Cape Hatteras Lighthouse

The Carroll A. Deering ran aground off Hatteras in 1921 with a hot meal on the galley table and no crew. They never turned up.

On the morning of January 31, 1921, a five-masted commercial schooner called the Carroll A. Deering ran aground on Diamond Shoals, the murderous sandbar six miles off Cape Hatteras. When the Coast Guard finally boarded her days later, they found an untouched meal in the galley, ready to be served. The ship's log was gone. The navigation equipment was gone. The lifeboats were gone. All eleven crewmen, including the captain, were gone. No bodies were ever found, no explanation was ever proven, and for a century the Deering has been the central ghost of Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, which stood within sight of where she wrecked.

The lighthouse keeps that company. It was built in 1870, 208 feet of black-and-white spiral brick, and it still holds the title of tallest brick lighthouse in America. It was built to mark the worst stretch of water on the East Coast, where the Gulf Stream and the Labrador Current collide off Cape Point and tear ships apart. The shoals below have eaten more than 2,000 vessels since colonial times, earning the stretch its official nickname, the Graveyard of the Atlantic. You don't end up with a graveyard that big without leaving a lot of people behind.

The Gray Man of Hatteras is the one the locals have been talking about the longest. The story, repeated since the early 1900s, is of a sailor named Gray who lived near Cape Point and drowned in a hurricane when his ship went down offshore. His ghost walks the beach in a long gray coat, and when he turns up it's a bad sign, because he shows up ahead of the worst storms. Residents who say they've seen him describe him as a kind of pre-storm warning system. People board up windows when they see him.

Theodosia Burr Alston, the daughter of Aaron Burr, disappeared off this coast in January 1813 when her schooner the Patriot vanished in bad weather en route from South Carolina to New York. The fate of the ship has been debated for two centuries; one theory has pirates taking her and making Theodosia walk the plank. Sailors passing the lighthouse at night have reported seeing a woman in early-19th-century dress walking the tideline, still trying to reach a shore she never made it to.

The most affectionate ghost at Cape Hatteras is the cat. Visitors for the better part of 150 years have reported a large black-and-white cat, 15 to 20 pounds, moving around the lighthouse grounds. It rubs against people's legs. It sits near benches. When anyone bends to pet it, it's gone. The animal is believed to have belonged to one of the 19th-century keepers and apparently never accepted being off-duty.

In 1999, erosion had eaten so much of the Hatteras coastline that the lighthouse was within a few hundred feet of the surf. Engineers lifted the entire 4,800-ton tower, put it on rollers, and moved it 2,900 feet inland over 23 days. It was relit that November. Keepers' descendants and tourists alike will tell you that whatever was already inside the tower moved with it. Footsteps on the spiral stairs after closing. Cold drafts in sealed upper rooms. Voices on the wind that sound, to anyone who has spent a night near the ocean, like people in trouble offshore.

The Carroll A. Deering sits in the National Archives as an unsolved maritime mystery. The meal on the galley table is the detail everyone remembers, and the lighthouse above the wreck site is where the crew, in whatever form crews take after a disappearance, seems to have ended up. On foggy nights, Hatteras is a loud coast, even when there's no wind.