Isles of Shoals

The Isles of Shoals are a cluster of nine small islands and tidal ledges, about six miles off the coast, split between New Hampshire and Maine. Captain John Smith named them the Smith Isles in 1614, and English fishermen worked them through the seventeenth century. Thomas Morton was exiled there in 1628, the town of Appledore was incorporated in 1661, and the community on Star Island, called Gosport from 1715, lasted until residents were evacuated during the Revolutionary War. In the mid-1800s Thomas Laighton and Levi Thaxter opened a summer hotel on Appledore, and Laighton’s daughter, the poet Celia Thaxter, turned it into a gathering place for artists and writers including Childe Hassam. Today Star Island, run by the Star Island Corporation, is a conference center, while Appledore hosts a marine laboratory.

The islands’ folklore is as old as their settlements. Philip Babb, an early settler and constable reputed to have been a shipmate of Captain Kidd, is said to walk the shore near Babb’s Cove in an old frock coat. A woman in white pacing the shore of Smuttynose and White Island is described as the wife Blackbeard left behind who waits for him to return – though the pirate died in 1718, before the 1720 date given in the story. The ship Isadore, wrecked in 1842 with all hands, is reported to patrol the bays with sails that fill in dead air. Another legend gives White Island three apparitions: the lady in white, muffled cries said to herald storms, and the voice of Betty Moody, who is said to have hidden with a child from hostile Indians in a cave on Star Island – a story that even ghost-lore writers call far-fetched.

The real tragedy took place on Smuttynose. On the night of 5 March 1873, with the men away, Louis Wagner, a German-born fisherman who had once worked for the Hontvet family, reached the island and broke into the only occupied house. He killed two Norwegian immigrants, Karen Christensen and her sister-in-law Anethe Christensen. A third woman, Maren Hontvet, escaped and signalled for help from a neighbouring island. Wagner was caught in Boston and tried at Alfred, Maine, in June 1873. The jury needed less than an hour to convict him, and he was hanged at Thomaston, Maine, on 25 June 1875. Celia Thaxter published her account, “A Memorable Murder”, in the Atlantic Monthly, and later books and the novel The Weight of Water kept the story alive. Notably, the standard lists of island ghosts do not include the murdered women, and no sightings are tied to the case.

Star Island’s ghosts reached a wider audience in 2009, when the Syfy series Ghost Hunters investigated the island. The team reported banging from the museum vault at Vaughn Cottage and a door that shut with no draft, but traced other claims to ordinary causes – a thermal image of a figure was a wood panel, and moving furniture sounds came from rodents in the Oceanic Hotel attic. They concluded the island was haunted, especially around the museum. Visitors to the island today are guests at a religious conference center and often hear the stories during a stay.

Reports include a man in an old coat on the shore, a woman in white pacing the beach, a spectral ship with billowing sails, muffled women’s cries before storms, banging from a museum vault and a sense of small hands pushing people on cottage steps.

Star Island’s shoreline, Vaughn Cottage museum, Cottage E and the old Oceanic Hotel; White Island’s lighthouse; Smuttynose’s shore; and the bays around the group.

Celia Thaxter’s Among the Isles of Shoals, Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water and J. Dennis Robinson’s 2019 Mystery on the Isles of Shoals keep the islands in print, and the Syfy series Ghost Hunters visited Star Island in 2009. Ghost lore is part of the islands’ identity for conference guests and Portsmouth’s tour trade.