I decided to hop on the ‘haunted homelands’ bandwagon this time around, as several other posters did before me. My subject is the U.S. state of North Carolina. Although I no longer live there, it’s a special place to me. I still visit there occasionally, mostly at towns on the islands of the Outer Banks, which are the setting of the Storm Ketchum Adventures and Tales I’ve written as Garrett Dennis.

When I lived there, I learned that this state has its share of hauntings and mysteries – which began right from the get-go. The English first attempted to settle there at a fort built in 1585 on then-inhospitable Roanoke Island. In 1587, a group of permanent colonists was brought to the fort. Their ship then sailed back to England for more supplies, intending to return as soon as possible; but the return trip was delayed by England’s run-in with the Spanish Armada in 1588. When the ship finally returned in 1590, the colony was found to have been abandoned. There was neither hide nor hair of any of the 118 settlers except for a cryptic clue carved into a gatepost at the fort – the word ‘CROATOAN’. Did the colonists migrate inland to avoid starvation? Were they massacred at the fort by the Spanish, or by Indigenous Americans either there or at some other location? Or did they move to neighboring Hatteras Island and assimilate with a native tribe there who lived in a village that may have been named ‘Croatoan’ in their language? Over the centuries, evidence has been uncovered to support a number of theories, but no one knows for sure what happened to those colonists; and thus was born the legend of ‘The Lost Colony’. Today, the remains of Fort Raleigh in the town of Manteo on Roanoke Island are said to be haunted by the ghost of colonist Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the New World.

There’s an abundance of other North Carolinian mysteries as well. These include the Brown Mountain Lights (Aliens? Ghosts? Marsh gas?); the Great Dismal Swamp (haunted by sounds, lights, and ghosts of runaway slaves who once hid there); Lydia’s Bridge (with its phantom hitchhiker, a girl killed there in a car crash on Prom Night); the Valle Crucis Demon Dog (which chases cars); the French Broad River Siren (who lures men to the water and drowns them); the Moon-Eyed People (nocturnal cave dwellers); the Grove Park Inn’s Pink Lady (who fell to her death from the fifth floor and now plays with the child guests); Crybaby Lane (the site of a burned orphanage, now featuring phantom smoke and children’s cries); Chimney Rock (winged apparitions); Teach’s Hole (the site of the famous pirate Blackbeard’s demise, where his body swims in search of its head); the Maco Lights (the ghost of a train conductor who lost his head while waving a light to try to prevent a train wreck); the Biltmore Pool (ghostly pool parties at the Vanderbilt vacation mansion); the Bladenboro Beast (an alleged vampiric monster)…

And my personal favorite, ‘The Devil’s Tramping Ground’, which is a circular path in the Chatham County woods. The circle is forty feet in diameter, and no plants will grow within it except for a small clump of wiry grass in the center of the circle, despite all sorts of vegetation thriving nearby outside the circle. It is said that the Devil paces the path at night while contemplating evil deeds, trampling and killing anything that might try to sprout under his feet. Supposedly, if something is left inside the circle overnight, it will be thrown out and found outside the circle the next day; dogs will whine and refuse to enter it; compasses don’t work correctly inside the circle; and people who have tried to spend the night there have reported odd sounds and occurrences. The odd, wiry grass in the center of the circle supposedly won’t grow anywhere else when transplanted, and attempts at new plantings within the circle don’t succeed; but soil analysis has uncovered no reason why plants won’t grow within it.

Why did I single out this ‘haunt’? Well, when I rolled out a sleeping bag and tried to spend the night there one time, some invisible presence stepped on me, laughed demonically, and dragged me out of the circle; and I’ve never been quite the same since… Just kidding! Actually, I’m somewhat of a Lost Colony buff, and there’s an intriguing connection between that failed coastal colony and this barren inland circle – which is that the circle lies in an area that may have once been called ‘Croatoan’. Did the lost colonists migrate to that location? And did something happen to them at that spooky spot?

I guess it also interests me because this particular haunt is ‘grounded’ in science (pun not unintended; intend your puns, you cowards!) – yet scientific analysis has failed to solve the mystery. And like the comedian Dana Carvey’s ‘Church Lady’ character on Saturday Night Live, that makes me go, “Hmm, could it be… SATAN?!” 😊