Mysteries of the missing

by Edward H. Smith

Headless horsemen and other strange ghostly figures march nightly on the beach at Nag’s Head. For more than two years these shades and spectres have been seen and Coast Guardsman Steve Basnight has been trying vainly to convince his fellows. They have laughed upon him with sepulchral laughter, as though the dead enjoyed their mirth. They have chided him as a seer of visions, a mad hallucinant.

But now there are others who have seen and fled. Mrs. Alice Grice, passing the lonely sands in her motor, had trouble with the engine and saw or thought she saw a man standing there, brooding across the waters. She called to him and he, as one shaken from some immortal reverie, moved slowly off, turning not, nor seeming quite to walk, but floating into the fog, silent and serene.

Some scoffers have suggested that these be but smugglers or rum runners, enlarged in the spume by the eyes of terror. But that cannot be so, for the coast guard is staunch and active. This is no ordinary visitor, no thing of flesh and blood. This is some grieved and restless spirit, risen through a transcendence of his grave and come to haunt this wild and forlorn region.

George Midgett, long a scoffer, has seen this uncharnelled being most closely and accurately. It is a tall, great man, clad in purest white, strolling along the beach in the full moonlight, which is no clearer than the sad and dreaming face.

It is Aaron Burr. And he is seeking his lost daughter, whose wrecked ship is believed by many to have been driven ashore at this point.

So much for the lasting charm of doubt, since I take my substance here, and most of my mystery, from the New York World of June 9, 1927, contained in a dispatch from Manteo, N. C., bearing the date of the previous day—one hundred and fifteen years after the happening.

But if we see Aaron Burr ghostwalking in the moonlight as once he trod in the tortured flesh at the Battery, looking out upon those bitter waters that denied him hope, or if we believe, with many writers, that he fell upon his knees and cried out, “By this blow I am severed from the human race!” we are still not much nearer to the pathos or the mystery of that old incident in 1812, when Theodosia Burr set out for New York by sea and never reached it.

“By and by,” says Parton in his “The Life and Times of Aaron Burr,” “some idle tales were started in the newspapers, that the Patriot had been captured by pirates and all on board murdered except Theodosia, who was carried on shore as a captive.”

Idle tales they may have been, but their vitality has outlived the pathetic facts. Indeed, unless probability be false and romance true, “the most brilliant woman of her day in America” perished at sea a little more than a hundred and fifteen years ago, caught off the Virginia Capes in a hurricane that scattered the British war fleet and crushed the “miserable little pilot boat” that was trying to bear her to New York. In that more than a century of intervening time, however, a tradition of doubt has clouded itself about the quietus of Aaron Burr’s celebrated daughter which puts her story immovably upon the roster of the great mysteries of disappearance. The various accounts of piratical atrocities connected with her death may be fanciful or even studiedly fictive, but even this realization does nothing to dispel the fog.

Theodosia Burr was born in New York in 1783 and educated under the unflagging solicitude and careful personal direction of her distinguished father, who wanted her to be, as he testifies in his letters, the equal of any woman on earth. To this enlightened training the precious girl responded with notable spirit and intellectual acquisitiveness, mastering French as a child and becoming proficient in Latin and Greek before she was adolescent. At fourteen, her mother having died some years earlier, she was already mistress of the house of the New York senator and a figure in the best political society of the times. As a slip of a girl she played hostess to Volney, Talleyrand, Jerome Bonaparte and numberless other notables, and bore, in addition to her repute as a bluestocking, the name of a most beautiful and charming young woman. Something of her quality may be read from her numerous extant letters, two of which are quoted below.