TLDR
On March 5, 1873, Louis Wagner rowed six miles to Smuttynose and killed two women with an axe. Maren Hontvet survived all night hidden in the rocks.
The Full Story
Smuttynose Island has 25 acres of rock and grass, no trees worth the name, and the most infamous murder scene in New Hampshire history. On the night of March 5, 1873, two Norwegian immigrant women were killed with an axe on this island. Fishermen and writers have carried the story for 150 years, and the man who killed them has a reputation for walking the ground in remorse.
The island is one of nine in the Isles of Shoals, six miles off the Portsmouth coast. In 1873 a single small house on Smuttynose held a Norwegian family: John and Maren Hontvet, Maren's sister Karen Christensen, and John's brother Ivan with his new wife Anethe. On the night of the murders the men were stranded on the mainland by weather. A Prussian fisherman named Louis Wagner, 28, who had once boarded in the Hontvet house and worked John's boat, rowed out from Portsmouth in the dark. He knew the women would be alone. He had asked three times that week.
Wagner came for $600 he believed was hidden in the house. Karen, 39, was in the kitchen. He beat and strangled her. Anethe, 25, woke to the noise and opened the door. He used the Hontvets' own axe on her head. Maren escaped through a window and hid all night among the icy rocks at the far end of the island, barefoot, listening. At dawn she crawled to Appledore Island and was rescued by another Norwegian family.
Wagner was arrested in Boston within a day. His boots matched the bloody prints inside the house. A blood-soaked shirt was found hidden in the outhouse of his Portsmouth boarding room. On June 25, 1875, he was hanged at the state prison in Thomaston, Maine. He denied the crime on the gallows.
New Hampshire folklore has kept Wagner on the island. A long-running thread in the state's ghost literature describes him walking Smuttynose in remorse for the women he killed. One New Hampshire Magazine piece puts it this way: "The ghost of Louis Wagner haunts the place in remorse for the two little Dutch girls he murdered here." The nationality is wrong. The rest has been passed down for a century and a half.
Other accounts describe a woman's scream carried on the wind near the site of the Hontvet house, which is now just a foundation. Some visitors talk about a sense of being watched from the direction of the rocks where Maren hid. The island is private, owned by a conservancy, with very few overnight visitors. What gets reported tends to come from researchers and the occasional fisherman.
What the island actually has now is quiet. Grass, gulls, surf, the foundation stones. The novelist Anita Shreve used the murders as the backbone of her 1997 book The Weight of Water, in which she reframed Maren as the killer, a theory that has never held up against the evidence but refuses to die. J. Dennis Robinson's 2014 book Mystery on the Isles of Shoals walked through the case in forensic detail and concluded what the 1873 jury concluded: Wagner did it.
Maren Hontvet lived another four decades after the murders and did not remarry. She refused to set foot on Smuttynose again. Whoever is walking out there, by most accounts, is walking alone.
Researched from 9 verified sources. How we research.
