About This Location
A remote island in the Isles of Shoals, site of one of New England's most notorious murders in 1873.
The Ghost Story
Shortly after one o'clock in the morning on March 6, 1873, an intruder broke into the only occupied house on Smuttynose Island and murdered two Norwegian immigrant women with an axe. The crime became one of the most infamous murder cases in New England history, and the twenty-seven-acre island -- six miles off the New Hampshire coast in the Isles of Shoals -- has never been the same. Three women were alone that night in the Hontvet cottage: Maren Hontvet, her sister Karen Christensen, and their sister-in-law Anethe Christensen. Maren's husband John and two other fishermen had sailed to Portsmouth and been unable to return due to weather. The killer beat and strangled Karen to death, then used the Hontvets' own axe to kill Anethe. As the attack unfolded, Maren heard her sister-in-law scream "Louis! Louis! Louis!" -- identifying the assailant.
Maren escaped through a window and hid among the rocks in freezing darkness until dawn, when she made her way across a breakwater to a neighboring island and raised the alarm. She identified the killer as Louis Wagner, a thirty-one-year-old German-born fisherman who had worked on John Hontvet's boat and boarded with the family for months before being displaced when Ivan and Anethe arrived from Norway. By March 1873, Wagner was destitute -- his shoes worn through, his clothes tattered, three weeks behind on rent at his Portsmouth boardinghouse.
The evidence against Wagner was damning. His boots matched bloody footprints found on the island. A bloodstained shirt was found hidden in the outhouse of his boarding house the morning after the murders, identified by his landlady Mrs. Johnson as one she had frequently laundered for him. Among the coins in his pocket when arrested was a distinctive button that Maren testified she had given Karen from her sewing box and watched Karen place in her coin purse. A stolen dory found on shore near where Wagner had been seen had its newly replaced thole pins worn smooth, as if rowed for hours through the night.
Wagner was tried, convicted, and -- after a brief escape from the Maine State Prison -- hanged at Thomaston, Maine, on June 25, 1875. He maintained his innocence to the end. Celia Thaxter, the poet who grew up on the Isles of Shoals as a lighthouse keeper's daughter on nearby White Island, was the first person to interview the bleeding, traumatized Maren on the morning after the murders. Thaxter wrote "A Memorable Murder" for the Atlantic Monthly in 1875, published just days before Wagner's execution. The essay scandalized readers who considered the subject unfit for a female writer, but it remains one of the definitive accounts of the crime.
The axe believed to be the murder weapon is on display at the Portsmouth Athenaeum. Karen and Anethe are buried in South Cemetery in Portsmouth, their graves still visited. On Smuttynose Island itself, visitors report hearing moans and screams rising from the site where the Hontvet cottage once stood. The sounds come most often on March nights, when the cold Atlantic wind carries something more than salt.
