Whisper in the Woods: Folklore of the Marsh

 —By Tiffany Amber Stockton

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September always feels like the right time of year for stories that live in the shadows. The air starts to shift, the days get shorter, and you're well on your way to the early autumn time that makes old tales feel a bit more alive.

And Chincoteague, it turns out, has plenty of old tales.

Strange Lights and Uneasy Spirits

Elisha Bloxom house

Back in May of 1890, a reporter for the New York Sun traveled to Chincoteague and wrote up what he found there. He was clearly charmed by the island and its people. And among everything he observed, he devoted an entire section of his article to what he simply called, "Ghosts and Charms."

He described a community that read meaning into everything around it. The wind sighing through the pines. Strange voices drifting in from the sea. Calls from across the meadows that couldn't quite be identified. And strange lights that danced above the stagnant water in the glades.

My great-grandfather lived there during that era. When you live on an isolated island with no books, no newspapers, and few neighbors, surrounded by marsh and open water, the supernatural tends to fill the space that other explanations can't reach.

The reporter also wrote about a specific haunted house. The home of a man named Elisha Bloxom, who had drowned in an accident at sea when a yawl capsized and struck him on the head. His neighbors suspected his mates could have saved him and didn't. The story claims old Elisha's soul couldn't rest. Sounds visited the house at night. The widow moved out. A family of newcomers who didn't know Elisha moved in ... and moved right back out before their lease was up. That was eight years before the reporter visited, and the house still stood empty, its reputation firmly intact.

What Fear Tells Us About Faith

The reporter noted something that I find quite profound. He wrote that when the preachers eventually came to Chincoteague with their prayers and sermons, the old islanders would attend, and listen, and believe, but they wouldn't be wholly comforted.

I mulled a bit on that and realize faith doesn't always arrive all at once or replace everything that came before it overnight. These were people in the middle of a transition between an older world of signs and spirits and conjurers, and a newer one shaped by Scripture and the church. The two coexisted for a long time on that island, just as they have in communities throughout history.

Folklore and superstition were never really about the supernatural. They were about the very human need to believe that the world has meaning, that suffering isn't random, that there is something to appeal to when your own hands aren't enough. First John 4:18 says that perfect love casts out fear. The Chincoteague residents of 1890 hadn't fully arrived there yet. But they were looking for the same thing faith offers: a reason to believe that the darkness around them wasn't the whole story.

The strange lights still dance above the glades in autumn. The pines still sigh when the wind comes in off the Atlantic. The island still holds its secrets. But the stories those things once generated say more about the hope for something bigger than the actual subject of the story itself.

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* Have you ever heard a piece of local folklore that turned out to have a real emotional or historical lesson underneath it?

* Do you think superstition and faith can coexist in the same community, or even in the same person?

* Is there a place near where you grew up that has a spooky reputation, and do you know what gave rise to the stories?

Leave answers to these questions or any comments on the post below.

** This note is for our email readers. Please do not reply via email with any comments. View the blog online and scroll down to the comments section.

Come back on the 9th of each month for my next foray into historical tidbits to share.

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BIO

Tiffany Amber Stockton has embellished stories since childhood, thanks to a very active imagination and notations of talking entirely too much. Honing those skills led her to careers as an award-winning and best-selling author and speaker, while also working as a professional copywriter. Through her love of words, she encourages others to Get Rooted in truth and live a life of purpose.

Currently, she lives with her husband and fellow author, Stuart Vaughn Stockton, along with their two homeschooled teens, and five cats in southeastern Kentucky. In her 20+ years as a professional writer, she has sold twenty-six (26) books so far and has agent representation with Tamela Murray of the Steve Laube Agency. You can find her on Facebook and GoodReads. She also rebooted her longtime blog and is expanding her content creation to Instagram and Twitter, maybe even an audio podcast at some point.

Phantom Ships of the Chesapeake

—By Tiffany Amber Stockton

There's something about open water and a dark sky that invites stories. Just think about all the sea shanties that have been written or the rich maritime folklore full of tales. And on a coastline with as many shipwrecks, storms, and hard histories as this one, there's no shortage of gaps to fill.

The Coast That Swallowed Ships

The waters off Assateague Island and along the Virginia Eastern Shore were among the most treacherous on the entire Atlantic coastline. Shallow shoals, sudden storms, and tricky inlets meant that ships met grief here regularly. There are dozens upon dozens of documented wrecks in this stretch of coast alone.

One of the most famous involves a Spanish warship called the La Galga. In September of 1750, she was driven ashore in shallow water at Assateague by a hurricane that rerouted her voyage from Havana back to Spain. The crew made it to shore, but the ship didn't. And according to local legend, not everyone who went down with her stayed quietly beneath the waves. It is said the spirits of those who died in the wreck still comb the beach near the Assateague Lighthouse to this day.

Now, I'm not here to argue for or against ghost stories. But when you walk that beach at dusk and the light shifts the way it does over open water, the stories don't exactly feel unreasonable.

Fire on the Water

Ghost ship legends tend to follow a pattern along the Atlantic coast. The image that shows up again and again is a ship on fire, visible from shore, impossible to approach, there one moment and gone the next.

The most famous version of this legend along the northeastern coast belongs to a ship called the Palatine, said to appear as a burning phantom off Block Island in Rhode Island. Benjamin Congdon, born around 1788, gave what he called a typical explanation for the apparition. He said the burning ship was sent by an Almighty Power to punish wicked men who had wronged her passengers. The people didn't just tell ghost stories for entertainment. They used them to make moral sense of tragedy.

That same impulse shows up all along the coast. When something terrible happened at sea and no good explanation came with it, the story that filled the space often came with answers. Greed was punished, cruelty was answered, and the innocent were remembered. The ghost ship wasn't used just to scare people. It was a form of justice that the law couldn't always provide.

What the Stories Were Really Doing

The part that interests me most as a fiction author is what the stories meant to the people who told them.

The Chesapeake region had the ideal conditions for this kind of folklore. Isolated coves, historic battle sites, and centuries of storms and shipwrecks all set the stage. These weren't just idle campfire tales. They were community memories, shaped into compelling narratives. A phantom ship burning on the water could be a warning to stay away from a dangerous stretch of shoals, a reminder of a tragedy the community hadn't finished grieving, or a way of saying that some things don't go unanswered even when no one is watching.

And there's a thread of faith underneath all of it. The watermen and island communities were deeply rooted in their churches. They didn't read ghost ship sightings as random. They read them as meaning something. In their understanding, things had consequences. Those who observed the burning Palatine shortly after the original wreck believed it to be a warning from an Almighty Power. That's not so far from a worldview shaped by Scripture.

I think about Pop-Pop's stories again here. He never told ghost stories exactly. His tales were always adventure, always rescue, always triumph. But he understood the dangers of the water. History happened out there. People died out there. And he didn't dismiss any of that reality. He simply chose to reframe the stories in a way that meant something to my brother and me.

The Light You Can Explain and the Light You Can't

Before the Assateague Lighthouse was operational, ships navigated this coastline by whatever lights they could find, and sometimes they found none at all. The lighthouse was built precisely because too many ships were lost in darkness. A real light saved lives. A false light, in some of those darker legends, lured ships to destruction.

That tension of true light versus false light runs all the way through Scripture. "Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path." Psalm 119:105. The people who lived along these shores and watched for burning ships in the dark knew firsthand exactly what it meant to need a reliable light.

The phantom ships still show up in Eastern Shore stories. Some of them probably have explanations like bioluminescence, fog, or distant burning debris. Some of them are just stories that got better with each retelling. Either way, they tell you what the people who lived here feared, and what they believed.