In 1980, in late September I and my wife stayed at the hotel 1661 INN at Old Harbor on Block Island for a week to celebrate our honeymoon.
We enjoyed an island off season, almost totally bereft of tourists from the mainland and watched an island gear down from summer, closing up in preparation for the winter.
Only bird watchers clubs frequented the island then, and the weather, windy, cold, blustery and rainy, added to our desire to stay close to the inn and in each other’s close company.
One especially stormy and windy evening at ten o’clock in the evening, I went out to the backyard of the inn tacitly to watch the view of whitecaps roiling on Old Harbor, and to socialize with a pair of goats, that roamed freely on the property.
Out on the harbor, about a quarter of a mile from the shore among the rolling whitecaps, I saw a large flickering, blue triangular light that vanished and then reappeared a short distance from where it had been.
At first glance, it looked like the angular sail and mast of a middle sized sailing craft, a craft in distress that struggled to make headway in the stormy waters, except that the sail radiated a surreal phosphorescent light and glow that ebbed and waned like a dying flame .
The bluish sail color glowed and turned to a purplish light and then vanished completely only to reappear another distance from where it was sighted.
I watched in more wonder as its shifting movements seemed to make it jump from one location to another location every few seconds; its odd flickering flame like nature, in tall triangular form, was something I’d never seen before.
It vanished completely after a few minutes among the stormy waves as though it had sunk.
The image of that strange vessel has haunted my memory for many years.
Not until recently, many years later, having read “Livermore’s History of Block Island”, did I realize that the book’s description of an oddly lit and shifting Palatine Ghost Ship often seen off Block Island, was similar to what I caught and observed. that windy white capped and rain swept evening.
(from Wikipedia)-
“The Palatine Light is an apparition reported near Block Island, Rhode Island, said to be the ghost ship of a lost 18th-century vessel named the Palatine.
The folklore account is based on the historical wreck of the Princess Augusta in 1738, which became known as the Palatine in 19th-century accounts, including John Greenleaf Whittier‘s poem “The Palatine”.
The legend derives from a historical incident: the shipwreck of the Princess Augusta at Block Island in 1738.
The ship is known from some near-contemporary accounts and from depositions taken from the surviving crew after the wreck, which were discovered in 1925 and reprinted in 1939.
The Augusta, a 220-ton British ship, sailed from Rotterdam in August 1738 under Captain George Long and a crew of fourteen, transporting 240 immigrants to the United States.
The passengers were German Palatines, natives of the Palatinate region, and as such the ship was described as the “Palatine (ship)” in contemporary documents, which accounts for the later confusion over its name.
The ship was heading for Philadelphia; from there the passengers may have intended to reach a German-owned settlement on the James River in Virginia, which attracted some 3000 of their countrymen.
The Princess Augusta’s voyage was beset by terrible luck; the water supply was contaminated, causing a “fever and flux” that killed two hundred of the passengers and half the crew, including Captain Long.
First mate Andrew Brook took command as severe storms pushed the ship off course to the north, where the survivors spent three months enduring extreme weather and depleting stores.
According to the crew’s depositions, Brook forced the passengers to pay for the remaining rations.
He evidently tried and failed different routes to Rhode Island and Philadelphia, but the gales pushed the damaged and leaking Augusta to Block Island.
Amid a snowstorm, it wrecked at Sandy Point on the island’s northernmost end at 2 p.m. December 27, 1738.”
Lost in time, it echoes like a broken record, repeating its angst and sorrow.
Ghost hunting is sad to me, for it does not offer direct help to a trapped, lost, wandering ghost, its evidence merely collected, but a haunting is nonetheless still most astonishing, self-affirming that we are, forever, more than our bodies.
For we step out of our bodies, as we step out of our cars, and of our clothing, for we are not our bodies, any more than we are our clothing, or our cars.
But the thought of lost, trapped ghosts, whose angst lives on, dwelling in the world of mind, the promise of Heaven, deferred, is sad beyond measure.
I believe, as with other ghostly manifestations, that the combined terror, angst and emotional turmoil aboard that ill-fated ship, scarred and templates the environment to retain its “memory”, a ghostly impression, for that ghostly sailing ship is seen only by those on Block Island, and nowhere else, at other locales along coastal Rhode Island.
This refutes my logical conjecture of ocean bottom methane gas ignited, then shifting and jumping, as a possible causation, because if it were such, this ghostly sight would be prevalent at other nearby coastal locales as well, and it clearly is not.
The Palatine ghost ship vanished completely, after a few minutes, among the stormy waves, as though it had sunk, but
the image of that strange vessel, on that stormy night, seared into my mind, has haunted my memory, every so often, for years .
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