When the Ghost Screams(44)

While natural disasters can be blamed on no one but a higher power, almost every other type of accident is the fault of someone. Often it is the victim himself. Other times it is a well-meaning person who made an unforgettable mistake.

I grew up beside one big, beautiful accident waiting to happen. Puget Sound was so near my home that on stormy days when the waves grew wild, the salty water splattered on our windows. When the sky churned, the waves turned a smoldering green as they rushed to crash upon the rocky beach.

On the days when Puget Sound shimmered blue, each white-ruffled wave glinted in the sunshine. Still, it was cold. At fifty-five degrees in the summer, the chill can cause a person to succumb to fatal hypothermia in five minutes.

I saw that as a challenge and was determined to swim to the lighthouse on Maury Island, two and half miles across the sound from my home. As a teenager, I thought of myself as a tough girl who could walk barefooted across barnacle-covered rocks without flinching. I’d done it so often that I had hardened the soles of my feet until they were thick and leathery.

Just as my feet could learn to take the sharp barnacles, my body could adapt to the cold. At age twenty, I acclimatized myself to the icy water by swimming in it daily, adding a few minutes each session until I could remain immersed for over two hours.

I planned my swim for the afternoon of a new moon, when the tide was the calmest. I coated myself with vegetable shortening to seal in body heat, and with two boats by my side, swam across the sound. Not a fast swimmer, it took me two hours and twenty minutes.

Though I was prepared, the average person is not.

While many people who live on Puget Sound wade into the waves on hot summer days, only the hardiest fully immerse themselves in the frigid water.

One poor soul took an unexpected dunk many decades ago and now lives on as a ghost of Puget Sound. I learned about him while my mother and I were signing books.

A woman came through the line and told us of an eerie encounter.

Years before, she and her husband had ventured out in a rowboat, and as they neared the shore of Maury Island, a storm hit, and the water grew wild. They were tossed about as they tried to avoid the big, jagged rocks. Cold water splashed into their boat, and they feared they would sink.

Suddenly, a fisherman appeared, wading toward them. “He grabbed the boat and pulled us in,” the woman confided.

Once ashore, the man left so hurriedly that they did not see him go. Puzzled, the couple headed up a path to a small store. When they told the cashier about the mysterious man who had saved them, she was skeptical. “She told us that that part of the beach was deserted, and she had never known anyone like the old man we described.”

They mulled over their experience. It had had a surreal quality to it. He had appeared and disappeared so quickly, it was as if he was a ghost.

A ghost.

They were not prone to fanciful notions, yet they felt in their bones that they had met a ghost.

After the woman finished her account, I turned to my mother and said, “I wonder who he was. I don’t remember a fisherman dying out there.”

“Don’t you remember?” my mother exclaimed. “It was one of your Grandma Doris’s favorite stories!”

Doris Rule, my father’s mother, had lived on the beach many years before. I didn’t recall the story, but my mother did.

Sometime back in the 1940s, a fisherman had regularly fished in the waters between our beach and Maury Island. An obese woman began to pester him for a ride in his rowboat. He politely turned her down, but she kept asking until one day he gave in.

Unfortunately, the woman was so big that she tipped over the boat. The fisherman and his passenger were suddenly bobbing in the chill water. The woman’s fat saved her life. It provided extra insulation and protected her from the cold.

But the fisherman quickly turned blue and was in the fatal grips of hypothermia before rescuers could reach him.

While I cannot be certain that the helpful mystery man who saved the couple was the spirit of the dead fisherman, it makes sense that he was. It was as if he were on a mission to save others from his icy fate.

Here are some more accounts of accident victims who remain earthbound.





Sunday Drive


Sometimes it is the smallest action that determines our fate. It can be something as simple as lingering over a second cup of coffee, forgetting to return a phone call, or passing another car on the road.

Normally not life or death decisions, we usually do not give these small acts a second thought. But when such a little thing prolongs our lives or brings swift death, we never forget them. It was Sunday, February 24, 1946 when Elmer Lawson of Charleston, South Carolina, made an unforgettable choice that irrevocably altered the lives of eight people and left a macabre apparition behind.