An Edenton Haunting
Told for true along the Beaufort waterfront, June 2016
“Shouldn’t we get out of this place?”
A game of 8-ball was underway on the middle table of the Royal James in Beaufort, and Joe and Mary Grady Norkus sat at the end of the bar, drinking a beer and watching. After a spell, Mary called me over – we had not seen each other in many a year – and soon Joe said he had a tale for me.
Joe and Mary had been married for a couple of years, and they drove down east to spend a gray, chilly Halloween weekend at the Rose of Tillery Inn, a bed and breakfast in Edenton with an Irishwoman as its innkeeper. She checked them in – they were the only guests at the Inn that night and the next — and led them upstairs to “the Captain’s Room,” all B&B rooms seeming by some invisible statute to be required to have names in keeping with the family history of the home or something in the local culture.
The second night — Halloween — after walking around the small port town, gazing at the wrought-iron railings of its antique downtown homes and at all the amusing, if ghoulishly-carved, jack-o-lanterns on those old homes’ porches, the couple retired about ten o’clock. Sometime well after midnight, Joe awoke abruptly when he heard their room’s door open, that sound followed by heavy footsteps upon the wooden floor.
Sometime well after midnight, Joe awoke abruptly when he heard their room’s door open, that sound followed by heavy footsteps upon the wooden floor…
Enough ambient light fell into the room from a security lamp outside for him to have seen whoever it was that had entered, yet Joe saw nothing. The footsteps strode over to the bathroom door, which opened, and moments later came the sound of the commode flushing, after which the footsteps reversed order, came out of the bathroom and crossed the bedroom. The door to the hall opened, then closed, and there was an end to it. Mary had awakened in the midst of the incident, heard as much and seen as little as Joe, and she then asked him, “Should we check out of here?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “Did whatever that was hurt us? We should just go back to sleep.”
Which they did.
Till along about three-thirty, when Joe woke up and this time saw the white, spectral image of a woman with an old-fashioned double-bun in her hair — she was sitting on the mattress at the end of the bed, just looking at them. He awakened Mary, who immediately saw the woman’s image, too, and they stared at the specter — and she at them — till after a quarter hour or so she slowly dissolved before their eyes and disappeared.
Again Mary asked Joe, “Shouldn’t we get out of this place?”
“We’re not going to drive back to Raleigh at 3:30 in the morning, Mary,” he said. “Let’s just get some sleep and maybe nothing else’ll happen.”
And nothing did.
They went down for breakfast early, finding the Irishwoman up ahead of them, busily trying to get a breakfast together for them, but having quite a hard time of it. “She was clearly nervous, agitated, and she kept dropping things, a spatula, a big knife, and clattering pots and pans together, so we said, ‘Hey, can we help?’ to which the woman replied: ‘No, no — did you all notice anything strange last night?’”
Joe slowly answered “Yes,” and then described the incident of the doors and the footsteps and the flushing.
“That was the Captain,” the Irishwoman said. “He was very proud of the plumbing in this place — he was a rumrunner, bought the best there was, and he was showing it off for you.”
“That was the Captain,” the Irishwoman said. “He was very proud of the plumbing in this place – he was a rumrunner, bought the best there was, and he was showing it off for you.”
Joe next told her of the woman who had sat at the foot of the bed regarding them. “Who was she?”
“That was the Captain’s wife! His boat, an old sub-chaser, went down in a hurricane off Ocracoke back in the ’20s, and she’s still here, still looking for him.”
The amalgam of the two spectral incidents, however explained, and the over-anxious innkeeper were enough to propel the Norkuses quickly away from the Rose of Tillery (before having any breakfast, though not before the innkeeper’s big black cat slowly crossed their path as they came out onto the front porch to leave), and they returned from Edenton up to Raleigh that All Hallow’s Day with what they thought was plenty of a tale to tell.
Yet early the next day, Joe Norkus got a call at work from the Sheriff of Chowan County, who said he had picked up Joe’s name and number from the Rose of Tillery’s guest ledger. “Say, did you happen to notice anything out of the ordinary while you were staying there?” the Sheriff asked.
“There was no sign of foul play,” said the Chowan sheriff, “but we found her yesterday, lying amongst pots and pans, a knife sharpener and a broken casserole dish, there on the kitchen floor, dead.”
Joe, holding back about the specters, began by telling him of the innkeeper’s startling anxiety on Sunday morning, her dropping utensils and seeming acutely disoriented as she went about breakfast preparations. “Why?”
“There was no sign of foul play,” said the Chowan sheriff, “but we found her yesterday, lying amongst pots and pans, a knife sharpener and a broken casserole dish, there on the kitchen floor, dead.”
“Dead?”
“Stone cold dead. So how about lettin’ me know if you think of anything else?”
After a several-seconds pause, Joe said, “Well, there was another couple, who showed up very late Halloween night.”
“They weren’t signed in,” the Sheriff replied.
“They wouldn’t be,” Joe said, an unheard whisper.
“And there was no car on the street or ’round back, just the innkeeper’s. What did you make of them at breakfast?”
“We left early,” said Joe, “so we never saw them. We got a feeling the innkeeper knew exactly who they were, though. Maybe they came to the Inn in . . . an odd way.”
“If only she could tell us more about them,” said the Sheriff.
“Yes,” Joe said. “If only she could.”
More from Bland Simpson in Coastwatch
“Public Trust: A Fisherman Challenged at Rich Inlet”
“This Wet and Water Loving Land”
lead photo credit: Adobe Stock.
