I purchased this book while I was in Outer Banks for the first time. Did you know this area is known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic? Though I have a love for ghost stories and lore, I never got into pirate tales and water-based ghosts. (That’s all changed now.)
My mom, aunt, and I visited the Island Bookstore in search of something my aunt wanted to find, and meanwhile I browsed the tote bags, every section (even if I knew I wouldn’t get anything), the literary tshirts for children that I wished had been for adults, and finally ended up at the travel/ghost stories area.
Yes, I take photos of the inside of bookstores.
It turns out the Outer Banks is incredibly haunted. It may be one of the most haunted places I’ve been within America (I’ve also visited parts of England that are way more haunted).
As an aside: I worked in bookstores for 6 years and try to visit a bookstore everywhere I go. I love that (very reliably) the ghost stories and tales of the supernatural are in or next to the travel section. You will almost always find a book about local lore wherever you are.
Outer Banks atmosphere pics to set the spooky mood.
We visited the bookstore a few days into the trip after we had visited a few places already, including the Black Pelican restaurant. (Well, honestly, we hadn’t visited very many places. The first few days were lazy, as they should be.)
Another Lifesaving Station (not the Black Pelican), also probably haunted.
We encountered stories about this restaurant everywhere we went.
The history of the restaurant was written on the back of the menu – this was my first Black Pelican story (tldr; it’s haunted by a bird that saves lives).
Then, one of the first few chapters in the book dives into a tale about a superior officer resorting to violence to defend himself against false accusations from one of his men, and the subsequent vengeful hauntings. I tried to look up any validity online and found a lot of variations of the tale, all involving one man shooting another with a shotgun at close range for one reason or another.
Finally – everyone we talked to had a story about the Black Pelican since the building was used as Lifesaving Station (pre-Coast Guard) and evolved over time until eventually it was converted into the restaurant. It was fun to see that theme unfold throughout the week we were there.
If you don’t see the ghosts, you’re not looking hard enough.
The day after I started reading the book, my dad and I went to the Roanoke Island Festival Park where I learned more history about how Europeans came here and slaughtered, enslaved, or diseased anyone they found, thus contributing to the overall haunted feeling of the area.
From the museum at Roanoke Island Festival Park, all their faces show such expression!
Later that day the family did a wild horse tour in the dunes and learned about how the Corolla wild horses were pushed off a boat and those that survived eventually became the wild horses you see there today. The beach is haunted, not just with people, but also horses.
Horses.
To wrap up the trip I did my biennial trip on a small airplane to fly over the islands and see everything from above. Being on the tiny tourist planes gives me massive joy and can lift me out of depression immediately (if I were in one). It’s very refreshing but also very expensive so I can’t do it more often than once every other year.
On this tour we flew over a bunch of shipwrecks. Even though you can’t see them (we couldn’t see them from the plane, but the tour guide knew they were there), it’s still very spooky! So many of them are almost right up on the shore, which means that a ridiculous amount of people drowned super close to the beach.
There’s a shipwreck in the water somewhere in between the dock and the black airplane part.
I think I might be an OBX fan now. I bought a sticker with skeleton surfers for my car.
This experience ignited a desire to buy ghost books everywhere I go and make that one of my travel reads. It was a quick read (see: thirteen tales) so I was able to finish it beginning to end while on the trip. This was an interesting way to immerse myself in the “travel experience” beyond simply going to the beach and looking at the water. I felt connected with the area both through history and folklore, and it was fun sleeping so close to the beach after reading stories about all of the ghosts that were definitely out there.
Very scary.
Even Zenny knew it was haunted.