Ocracoke Lighthouse

Blackbeard died in the channel next to this lighthouse in 1718. Locals say a glow still moves under the water, hunting for its missing head.

Blackbeard's head came off on November 22, 1718, in a knife-and-pistol brawl aboard Lieutenant Robert Maynard's sloop off Ocracoke Island. Maynard's crew lashed the head to the bowsprit and dumped the body overboard at Teach's Hole, the deep-water channel that now sits a short walk from Ocracoke Lighthouse. According to a story every island kid grows up hearing, the body didn't sink. It swam three laps around Maynard's ship before finally going under. And since then, on certain nights, a strange light moves under the water in the cove, and voices on the beach hear something that sounds like a man's pained bellow asking for his head back.

The lighthouse itself is younger than Blackbeard by more than a century. Built in 1823, it's the second-oldest operating lighthouse in the United States, a short, stout, whitewashed tower standing 75 feet tall on the southern end of the island. Its brilliance is that you can see it from the beach; its ghost problem is that Teach's Hole is right there, just across the marsh, and whatever happened in 1718 has been turning up in locals' and visitors' accounts ever since.

The light under the water is the detail people return to. It's described as a soft, steady glow, sometimes blue, moving beneath the surface in patterns no current would explain. Sportfishermen have reported it. Night kayakers have reported it. Skeptics explain it as phosphorescent marine life or moon reflection off bottom sand. Believers call it Blackbeard's lamp, carried by a body that never accepted the verdict of a Virginia governor's ambush.

Our State magazine documents a separate accounting of Ocracoke hauntings, most of them tied to the island's 81 cemeteries rather than to the lighthouse proper. A bearded man has been seen near Sam Jones's grave at Springer's Point. A couple in mid-nineteenth-century dress turns up in the Sunset Village cemetery. An Island Inn room has a ghost named Mrs. Godfrey who presses down on sleeping guests' feet. Ocracoke is a town where the dead are scattered through the village in small family plots, not banished to a single city of the dead, and the island keeps turning up its own history in the present tense.

But Blackbeard is the headliner. He's the one the souvenir shops sell. He's the reason the channel has his alias on the navigational charts. The lighthouse's role in all this is half geography and half theater: it's the structure you're standing next to when you look out at Teach's Hole and try to decide whether that light in the water is algae or a man with unfinished business.

Edward Teach was killed by Lieutenant Maynard, not by the North Carolina colonial authorities, and not in the ocean. He died in a calf-deep channel with a sword in his hand, after taking by some accounts five pistol balls and twenty cutlass wounds. The story that his body swam laps before sinking was probably started by Maynard's own crew, who had reason to build their opponent up in the telling. Three hundred years later, it remains the cleanest short summary of what Blackbeard is up to at Ocracoke: looking for his head, circling his killer, refusing to quit the island he used as his own.