Ocean-Born Mary House

Mary Wilson was born at sea on July 28, 1720 (some accounts give July 26), aboard a ship carrying Scots-Irish emigrants from Ulster to New England. The family story, told for generations in Londonderry, New Hampshire, says pirates boarded the ship and planned to kill everyone aboard, until the captain heard the newborn cry. He spared the passengers on condition that the baby be named Mary, after his mother, and left a bolt of green brocade silk for her wedding dress. Historians who have studied the episode think the core is likely true, even if the details have grown: pirates boarded, Elizabeth Wilson gave birth early under the strain, and the captain let the ship go and left gifts.

“Ocean-Born Mary” grew up in Londonderry, married James Wallace in 1742 – in the green silk, the story goes – and raised four sons and a daughter. After her husband’s death she moved in 1798 to Henniker to live with her son William, and she died there on February 13, 1814, aged 93. She is buried in the cemetery behind Henniker’s town offices, and scraps of the famous silk survive in collections in Londonderry, Henniker and Concord, including the New Hampshire Historical Society.

The ghost came much later, and to a different house. Mary never lived in the house built in the 1760s by her son Robert Wallace. In 1917 it was bought by Louis “Gus” Roy, who, with his family, spun a new legend: the pirate captain had followed Mary to Henniker, lived with her, was murdered there and buried with his treasure beneath the hearthstone – and a tall, red-haired ghost, Mary herself, now guarded it. Roy charged for tours and even rented shovels so visitors could dig for pirate gold in the yard. The story spread through newspapers and ghost books, and curious visitors kept turning up at the door for decades.

Local historians and townspeople regard the haunting as invented. No treasure or human remains have ever been found at either Wallace house, and William’s house, where Mary actually spent her last years, became the town poor farm and burned in 1923. The Robert Wallace house remains a private residence; it is not open to visitors, and the place to pay respects to Mary is her grave in town.

Promoters claimed a tall, red-haired woman in colonial dress walked the house and grounds and guarded buried pirate gold; later visitors added footsteps and cold spots. Almost all accounts trace back to the Roy family’s promotion.

The Robert Wallace house outside Henniker (a private home) and its yard, especially the hearth.

The legend inspired Lois Lenski’s 1939 children’s novel Ocean-Born Mary, the folk song “Ocean-Born Mary” by Neptune’s Car, and chapters in many New England ghost books; historian Jeremy D’Entremont’s Ocean-Born Mary: The Truth Behind a New Hampshire Legend separates fact from fiction. Pieces of her wedding silk are prized museum objects.