In Brief
On White Island, southernmost of New Hampshire's Isles of Shoals, a woman in a dark sea cloak is said to wait at the waterline, watching the sea and crying that he will return. The pirate she's waiting for died off North Carolina in 1718.
The Full Story
On the rocks of White Island, the southernmost of the Isles of Shoals six miles off the New Hampshire coast, locals tell of a tall woman in a dark sea cloak with long blonde hair. She stands at the waterline, staring out to sea, and the story goes that she's been there for three centuries, watching for a ship.
The legend names her a pirate's bride. One of Blackbeard's wives, the telling goes, was left on the Shoals around 1720 and sworn by dark oath to guard a chest of buried treasure until he came back for her. He sailed south instead. He was captured and killed at Ocracoke, North Carolina, in 1718, and he never returned. The treasure, said to be buried on nearby Lunging Island, was never found. She is still waiting, and what she's heard crying out to the water is that he will return.
It is folklore, undocumented and inconsistent. The pirate is named in some versions as Blackbeard, in others Captain Kidd or Quelch; the woman as Martha Herring, or Annie, or no name at all. She is reported on several of the Shoals islands, not White alone. None of it is written down as fact.
What is written down is older than the tourist retellings. A girl named Celia Laighton spent her childhood on this rock in the 1840s, while her father Thomas kept the light. She grew up to be Celia Thaxter, one of the most popular poets in New England, and in her 1873 book about the Shoals she set down the earliest known version of the ghost: a man meets a woman in a dark sea cloak at the water, and before she vanishes she tells him, "He will come again."
The island she wrote from is a hard place to be. White Island is six miles out, with no safe landing except in calm water. The first lighthouse here went up in 1820; the brick tower that stands now replaced it in 1859, its light roughly 85 feet above the high-water mark. A covered walkway runs from the keeper's house to the tower so no one had to cross open rock in a gale.
Nathaniel Hawthorne came out on September 9, 1852, and found the keeper in his garden, pulling onions and cabbages early because the insects were already eating them. He wrote the visit down in his notebooks. It is the small, ordinary detail that survives from a place like this: a man tending vegetables on a rock in the Atlantic, while a few hundred yards off the legend says a woman in a cloak watched the same water he did.
The light was automated in 1986, and the keepers left for good. The tower and the keeper's house are closed now, reachable only by cruise from Rye Harbor when the sea is calm enough to look.
The child who lived on these rocks left and became famous. The woman in the sea cloak stayed.
