Legends and Lore
Prentice Pendleton and the Ghost Ship: The Dead Ship of Harpswell
The sea has always been hungry. Long before maps carved neat lines across its surface, sailors whispered about storms that rose without warning, walls of black sky collapsing in seconds. Waves that moved with intention. Shapes beneath the water too large to be fish and too patient to be accidents. The ocean did not simply kill. It chose. Maritime history is littered with these accounts. Crews vanishing mid-voyage. Ships returning broken, their decks intact but their people gone. No blood. No struggle. Just silence where voices should have been. The kind of silence that lingers in the wood long after the wind stops blowing. And then there are the ghost ships. Vessels sighted through fog that glide against the current, sails full though no wind touches them. Ships that appear close enough to hail, lanterns burning, rigging creaking, only to dissolve like breath on glass. Others are found adrift, perfectly seaworthy, meals still set on tables, lifeboats untouched… and not a single soul aboard. As if the sea reached up, plucked the crew away, and left the shell behind as a warning. The most famous of these is the Mary Celeste, discovered in 1872 drifting in the Azores. Cargo intact. Logbook unfinished. Personal belongings undisturbed. A ship frozen in the middle of an ordinary day, except for the absence of the living. Every theory since has tried to cage the mystery inside reason. Mutiny. Weather. Panic. Error. Each explanation closes one door and opens another darker one behind it. Because ghost ships are not just stories about what happens on the water. They are stories about what the water remembers. For centuries, sightings have persisted. Shapes on the horizon that refuse to behave like ships should. Hulls moving without sound. Crews that wave from the deck, faces pale, eyes empty, before fading into mist. Sailors who swear they saw them carry the memory like a scar, speaking of it only in low voices, as if afraid the sea might hear them telling. Maybe there are answers. Maybe there always have been. But the ocean is vast enough to keep secrets, and old enough to enjoy keeping them. And sometimes it is more unsettling, and far more honest, to let the legends stand as they are. Because out there, beyond the reach of land and light, something is still sailing. And it does not need a crew. Click below to find out the true story of the Ghost Ship of Capron Bay!
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Prentice Pendleton and the Boo Hags: Don't let the Hag Ride Ya
The dead wear many faces. In stories told across the world, two of them stand above the rest. The vampire — elegant, patient, eternal — drinks life one heartbeat at a time. The zombie — hollow, ravenous, unstoppable — devours the living in endless hunger. These creatures dominate our nightmares because they are familiar fears: disease, death, and the slow loss of humanity. But there is another thing. Older. Quieter. Far more personal. In the marshlands and pine shadows of the Carolinas, there are warnings passed down in low voices. Doors are locked not just to keep strangers out — but to keep something from slipping in. Elders tell children never to leave shoes by the bed. Never to sleep with a window cracked open. Never to ignore the feeling that someone is standing in the room when the air suddenly grows heavy. Because that is how you know a Boo Hag is near. The Boo Hag does not crash through doors. It does not howl or stagger through the streets. It arrives silently, sliding through keyholes, crawling through cracks in the night. It is not hungry for blood or flesh. It is hungry for you. While you sleep, it presses down on your chest, drinking your breath, draining your strength. By morning you wake exhausted, marked by scratches you cannot explain, your skin burning as if something wore it and put it back wrong. And that is the truth buried inside the legend. A Boo Hag does not simply attack. It steals your skin. It wears your face. Walks in your body. Moves through the world as you while your spirit lies trapped and fading. No one notices. No one suspects. You smile with its mouth. You speak with its voice. And somewhere inside, you are screaming. The people of the Carolinas say these creatures have always been here — older than the roads, older than the towns, older than the names on the land. They are not as famous as vampires. They do not march in hordes like zombies. They do not need to. They hunt one at a time. And if you wake in the night unable to move… if you feel a weight pressing down… if your breath comes shallow and your body feels borrowed… listen carefully. You may not be alone inside your skin.
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Prentice Pendleton: Little Rhody's Legendary Blood Sucker!
The shadow behind The Haunting of the Minuteman Cemetery reaches back to a real fear that once gripped New England — a fear born not from monsters, but from grief. In the late nineteenth century, sickness crept through small towns like a silent predator. Families wasted away slowly, coughing blood, growing pale, their bodies shrinking day by day. People called the disease consumption, because it seemed to devour its victims from the inside. We now know it as tuberculosis. At the time, no one understood it. They only understood the pattern: It never seemed to take just one. In the Brown family of Rhode Island, death came again and again. Mercy Brown watched her relatives fade, one by one, until she too succumbed. When she died in 1892, she was buried in the frozen ground of winter. But the dying did not stop. Another family member grew ill. Then another. The town began to whisper. New England was deep in the grip of what historians would later call a vampire panic. In isolated communities, where science had not yet outrun superstition, people searched for explanations that matched the horror they were living through. They believed something among the dead was feeding on the living. And Mercy, young and newly buried, became the center of their fear. The only cure, they believed, was to confront the grave. So they dug her up. In the bitter cold, townsfolk opened Mercy Brown’s coffin expecting decay — the natural proof that death had done its work. Instead, they found her body eerily preserved. Her skin had not collapsed. Her features were recognizable. To frightened eyes, it looked as if she had not accepted death at all. To them, this was confirmation. They believed Mercy was a vampire, stealing life from her own bloodline. In an act meant to save the living, her heart was removed and burned, the ashes mixed into a tonic for the sick — a desperate ritual born from terror and love intertwined. Today we understand what they did not: winter burial can preserve a body. Tuberculosis spreads through the air, not through the dead. But knowledge does not erase the emotional truth of that moment — a community so frightened of losing everyone it loved that it turned to the grave for answers. The story of Mercy Brown survived because it sits at the crossroads of history and myth. It is not a tale of monsters rising from coffins. It is a story about what humans do when grief demands an enemy, and science has not yet given one a name. And in the quiet of old cemeteries, where stones lean and dates blur with time, it is easy to imagine how such fear could awaken something darker. Something waiting for belief to give it shape. That is where the haunting begins.
Learn MoreUnited States of Scare: The Gamecock Creeper
In the exciting tale of the “Gamecock Creeper,” twelve-year-old twins Finn and Sloan Dunne uncover the legendary Three-Eyed Man lurking beneath the University of South Carolina. Their father, a new professor at the university, unknowingly brings his family close to the creature’s lair within the ancient steam tunnels. One evening, the creature follows the twins home and abducts their beloved Golden Retriever puppy, Goldy. Despite their earnest pleas, the twins’ story of the Three-Eyed Man is met with disbelief, leaving them no choice but to embark on a daring rescue mission. Armed with courage and accompanied by their new friend Lacey, the twins navigate the labyrinthine tunnels beneath the campus. They confront the Gamecock Creeper. Will they outwit its cunning traps, and finally reunite with Goldy? The adventure strengthens the bond between the twins and Lacey. Will they emerge as heroes? Are people at the university serving as guardians of one of the university’s most chilling secrets? Whatever happens, the twin's act of bravery spreads, turning the legend of the Gamecock Creeper into a tale of triumph over fear.
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United States of Scare: The Witching Tree of Smithfield
There is a road in Smithfield where the pavement refuses to forget what stands beneath it. Drivers slow without meaning to. Headlights dim for a breath. And in the center of a lonely three-way intersection stands a dead tree that should not still be there. It is older than the asphalt around it. Older than the lines painted to guide traffic. The town built the road around the trunk instead of cutting it down — and no one agrees on why. Some say the chainsaws broke. Some say the workers refused to finish the job. Others say the tree was never meant to be touched. Because something is buried beneath its roots. Local legend calls her a witch. Not the storybook kind with hats and broomsticks, but the older kind — the kind whispered about in colonial towns where fear traveled faster than truth. The tale says she was buried standing upright, trapped beneath the earth with her back against the tree, sealed there to keep her from walking again. The tree died. She didn’t. The ritual tied her to that patch of road. Bound her to the crossroads, where choices are made and spirits linger. And like all crossroads, it became a place where the barrier between the living and the dead thinned just enough to feel… flexible. Teenagers test the legend every generation. They park their cars at night. Engines off. Lights out. One of them steps into the road and circles the tree three times. No one agrees on what happens next — only that something always does. Some say the air drops twenty degrees. Some hear breathing that isn’t their own. Others swear the bark of the tree twitches like skin trying to move. And if the circling is finished… she notices. Witnesses who ran claim they heard footsteps behind them that didn’t match their own. Fast. Bare. Closing the distance. They say the only safe place is the abandoned house up the street — a structure locals refuse to approach after dark. Doors rot open. Windows stare like empty sockets. And yet, according to the legend, crossing that threshold is the only thing that makes her stop. Because she cannot enter. She can chase. She can scream. But she cannot cross the door. Every town has a place people joke about in daylight and avoid at night. In Smithfield, the tree still stands in the road, traffic bending around it like water around a stone. No plaque explains it. No official record mentions the burial. But locals know. You don’t circle the tree. And if you do… you don’t stop running.
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