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immediately pushed into me waiei dllU JUlll^u uiyuux u. Their rowing pace would have won an Olympic medal.
Once a safe distance from the island, the men exchanged descriptions of what they saw in the light of the camp fire. And they both agreed: It was a headless skeleton.
Although this story dates to the mid-19th century, many men since then have claimed they had run-ins with the headless apparition, variously described as a skeleton and a ghost. In search of an explanation, many of them have settled on an old pirate legend to explain the skeleton’s appearance.
.There was a time when pirates used Mississippi’s many inlets and islands for hiding places. One particular pirate captain unloaded his booty into a longboat and rowed to Deer Island where his men dug a deep hole. Once the deed was done, the captain shouted, “Now, who wants to guard this treasure?”
A novice pirate, wanting to please his new boss, immediately spoke up. He did not know such volunteerism meant death, and before he finished his sentence, his head was lopped off with a cutlass.
And so his spirit guards the treasure to this day.
The Blond-Headed Ghost of Saucier
Lynnie Mason took her children outside to play, admonishing them not not go indoors without her permission. When she heard a chair scrape across the kitchen floor, she immediately ran inside. The sound indicated someone was trying to get into the “goodies” jar above the refrigerator.
No one was there. The chair was by the refrigerator, but everyone was outside where they were supposed to be.
That isn’t the only time Mrs. Mason, who lives on Hickman Road in Saucier, has faced the unexplained. She has seen doorknobs giggle with no one around to move them and she has heard a childish raking of a stick across the furnace grate. They are not the tricks of her five children.
She believes a long-dead, little blond-haired girl is behind it all. The neighbors claim to have seen her and so have her two ex-husbands. “I’d like to find out who she is, ” Mrs. Mason confesses. “Everyone just calls her ‘the little Jones girl.’ ”
Mrs. Mason has noticed that the little girl mostly pulls her pranks when something big or exciting happens to the family.
“She just does childish things, you know, like the kind my own kids would do,” she says. “I wonder about her. The story you hear around here is that she was an abused child who died under mysterious circumstances.”
When Mrs. Mason bought her land in 1976, there was an abandoned house on the adjacent property. A neighbor told her that a little blond-headed girl sometimes jumped off the porch and disappeared. The house since has been tom down, but there are still sightings of the girl ghost, who apparently likes to visit neighbors.
The Ethereal Harpist of Pass Christian
In the 1850s, the young and beautiful Julia Vinesto fled revolution-wracked Uruguay with her wealthy husband. They booked passage on a boat bound to New Orleans, and during the long, boring voyage Julia succumbed to the charms of the boat’s captain.
Captain Hawes had the youth Julia’s aged husband lacked, though even that could not assuage her feelings of
became worried when Julia asKea nun 10 COIUC&S IU3 ouio to a priest for forgiveness. He became afraid that she would talk, so instead of bringing the ship into the port of New Orleans, he anchored off Pass Christian. That night, the townsfolk saw a glowing light, and realized a ship was on fire. They launched rowboats to rescue passengers, but before they reached the vessel there was a terrific explosion. The would-be rescuers returned with no survivors, but reports of hearing hauntingly beautiful sounds of a harp playing old Portuguese love songs.
The next morning, the captain and four crewmen appeared on shore, claiming they had escaped the blaze. Hawes bought a house facing the Gulf and soon he became one of the most popular men in the area. Life went quite well for him until one of his crewmen, who was dying of yellow fever, confessed the murder of the passengers to a doctor.
When Hawes realized his secret was out, he went to an old oak tree on the shoreline and began to dig. The doctor and two of his friends were watching from the brush when they became conscious of the squeak of rusty oarlocks and harp music.
Hawes looked up as the rowboat approached the shore. When he saw it was manned by four skeletons and a ghostly young woman playing a harp, he fell forward in shock and lethally struck his head on the chest he had just uncovered. In one hand he clutched a few gold coins, but the chest was empty.
And when the wind is just right off the Pass Christian beach, the haunting melodies of a harp mingle with the lapping sound of waves and the rustling of the Gulf breeze.
The Ghostly Canine of Northeast Gulfport
There “it” was again, and after the sixth sighting V.D. Coleman was certain his eyes were not playing tricks. The white apparition that looked like a dog darted away, so Colemen and his friend Wallace River took after him. They ran north for a quarter of a mile, but stopped abruptly when they realized the phantom dog had reached its destination.
The dog sat under a big oak tree near Handsboro Road. Both the men had carried guns and when young Rever raised his to shoot, a mysterious groan filled the night air. Coleman forbade his friend to pull the trigger.
The white dog had first appeared two weeks earlier as Mrs. Coleman and some of her friends waited for V.D. to return from a fishing trip. She spotted it across the street from their home, which was near the old Gum Carbo School in northeast Gulfport. She pointed him out to her friends, and one of them who had a large dog tried to sic it on the white intruder. Instead, it whimpered and crawled under the house where it remained hidden for the next day and a half. The phantom dashed away.	w
At least 30 people reported sighting the apparition in September 1922, and several had attempted its capture. Always, the white dog disappeared into the night.
“It is evident that the persons who have made statements are in dead earnest about what they say concerning the mysterious appearance,” The Daily Herald reported that month. “There is no doubt but that they have seen something. ”
But what was it?
The thing was described as “a large white dog, the exact form of the dog being not very clearly marked. ” Two possible explanations for its appearance were given at the time. One was that the phantom canine watched over a treasure buried by the notorious Copeland clan, which had terrorized and pillaged South Mississippi during the 1830s and 1840s. Others believed it was the companion of an old