Springer's Point Nature Preserve

Blackbeard threw the largest pirate party in American colonial history on Springer's Point in 1718. Five weeks later, he lost his head offshore.

On November 22, 1718, Lieutenant Robert Maynard of the HMS Pearl cornered Blackbeard in a channel just off Ocracoke Island. The pirate took five musket balls and twenty sword cuts before he fell. Maynard cut his head off, hung it from the bowsprit of his sloop as proof of the kill, and threw the body overboard. Witnesses claimed the headless corpse swam three laps around the ship before it finally sank.

That channel, still called Teach's Hole, sits a few hundred yards offshore from Springer's Point.

Springer's Point is a 120-acre coastal preserve on the south end of Ocracoke Village, a tangle of ancient live oaks, Spanish moss, and maritime forest with Pamlico Sound on one side and the inlet on the other. Edward Teach used the sheltered water here as a home base during his short, prolific career. In October 1718, a month before the Royal Navy caught up with him, he threw what may have been the largest pirate gathering in American colonial history on this beach. Israel Hands, Charles Vane, Robert Deal, and John Rackham brought their crews. The party ran for days. Hogs and cattle were slaughtered and cooked on open fires. Rum went through faster than the barrels could be tapped. It was the last great social event of the Golden Age of Piracy, and five weeks later most of the headline acts were dead or in chains.

The ghost stories at Springer's Point are exactly the ghost stories you'd expect. A large bearded figure in tattered seafarer's clothes, glimpsed in the early morning mist along the beach, gone when anyone turns to look straight at him. Visitors who feel a sudden presence near the water's edge and understand, without being told, that it's looking for something it lost. Paranormal photographers pull orbs out of shots taken under the live oaks. On certain still nights, hikers on the trail claim to hear faint laughter and the clatter of a party coming from the woods behind them, always from a direction that would put the sound roughly where the October 1718 gathering would have been.

The trail itself runs about half a mile through the preserve, managed by the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust. It ends at a narrow sand beach where the sound meets the inlet and where the view is more or less the last thing Blackbeard saw before he sailed out the following morning to die. People come for the trees. The live oaks here are some of the oldest on the Outer Banks, their lower branches thick enough to sit on, their canopies closing over the trail in a way that makes the walk feel enclosed even on bright days. Plenty of visitors leave having noticed nothing unusual. The ones who do notice something usually describe the same thing: a held breath, a sense that the woods are paying attention, and a pirate who never got his head back.