In Brief
The Ocracoke Lighthouse in North Carolina is the oldest operating light in the state. The real ghost story is the channel beside it — Teach's Hole, where Blackbeard was killed in 1718, and where a strange light still moves under the water.
The Full Story
The Ocracoke Lighthouse, on Ocracoke Island off the North Carolina coast, isn't the haunted part. The squat whitewashed tower has stood since 1823, and no one tells a ghost story about the building itself. The story is about what you're standing beside when you look out from it.
A short walk across the marsh is a deep-water channel called Teach's Hole. The name is on the navigational charts. Teach was Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard, and the hole is where he anchored and where he died.
On November 22, 1718, a Royal Navy force under Lieutenant Robert Maynard caught him there. Virginia's governor had sent them. What followed was a knife-and-pistol melee on the deck of Maynard's sloop, and when it ended, Maynard's men beheaded the pirate. The story goes that they threw the body overboard, and that it swam three times around the ship before it sank. Maynard lashed the head to his bowsprit and sailed off with it.
Three centuries later, the body is still in the cove, by the way people tell it. Locals and sportfishermen report a strange light moving beneath the water at Teach's Hole, and they read it the same way every time: Blackbeard, still looking for his head. On stormy nights there's said to be a sound on the beach like a man bellowing in anguish.
Skeptics have an answer. The light is phosphorescent marine life, or moonlight catching the pale sand on the bottom of the channel. No one has confirmed it either way.
He may not be alone out here. Ocracoke is a village where the dead get kept in small family plots rather than one churchyard, and Our State magazine counts 81 of them scattered through town, "beside a chicken coop, behind the lighthouse." Over at Springer's Point, a wooded spot near the grave of a wealthy eccentric buried with his horse, a man named Roy Parsons told of a bearded figure who chased him through the trees and then "went down like smoke." Some say it was Blackbeard too.
The lighthouse, meanwhile, just keeps working. The Coast Guard runs the fixed white light; the National Park Service has owned the station since 1999. A ranger is on the grounds in summer. It's the oldest operating lighthouse in North Carolina, a calm, working landmark — and it happens to stand a few hundred yards from the channel where you decide, on a dark night, whether that light under the water is a trick of the sand or a dead man still searching.
