Seaside Spectres

By Daniel W. Barefoot and Scott Mason

Seaside Spectres collects ghost stories from the coastal region of North Carolina as part of the Haunted North Carolina series. This book includes stories told around beach campfires, in grandma’s attic, and on nighttime drives to the coast. There are thirty-three stories in all, one for each coastal county, including tales of ghosts, witches, demons, spook lights, unidentified flying objects, unexplained phenomena, and more.

In “The Cursed Town,” an eighteenth-century preacher curses the town of Bath—a curse from which the town never recovered. “Terrors of the Swamp” details the unexplained happenings in the Great Dismal Swamp—mysterious lights, a haunting from the American Revolution, and a creature called the Dismal Swamp Freak. In “The Fraternity of Death,” readers meet the nineteenth-century cult whose members mocked the Last Supper and died under mysterious circumstances soon afterward, inspiring a story by Robert Louis Stephenson.

Seaside Spectres contains a new foreword by Scott Mason, WRAL’s "Tar Heel Traveler" and author of three North Carolina guidebooks. Other books in the Haunted North Carolina series feature tales of the mountains, Haints of the Hills, and tales of the state’s central region, Piedmont Phantoms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blair
• Release date: Sep 10, 2019
• ISBN: 9781949467215

Daniel W. Barefoot

Daniel Barefoot, former member of the North Carolina Assembly, historian, folklorist, and magician, is the perfect guide to the diverse supernatural history of the state. He is the author of twelve books, including Haunted Halls of Ivy: Ghosts of Southern Colleges and Universities, Hark the Sound of Tar Heel Voices, and Spirits of ’76. From 1998 until 2002, Barefoot served three terms in the North Carolina House of Representatives, representing the 44th district. He has served as the city attorney for Lincolnton, North Carolina. He is a frequent speaker to cultural, civic, and church groups throughout the Southeast.

Book preview

BEAUFORT COUNTY

The Cursed Town

The devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.

William Shakespeare

Today, she rests on the quiet waters of Bath and Back Creeks, much as she has for the last three hundred years. Bath, the oldest town in an old state, was incorporated by the Colonial Assembly on March 8, 1705. Homes and other structures of antiquity, including the oldest extant church in North Carolina, line the historic lanes as reminders of the time long ago when Bath was one of the most important towns in the colony. For much of the first half of the eighteenth century, it served as the unofficial capital of North Carolina and played host to several sessions of the Colonial Assembly. By the Revolutionary War, however, Bath had lost its place of dominance. And ever since, the first Tar Heel town has languished in relative obscurity.

Why Bath fell into a state of lethargy before the nineteenth century has been debated by historians through the years. Some people contend that the town was relegated to its status as a small, politically insignificant backwater hamlet by one of the most famous early evangelists in America, who put a curse on it. And perhaps it was this curse that caused Bath to have a brush with the supernatural in the early nineteenth century and made it the setting of one of the most haunting of all North Carolina legends.

Because of its location on the post road, which extended from Portland, Maine, to Savannah, Georgia, Bath attracted a wide variety of travelers and adventurers in the mid-eighteenth century. Local taverns soon acquired a reputation for bawdy and salacious activities. About the same time, colonial America was undergoing a religious experience known as the Great Awakening.

In the midst of this spiritual revival, George Whitefield, a noted English religious reformer and preacher, paid a visit to Bath on four occasions. He used his gift of oratory to condemn the vices of cursing, drinking, and dancing and to declare them the work of the devil. His fire-and-damnation sermons were not well received by the local residents, who were quite suspicious of the strange man, and for good reason.

On each visit, Whitefield brought a coffin in his wagon. When questioned about the peculiar practice, he offered a simple response: he wanted to make sure that if he died, a coffin would be waiting for his body. Folks in Bath were mortified to discover that the preacher slept in the coffin. But as he saw it, the practice allowed him to avoid the debauchery of the local