Bath Historic District

Blackbeard retired here in 1718, a preacher cursed it in the 1740s, and a fireball still patrols the creek during bad storms.

Bath, North Carolina, was supposed to be the state capital. It had the first library, the first church, and the first free school in the colony. Instead it's a village of 250 people, cursed on two separate occasions by two separate men, one of them a pirate and the other a preacher.

The town was incorporated in 1705 on a neck of land between the Pamlico River and Bath Creek. It was the closest thing North Carolina had to a city for the first few decades of the 1700s. In the summer of 1718, Edward Teach sailed into the creek to collect a royal pardon from Governor Charles Eden. Teach, better known as Blackbeard, had spent a year terrorizing shipping from the Caribbean to Philadelphia. He bought a house at Plum Point, married a local woman said to be his fourteenth wife, and for a few months appeared to be going straight. The governor looked the other way because Blackbeard kicked up a portion of his plunder in exchange for the protection.

The retirement didn't take. Teach was back on the water by late summer, and on November 22, 1718, Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the Royal Navy caught him at Ocracoke Inlet, killed him in a boarding action, cut off his head, and sailed back to Virginia with it hanging from the bowsprit of his sloop. The head was proof of bounty. The body went over the side and, according to the story, swam three laps around Maynard's ship before sinking.

The first curse starts there. The Bonner family, who have been in Bath for generations, describe something they call Blackbeard's Lights. During bad summer storms a fireball about the size of a man's head appears low over the water between Plum Point and Archbell Point, skimming back and forth across the creek until the weather clears. It doesn't show in calm weather. It shows when the water is bad, which is when a pirate ghost would be out checking on his stretch.

The second curse is George Whitefield's. Whitefield was one of the great evangelists of the Great Awakening, and when he passed through Bath sometime in the 1740s, the town fathers told him to leave. He obliged. On the way out he shook the dust from his shoes at the town gates and declared that Bath would remain small forever. Over the next two centuries the town was hit with political infighting, yellow fever, Indian wars, hurricanes, and the opening of a better port at Washington upriver. By the time the curse should have expired, the population had stopped growing and never resumed. It hasn't cracked 300 in a century.

The modern town is a state historic site clustered around St. Thomas Church, built in 1734 and the oldest church building in North Carolina. Palmer-Marsh House, Van Der Veer House, and Bonner House anchor the original streets. Ghost tours walk the short route between them most weekends. The point of the tour isn't really the individual ghosts, it's the overall pressure of the place, a town that was on track to become the Richmond of the Carolinas and got talked out of it by a pirate and a preacher.