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Close encounters of the worst kind
By Deborah Taylor-Hollis
I always seem to find eyewitnesses to our particular creepy little tales. As real estate prices skyrocket, it's getting harder to find people who will admit that their 600K home has some "unalterable" features," some creak in the night that no amount of WD40 will control, some unpleasant shade you catch out of the corner of your eye while watching extreme sports. This year I won't disappoint you--here's another true tale direct to you.
My dear friend Kathy knows that ghosts exist, and that they often come back to haunt people in terrifying clarity. She lost her innocence about things-that-go-bump-in-the-night on a hot summer day on a public beach on Block Island. She was still a little kid, only 7 or 8 years old, playing on an idyllic summer beach with her brothers Jay and Glenn and their family dog, a huge great Dane-shepherd mix. One minute it was just another sweltering summer day on a breezy stretch of open sand with nothing happening, and the next thing she knew she and her brothers--and the dog--were watching the horror of history out in the open waters.
A tall-masted schooner appeared out in the ocean, huge and powerful, sails billowing for all to see--and hear. Out of nowhere it had materialized about a half-mile offshore--close enough for the whole group to see every person on board and make out their clothing, even to hear their faint cries for help, for the ship was ablaze from stem to stern with weird, glowing flames. The women in their long dresses and the men in their stiff uniforms and crisp collars were screaming for help as they jumped overboard and plunged into the water.
Kathy and her brothers--and the now madly barking dog--ran up the beach to get their parents and dragged them outside to see the ship. Kathy's father sent Jay to the nearest farmhouse to get help. He could hear the screams all the way to the high ground.
The local farmer wasn't at all upset by the shaking boy and his tale. He took out a book of local history and told Jay to give it to his dad. "Tell him I've seen it twice in my lifetime," he added.
The haunting of the Palatine was a fairly regular occurrence out on the beach, Kathy discovered. Not a prank or a figment, the German schooner was ferrying religious outcasts to New York at the end of the 18th century when she met the same fate many others had before her.
The local folk of Block Island boasted the tallest lighthouse on the East Coast, one that kept ships off the dangerous shoals and away from Black Rock, which destroyed any vessel passing too close.
According to the farmer's history book, some of the locals also made a living out of wrecking ships and plundering them for their goods. They would build bonfires up on the high cliffs to trick unwary sailors into changing course, sending them to their deaths. They were called "moon cussers," because on moonlit nights they could not lure ships to the rocks, and only worked under cover of the new moon.
Every man, woman and child on board either drowned or was burned to death within sight of the beach one night so many years before, as had been all the ships before them, the looters making sure no one survived to testify against them. But this ship was full of religious people, and their cries, for whatever reason, still return. Whatever energy moves the universe moves their shadows to recreate their last agonizing moments for strangers on the beach.
If you visit www.blockislandinfo.com you will be reminded of the movie Jaws and how desperate the townspeople were for happy tourists. You will read of the 800 happy hypocritical denizens who gathered smiling and waving to be photographed in front of their lighthouse. Their website glosses over why the lighthouse had to put in a green light for sailors, and why the 1661 Inn serves Oysters Palatine.
Kathy would like to look at it logically. She was too young to have made up all the details. She was with her brothers, her mother and father, and the barking, agitated dog, who all saw the same thing--so it wasn't an embellished dream. It happened out on the water, in broad daylight, and it's a documented historical fact.
I guess dark old houses aren't the only things we should avoid with a shudder in the night.
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Willow Glen, California Since 1992
