaid Point, the Cape Fear flows through eastern North Carolina down to around Wilmington, where it broadens and finally joins the sea near Bald Head Island, at the place from which the river derives its name, Cape Fear itself. The name is said to come from the 16th century explorers Sir Richard Grenville and John White, both of whom nearly wrecked their ships when navigating the cape.

The Cape Fear River was one of the early economic drivers of North Carolina. It provided transportation from piedmont down to the port of Wilmington, although going all the way down the river required passing through a series of dangerous falls and rapids. The river was once teeming with Atlantic Sturgeon, a strange-looking, ancient species of fish that spends most of its life in the oceans but, like the salmon, travels up into fresh water to spawn. The sturgeon’s eggs are highly prized as caviar, and because of this it was hunted to near extinction in the 19th Century. With all of this potential for money to be made, the banks of the Cape Fear became a draw for settlers.

In 1740, four Scotsmen from Argyllshire, Duncan Campell, James McLachlan, and the brothers Hector and Neill McNeill purchased several large tracts of land in the area where the Haw and Deep rivers merged into the Cape Fear to form a town named Lockville. The fledging settlement they planted was soon joined by a man by the name of Ambrose Ramsey, who calculated that if there’s money to be made, that means there’s money to be spent, and he was pretty sure he knew one of the best ways for this to happen. And so he opened a tavern.

Ramsey’s Tavern sat right by the banks of the Deep River, a short distance upstream of where it joined with the Haw. When people left the tavern at the end of the night, this confluence was on the path home, and in the middle of this broad channel was a long, white, sandbar. And it was on this channel that people said they saw the mermaids.

They said that the mermaids would sit on the sandbar at night, combing their long hair in the moonlight. People walking home from the tavern would see them laughing, singing, and playing and splashing in the water. They would dive below the surface if anyone should call out to them or try to approach.

Mermaids are thought to be creatures of the sea. So why were they hear, so far inland? The explanation came forth that everyone knew mermaids were vain creatures. They swam up from the coast to wash the salt from their hair, so it would be more shiny and beautiful.

It’s from this gathering that the area came to be known as Mermaid Point. Of course, it may mean something that people always seemed to see the mermaids on their way home form the tavern, and never on the way too the tavern.

The town of Lockville failed to thrive, and eventually what business there was was taken up by the nearby towns of Moncure and Haywood. Ambrose Ramsey’s tavern stood until the late 19th century, when it was destroyed in a flood. This was about the same time that the sightings of the mermaids stopped. It’s noted that the disappearance of the mermaids seemed to coincide with the building of the first of a series of dams and locks along the course of the Cape Fear, perhaps cutting off the path of the mermaids up from the sea.

As for that mermaid-drawing sandbar, sadly, it’s no longer visible. The construction of Buckhorn Dam raised the water levels in the area and the sandbar sank beneath the surface.

Vanishing hitchhikers are a staple of American folklore. Seemingly every state in the Union has some variant on the story of a young woman who died in a car crash and is still trying to make her way back home. In his book The Vanishing Hitchhiker, Professor Jan Harold Brunvand records multiple variants of the story, and notes that there were at least eleven different versions of the story circulating in North Carolina in the Sixties.

These Phantom Hitchhiker stories have a long history, seeming to date from even before the invention of the automobile. There are recorded versions with ghosts hopping on buggies or horses. Sometimes the mysterious passenger isn’t a young lady in distress at all, but a religious figure — a Catholic saint, a Mormon wandering Nephite, or even Jesus. There are recorded Yiddish versions of the story from Europe, where the hitchhiker is the Prophet Elijah. While the details vary from story to story and culture to culture, the theme of someone stopping to help a mysterious figure who then disappears before reaching their destination remains the same.

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North Carolina’s Lydia is just one of many such stories from across the world, and even just one of many such stories from across North Carolina.

Of the multiple versions of the story circulating in North Carolina, the girl’s white dress, her sitting in the back seat, and the fact that it’s raining are the details that seem to turn up in every retelling. It’s only relatively recently, when the influence of the internet began to give our oral culture a more static format, that the variant where the girl is named Lydia and specifically identified with the overgrown bridge has become the most often told one.

In the 1960s, versions of the story usually included that the girl’s name was “Mary.” And while there were many variations throughout the state, most placed the encounter somewhere along the stretch of US-70 known as the Old Football Road running between Chapel Hill and Greensboro. But the bonus of having a specific, and genuinely creepy, destination associated with the story seems to have fixed our homegrown hitchhiker halfway to High Point and perpetually flagging down passing motorists from Lydia’s Bridge. The fact that Lydia’s Bridge is not actually a bridge, but a culvert to carry the railroad tracks over a now-dry stream bed is seldom mentioned.

So what does the story of the phantom hitchhiker mean? Why do we keep telling it time and time again? It’s probably worth noting that, while there are certainly older versions, the story began spreading like wildfire after the invention of the automobile. There was a time when cars were few on the road that the death of a young woman in an automobile accident would have been a relative rarity. There may be some folk memories of some fatal accident long ago which shook an entire town, and that those memories are kept alive in the phantom hitchhiker stories. There also may be something in the way the story captures the excitement of a teenager’s first few years driving, where making the journey from Raleigh to Greensboro alone at night can seem like an adventure and where anything is possible — even picking up a hitchhiker who died nearly a century ago.

And if you happen to see someone in a white dress standing by that overpass in High Point, there’s a good chance that teenagers seeking excitement has a lot to do with that as well.