[Note: Parts of this story first appeared in Michael’s Soapbox column in The Nashville Graphic]
I’ve gathered up some good old North Carolina legends. Most of us have heard about the Maco Light, the Brown Mountain Lights and the Devil’s Trampling Ground; locals know The Trestle in Momeyer. Hopefully, this week I’ve got some stories you haven’t heard.
Poole Woods
In the 19th century, William Poole owned vast tracts of wooded land south of Raleigh. Poole was a wealthy man, a mill owner, and above anything he loved trees and horses. Particularly he loved white horses, it was noted by all who knew him that he always rode a fine white horse.
During the Civil War, when Union troops marched into Raleigh, rumor spread that Poole had gold hidden on his estate. Raleigh’s leaders had negotiated with General Sherman to spare the town from the torch, but a band of Union Trips hungry for loot split off from their company to find Poole.
Poole was captured in his home, but denied the existence of any gold. The Northern Soldiers forced him to watch as his mill was burned to the ground, but Poole still asserted he had no gold.
Poole was telling the truth, there was no gold, but the soldiers carried off something more precious to Poole than his gold: his prize white horse. Poole was heartbroken as he saw his precious companion being led away.
But after Poole died, it’s said that his horse returned to him in spirit. For years afterwards, a pale white rider on a pale white horse was seen galloping through the woods.
Peter Dromgoole
The legend of Peter Dromgoole and Fannie is a popular campus story at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dromgoole, a student who supposedly died in a duel in 1832, is said to be buried under a stone known as Dromgoole Rock. It doesn’t hurt to keep the legend alive that Dromgoole Rock is located at Piney Point, on the land of the appropriately gothic Gimgoul Castle. Gimgoul Castle was constructed in the 1920s and is the home to the Gimgoul Society, UNC’s answer to Skull and Bones.
The legend goes that Peter Dromgoole and another student were both in love with a young girl from town named Fannie. The rivals met one night and had a few nasty words to share, then agreed to meet the following day for a duel.
Dueling was, even then, strongly discouraged in the student handbook, but somehow word of the event leaked out and Fannie heard of it. She rushed to Piney Point just in time to see Peter shot through the heart. Peter collapsed onto a boulder, which was permanently stained with his blood.
In a textbook case of a student prank gone bad, the witnesses and seconds hastily buried Peter’s body and moved the rock where he had died on top of his grave to cover the fresh dirt. Ironically, this had been the very rock where the two lovers had often met.
Fannie, pining for Peter, died later that summer. Before she died, she said that Peter was lonely and she was going to meet him. The shadowy figures of the two lovers meeting in the woods by Dromgoole Rock have been often seen since.
The Curse of Bath
Bath is the source of two famous North Carolina legends. The first one also names Bath one of the few towns in North Carolina brought down by a curse.
In the early 18th century, Bath was an important commercial center, it was even the residence for Edward Teach, who practiced his piratical trade more usually under the name of Blackbeard. The easygoing attitude of the town didn’t impress the 18th century traveling evangelist George Whitefield, who was famous for mesmerizing crowds and using the press as a vehicle for evangelism. On a visit to Bath, the talk of hellfire and damnation was greeted with less than full enthusiasm by a crowd that had come to see the financial benefits of a lifestyle built around boozing and piracy.
Disgruntled, Whitefield placed a curse on the town that Bath would lose its prosperity and dwindle away to nothing. Sure enough, the nearby town of Washington soon began to suck away Bath’s prosperity, and by the middle of the next century all that remained was the sleepy little hamlet that’s there today.
The second story involves another stranger visiting Bath, but a stranger of a distinctly different character than Whitefield.
A man named Jesse Elliot was a resident of Bath and the proud owner of a powerful racing stallion. Elliot would race any comes, and he and his stallion would always win. One day, a tall man appeared in the town and approached Elliot, saying he’d heard of his racing fame and had a horse he’d like to try against his stallion. Elliot quickly agreed, and the two men arranged to meet the next day.
When Elliot arrived at the course, he saw the stranger already waiting for him on a midnight black stallion, larger and more fiery than any Elliot had ever seen. And atop that angry horse was the stranger, also dressed all in black, with an evil fire in his eyes that burned into Elliot’s soul.
Frightened, Elliot paused for a moment, but his greed for racing consumed him and he urged his stallion on, shouting “Take me a winner or take me to hell!” Elliot’s horse charged ahead, but the stranger’s stallion soon drew aside. And as soon as it did, Elliot’s own horse dug its feet into the grown, throwing his rider into a tree and killing him instantly.
As for the stranger, it’s said that he just laughed, and rode back to his home in hell with Jesse Elliot’s soul astride his black stallion. And the footprint’s where Jesse Elliot’s horse dug its feet into the sand can still be seen to this day.
The Ship of Fire
On a certain evening every year, at the mouth of the wide Neuse River, a large bright object speeds into view. It looks like a sailing ship being destroyed by fire, its deck and masts in blazing outline. The apparition disappears, then reappears, then again disappears for another year. It burns furiously but is not consumed.
It is the ship of the Palatines. The Palatines were a group of German Protestants who left England in 1710 to settle New Bern. As the vessel crossed the Atlantic, the prosperous Palatines, pretending to be poor, hid their gold coins and silver dishes from the eyes of the ship’s sinister captain and crew. When the Palatines caught sight of the shore which they believed to be their future home, so excited were they that up from the hold and out from hiding places came all their belongings in preparation for landing. Unwisely displayed on the deck was their precious wealth, all of it in full view of the corrupt captain and his first mate.
Quickly the captain formed a plan. He announced to the passengers than no landing could be made until the morrow. He and the crew would murder every Palatine aboard, then gather together the gold and silver, set afire the ship filled with its dead, and escape in the lifeboats.
The strike was sudden. As planned, the ship was set afire, and the murderers pushed off in the small boats. From a distance they looked back at the ship. It burned brighter and brighter, the brilliant blaze of the fire shooting into the air, but the vessel did not sink into the water. And then the thing began to move.
The frightened murderers could bear no more. They abandoned their boats on the bank of the river and fled into the forest. There they and their descendants lived on their “ill-gotten spoils.” To this day the crime has not been avenged, and so every year on a certain evening the burning ship appears off New Bern.
Specter at the Gold Mine
During the Carolina gold rush of the 1830s and 1840s, a miserly old codger called Skinflint McIntosh owned a rich vein in southern Cabarrus County. So tightfisted was he that he wouldn’t pay adequate wages to the miners to dig for the gold, nor would he provide sufficient safety measures to prevent accidents in his mine. The vein of gold was 450 feet down a narrow shaft.
One of the best workers in the district was Joe McGee, whom Skinflint kept trying to hire. “If I got killed down there,” said Joe, “would you pay my wife Jennie $1,000?” “Joe,” Skinflint shouted, “I’d pay her $2,000.” And so it was that Joe gave up his other job and went to work for Skinflint.
One cold, drizzly night, when Joe didn’t come home at the usual hour, Jennie became worried. Finally she persuaded Joe’s friend Shaun to gather up a few men and look for Joe in the mine. They search the deep hole but found nothing. After several weeks Jennie asked Skinflint for her money. “Oh, no,” said Skinflint, “Joe’s just gone off somewhere.” And he didn’t pay her.
Soon after, on another bitter night, a loud knock came on Shaun’s door. Opening it, he was startled by a ghostly white specter who spoke with the voice of his friend Joe and told Shaun to go to the mine that very night; it told him to dig a a certain spot where the green timbers had given away and caused a cave-in. It asked if Skinflint had paid Jennie, and when Shaun said no, the specter wailed, “I’ll haunt that mine of his forever.”
McGee’s body was found exactly where the specter said. Skinflint paid up, but only when threatened by Joe’s old friends. Word spread about the haunted mine, and no one would work for McIntosh. All of this happened 150 years ago but the gold is still in the mine–as is the specter.
The Siren of the French Broad
“Among the rocks east of Asheville, North Carolina, lives the Lorelei of the French Broad River,” writes early American Folklorist Charles M. Skinner. Despite the Classical and medieval European connotations of the names Siren and Lorelei, this entity has supposedly haunted the pools of the upper part of the river since the days of the Cherokee. Those who sit or rest too near the Siren’s lair will see in the water “the form of a beautiful woman, with hair streaming like moss and dark eyes looking into his, luring him with a power he cannot resist. His breath grows short, his gaze is fixed, mechanically he rises, steps to the brink, and lurches forward into the river. The arms that catch him are slimy and cold as serpents; the face that stares into his is a grinning skull.”
Girl at the Underpass
Before interstate highways ran around towns and cities, a young man left Greensboro late one night to drive to his old home in Lexington. At that time, just east of Jamestown, the old road dipped through a tunnel under the train tracks. The young man knew the road well, but it was a thick foggy night in early summer and he drove cautiously, especially when he neared the Jamestown underpass. Many wrecks had taken place at that spot. Standing on the roadside just beyond the underpass was an indistinct white figure with arm raised in a gesture of distress. The young man quickly slammed on his brakes and came to a stop beside the figure.
It was a girl, young, beautiful, resplendent in a long white evening dress. Her troubled eyes were glaring straight toward him. “Can I help you?”
“Yes.” Her voice was low, stranger. “I want to go home. I live in High Point.”
He opened the door, and she got in. “I didn’t expect to find anyone like you on the road so late at night.”
“I was at a dance.” She spoke in a monotone. “My date and I had a quarrel. It was very bad. I made him drop me back there.”
He tried to continue the conversation, but she would say nothing more until they were into High Point. “Turn at the next left,” she said. “I live three doors on the right.” He parked before a darkened house, got out of the car and went around to open the door for her. There was no one there! He looked into the back seat. No one! He thought she might have rushed up the sidewalk and out of sight.
Confused and undecided about what to do next, he thought it only reasonable to find out if she had entered the house. He went up the steps and knocked on the door. The door was opened by a white-haired woman in a night robe.
“I brought a girl to this house,” he explained, “but now I can’t find her. Have you seen her? I picked her up out on the highway.”
“Yes, I know,” said the woman wearily. “that was my daughter. She was killed in a wreck at that tunnel five years ago tonight. And every year since, on this very night, she signals a young man like you to pick her up. She is still trying to get home.”
Sources:
North Carolina Ghost Stories and Legends
Skinner, Charles M. Myths and Legends of Our Own Lands
Walser, Richard. North Carolina Legends
Some good ones, Michael. Thanks.
Thanks!
Very interesting stories! You mentioned the Brown Mountain Lights. My wife and I were taken by my aunt who lives in the area to the cliff overlooking the river just off the Parkway. It was an amazing and strange display of lights moving around over the top of the mountain east of us.
Thanks for reading — I’d love to see the Brown Mountain Lights in person