Episode 28: Making a Mark

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This is the story of the one.

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I talk a lot about New England folklore.

One of the biggest reasons for that is because the Northeast part of the United States serves as a sort of cultural bridge between the old world and the new.

It was there, more than anywhere else, where the old tales and superstitions first set root on American soil.

The witch hysteria of the late 1600s was an aftershock of a larger tremor that shook Europe for decades.

The American version of the vampire has roots in Eastern European folktales and legends.

Even holidays like Christmas and Halloween were really just old world injections into the cultural soft tissue of America.

And the needle pierced us in New England first.

Most of the time.

There are other parts of the country that played host to pioneers and adventurers as well.

People who risked their lives and loved ones to travel across the cold Atlantic and build a new home here on these shores.

And the age of colonization brought more than just settlers and supplies.

It brought lore.

Settlers up and down the east coast of what would one day become America came ashore with heads full of superstitions and a propensity to attach meaning to things we might overlook today.

Put another way, they brought food for their journey and the seeds to grow more here.

They came with minds that were perfectly wired to build new folklore on the backs of old tales, new fears, new legends, new hauntings.

And we can still find those creations in many places along the eastern seaboard, places like North Carolina.

Before the vacation homes and sun-baked tourists crowded along the sandy shores of the Outer Banks, Pioneers were attempting to carve out an existence there.

Those that survived left behind more than buildings and descendants, though.

Today, the Outer Bank is home to tales that still send shivers down the spines of locals and tourists alike, because folklore, whether it's new or old, has a way of leaving its mark.

I'm Erin Manke, and this is Lore.

Brigham's Bay sits on the northern coast of the southern part of Hatteras Island, between the towns of Frisco and Buxton.

Hatteras is part of the Outer Banks, which on the map look like nothing more than a thin string of earth and sand a few miles off the coast of North Carolina.

Imagine the island as a backwards capital L, hugging the coastline near the Pamlico River.

But don't let that thin strip of sand and state parks fool you.

Hatteras, like many of the other islands out there, is still big enough for stories to take root.

And that's because it has a long history, longer than most parts of the country, in fact.

Near the northern tip of the island, just to the west, is Roanoke Island, the site of England's first settlement in the New World.

Although the colony there disappeared sometime between 1586 and 1587, Europeans didn't stay away long.

And it it was their constant activity in the region that gave rise to so much of the local stories still told today.

There is a legend in Hatteras of the horrible deeds of one particular captain.

According to the story, in 1710, an English ship crossed the Atlantic carrying refugees from Germany.

They were known as Palatines, and they had originally fled the Middle Rhine area to settle in England, but there were so many that the English decided to help them move to the New World.

When these refugees boarded the ship, they hid their valuables, afraid that they might be stolen by the ship's crew.

After a successful journey, the ship entered the waters inside the outer banks, heading toward New Bern on the coast.

Their new home was in sight, and after such a long journey, it must have been a relief to see it.

Sensing they would soon disembark, the Palatines removed their valuables from hiding and gathered them together for the final leg of their journey.

Now, maybe it was the sight of all that treasure, the jewelry and coins and precious heirlooms, that triggered what happened next.

Or perhaps the crew had planned it all along.

But here was their chance, and they decided to act.

Claiming that the weather wasn't good enough for a landing, they told the passengers to return to their cabins and wait until morning.

During the night, the crew moved systematically throughout the ship, killing the sleeping refugees and stealing their treasures.

After killing the passengers, the captain and crew set fire to the ship and headed to shore in lifeboats.

But the ship didn't sink.

Instead, the legend claims that the flames grew higher and higher while the ship began to move forward into calm waters.

Fearing for their lives, the crew abandoned the lifeboat and were never seen again.

To this day, locals whisper of a ghost ship that can be seen under the first full moon of September.

This ship, orange with flames, passes near the Okra Coke Inlet three times, and it vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

Another prominent local story involves the capture of the legendary pirate Edward Teach, also known as Blackbeard.

Teach patrolled the Atlantic and Caribbean in his ship Queen Anne's Revenge for a little over two years, and in the process, became one of the most feared pirates of his day.

As history records, Blackbeard was finally cornered by Lieutenant Lieutenant Robert Maynard and his men in November of 1718, just inside the outer banks near the southern tip of Hatteras.

In a battle that was horribly bloody for both sides, the great Blackbeard suffered no fewer than 20 sword wounds and five gunshots before he was finally brought down.

The English beheaded his corpse and tossed the body into the sea.

His head, though, was kept.

Maynard hung it from the bowsprit of his ship, and it was turned in later to collect his reward.

Locals there near Okrocoke tell of a spot known as Teach's Hole, where the legendary pirate once anchored his ship.

If the stories are to be believed, Blackbeard's ghost haunts the location.

There are those who claim to have seen strange lights, both above and below the water there on the coast.

They say it's Blackbeard, swimming through the waters he used to patrol.

Others say you can hear voices there.

When storms blow in and waves crash against the shore, locals claim you can hear something besides the rain and thunder.

It's the sound of a man crying out in pain.

The same words, over and over.

Where is my head?

Hatteras is still popular with visitors today, though I would assume none of them are pirates.

People still build homes there.

They have streets and restaurants and parks and trees.

Tourists flock there every summer to take in the scenery.

But right there on Snug Harbor Drive near Briggins Bay is a tree that's called the island home for centuries.

In fact, it was most likely ancient when the colonists first arrived hundreds of years before.

And although most of the people driving by it are completely unaware, this tree has a story to tell.

According to local legend, it starts with the arrival of a woman near Frisco back in the early 1700s.

They say her name was Cora, and she brought along a baby.

They were always seen together, the child held tight to her chest or strapped into a sling.

For an area frequented by sailors or widows of those who were lost at sea, this wasn't an unusual sight.

The Brigands Bay area was even more wooded then than it is now, and it's said that she took up shelter in the forest there rather than in the small community that was forming on the coast.

But it wasn't living on the literal outskirts of society that earned her a reputation as an outsider.

It was her knack for the unusual.

Some have said that cows she touched would dry up and turn sick.

When the fishing got rough and nets were empty, Cora still managed to bring in enough to feed herself and the child.

And when a local boy decided to poke fun at the baby, legend says that he got so sick, he nearly died.

Naturally, people talked.

People always talk when things don't fit the norm.

And that talk spread.

In an era when it didn't take much more than an unpleasant disposition or off-color comment to earn a woman a reputation as a witch, it seemed Cora was making it a little too easy for the locals to be suspicious.

The legend also tells of how, during Cora's stay, a ship called the Susan G ran aground off the northern coast of the island.

The captain and his crew left the ship and came to town, and from there they made plans to repair it and continue their commercial journey.

It sounds simple, right?

Just repair the damage and move on.

But doing so meant unloading all of the cargo piece by piece and bringing it to shore.

The captain's name, according to the legend, was Eli Blood.

Now that better have been his real name because, come on, how perfect is that, right?

Captain Blood.

This captain enlisted the help of locals to move the cargo off his grounded ship and in the process he got to know quite a few of them, which was a good thing.

Judging by the repairs, he and his crew from Salem, Massachusetts were bound to be there for a very long time.

And it was during this long stay that he and his crew heard the stories of Cora and her baby.

The heart of the rumors pointed to one single sensational conclusion.

Cora was a witch, and the child she brought with her was her familiar, her supernatural pet.

And as it turned out, Captain Blood was probably the last person on earth that this mysterious Cora wanted to draw the suspicion of.

The captain, it seems, was not just a sailor from Salem, Massachusetts.

He claimed to know Cotton Mather, the Puritan minister who was a passionate voice in support of the Salem witch trials.

He had read Mather's books.

He was a student of Mather's methods, methods and apparently shared the man's intense hatred for the dark arts.

So much so, in fact, that he considered himself a white witch, someone trained in combating the forces of darkness with their own brand of magic.

He claimed to have his own familiars, which he fed with drops of blood, and those familiars acted like spies for him, informing him of black magic nearby.

Captain Eli Blood considered himself a witch hunter.

Now, I realize this this sounds incredibly hypocritical, which it is, of course, but back then it was also heroic.

It gave the people of the island a feeling of safety.

At last, they might have said, We have someone here who can deal with Cora the witch if she gets out of hand.

And that's when the body of a man washed up on the beach.

The body wasn't one of Captain Blood's men, but it drew his concern nonetheless.

It was the body of a young man from town, and although no marks could be found that pointed to the cause of his death, there were a number of other clues.

Local legend tells of how the man's face was twisted into a horrible expression of fear.

His hands, they say, were clasped together as if he had been kneeling before someone powerful, begging for his life.

The man even had the numbers 666 carved into his forehead.

The most damning evidence of all, however, were the footprints in the sand near his body.

They were smaller than a man's, and they moved away from the body in a clear, definable direction.

The woods.

Someone needed to investigate the man's death, they said.

And who better to do it than the witch hunter himself, Captain Eli Blood?

He had little else to do while he waited on the ship's owner to send help and supplies.

This sounded like the perfect job for his idle mind.

Captain Blood, for his part, agreed.

He gathered his men, mostly slaves from Barbados, who all had a healthy cultural fear of black magic, and together they went in search of Cora's shack in the woods.

When they found her, she was inside making breakfast for herself and her child.

The men seized them both and brought them back to town.

They accused Cora of witchcraft and murder, of course.

How could they not in a society governed by deep suspicion and intense fear of people who failed to fit in?

Now, before you write them off as barbaric, remember that this is a flaw we have yet to overcome.

We still fear those who are different from us.

Maybe it's genetic, or maybe it's culturally ingrained.

That fear is like a snake hiding in the bushes.

Always ready to strike.

And it struck hard for Cora.

Captain Blood had her bound, left hand to right ankle, right hand to left ankle, and then carried her to the shore.

There, he ordered her to be thrown into the water.

It was a test, he said.

If she floated, she was a witch.

And seeing as how the tide was low and the waves were calm, of course she didn't sink.

How could she?

Satisfied with the results, the captain moved on to his second test.

Pulling his knife free, the man tried to cut a handful of Cora's hair, but the blade failed to do its job.

More proof, he declared, that she was in fact a witch.

Or at least proof that he needed to sharpen his knife, but hey, I'm no witch hunter.

The final test was the most creepy and ambiguous of them all.

Taking a bowl of sea water, the captain asked each of his crew to cut their fingertip and drip blood into the bowl.

When they had all done so, he stirred this mixture with his knife until it foamed and swirled, and then he chanted words that no one else understood while staring hard into the bowl, and then raised his face in triumph.

She's a witch, he exclaimed.

And then, as if needing a second opinion, he passed the bowl around to the others.

Each of them, according to the story, saw two things in the bowl.

The devil and the face of Cora.

That was all the proof they needed.

Cora was a witch, pure and simple.

And now her execution would be completed.

The captain had his men gather firewood and branches and pile them at the base of a large oak tree near the bay.

And then Cora and her child were tied to the tree, ready to be burned alive.

Now, what happened next will sound unusual.

That's the fingerprint of an old story.

They sometimes take on a patina of oddities and otherworldliness.

But sometimes the patina adds texture, even value to an antique.

I'll let you be the judge.

According to the locals who tell the tale to this day, Captain Blood approached the tree with a lit torch in his hand, ready to set fire to the wood and burn the witch and her familiar alive.

But another captain, a local man named John Smith, held him back, asking instead for Cora's trial to go through the proper legal channels.

Smith, you see, being a sane man, wanted to do things right.

But as the men argued, two things happened.

First, the child in Cora's arms twisted and writhed as it transformed into a large black cat with shimmering green eyes.

Second, a dark ominous cloud began to gather overhead in an otherwise cloudless sky.

Both men cried out in horror, and then Captain Blood lunged forward with the torch to ignite the kindling.

It was at that very moment that the cloud overhead rumbled, and a lightning bolt flashed down, striking the tree and blinding everyone around it.

When the smoke cleared, the tree was empty.

The ropes were still there, as was the pile of branches and firewood.

But the woman and the cat were gone without a trace.

Well, that's not true.

There was one clue, but it's difficult to believe.

There, etched by lightning into the bark of the old oak tree, were four clear letters, which spelled out one single word: C O R A

Cora

The Outer Banks is just like any other place in the world on many levels.

It has a history, and over the centuries that comprise that history, stories have been told.

In a lot of ways, story is one of our greatest legacies.

Wherever we've been, we've left story in our wake, like footprints in the mud.

Some stories are true and act like time capsules.

Some are exaggerations of the truth and are meant to entertain later generations more than anything else.

Some, though, serve to fill in the blanks, to answer those lingering questions or to explain the things we can't wrap our minds around.

Are there really fiery ghost ships and headless pirates haunting the outer banks?

Was the word on the Kora tree, a word that you can still go see for yourself if you want, really carved into the bark by lightning?

The chances are pretty good that it's all just a collection of old, entertaining folktales.

But some stories do both.

Beneath their decorative paint and fantastical flourishes, they conceal a grain of truth deep in their core.

The most famous local legend in the Outer Banks by a mile is the story of the lost colony of Roanoke.

The island is located off the west coast of Hatteras Island and when the English settled there in 1585, they knew they were on the edge of the world.

Building a settlement there took a lot of guts, and it came with a lot of risk and danger.

When John White and a hundred new settlers landed in July of 1586, the first settlement was gone, so they stayed to investigate.

They set up their own fort there and also worked to establish relations with the local Native American tribes, the Croatoan on what is now Hatteras and the Kori on the mainland.

White left for England one year later to get supplies, but didn't return for three years.

When he did come back, no sign of the English could be found.

He'd left them with a plan, though.

If they were forced to leave, they'd been told to carve a cross into a nearby tree so White would know they'd been attacked.

And he did find a carving.

But it wasn't a cross.

It was a single word, Croatoan.

This was good news, because it meant they'd departed peacefully.

White wanted to search Hatteras immediately, but when a terrible storm blew in, his men refused to stay.

However painful it might have been, after all, White's own granddaughter was among the missing, they left the very next day.

It's interesting to note that the Croatoan lived in southern Hatteras, in the area between modern-day Buxton and Frisco, right by the Coratree.

And if it wasn't really lightning that carved those letters, perhaps it was an actual human being.

Sure, it could be nothing more than a centuries-old prank or just a bit of lover's graffiti.

Anything's possible.

Or maybe, like a myth with a grain of truth at its heart, this tree is the last hint in a chain of clues that point to the final destination of the settlers from Roanoke.

You see, the Cree tribe on the mainland went by a few other names.

Some called them the Koris, or the Coronin,

or interestingly enough, the Cora.

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So what do this animal

and this animal

and this animal

have in common?

They all live on an organic valley farm.

Organic Valley dairy comes from small organic family farms that protect the land and the plants and animals that live on it from toxic pesticides, which leads to a thriving ecosystem and delicious, nutritious milk and cheese.

Learn more at OV.co-op and taste the difference.

This episode of Lore was researched, written, and produced by me, Aaron Mankey.

Lore is much more than a podcast.

There's a book series in bookstores around the country and online, and the second season of the Amazon Prime television show was recently released.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

I also make two other podcasts, Aaron Mankey's Cabinet of Curiosities and Unobscured, and I think you'd enjoy both.

Each one explores other areas of our dark history, ranging from bite-sized episodes to season-long dives into a single topic.

You can learn about both of those shows and everything else going on all over in one central place, theworldoflore.com slash now.

And you can also follow the show on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Just search for lore podcast, all one word, and then click that follow button.

When you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always, thanks for listening.

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