Summers in my childhood were often spent in the Outer Banks of North Carolina. In my mid-teenage years, my family moved there permanently, viewing the small, local towns as being more conducive to raising a healthy, well-minded youth than the larger towns or cities. It was not until I moved there as a teenager, and established budding friendships, that I learned of the Cora tree.
There is quite a legend tied to this lone tree in the Brigand’s Bay area of Frisco, North Carolina.
As a child, our summer house was within a five minute walk of the tree, yet I never knew the tale of it. When we moved to Frisco for good, it was in a different area of the Bay community, farther from the tree; which, according to local legend, was to be the execution site of a “witch” named Cora.
Reportedly, the “witch” lived in the area with a baby, some legends state that it was her child, others are not specific on the details. Both were considered strange by the local population, for they were not of resident bloodlines. Quite a few members of the population of the Outer Banks island chain ended up there after shipwrecks, so new people were not unusual; but there were certain living expectations by the people who lived there. Of those expectations, which were fitting for the time, young, unmarried women did not live alone, separated from the village.
As was typical of certain time periods in history, in this case the early 1700s, when odd things began to happen in the villages, for example someone getting sick, blame fell on the outcast. At the time of the odd occurrences in Frisco, a ship captain was stranded on the island because his ship had floundered. Oddly enough, or perhaps not so strange when considering the story here, the ship’s captain was from Salem, Massachusetts. Though there was no evidence that Cora had anything to do with the strange happenings on the island, the locals and the captain suspected her. Matters came to a climax when the body of a young man was found washed on the beach and small, assumed female footprints were found leading away from the body into the woods.
Subsequently, the captain went to Cora’s hunt and had her and the baby brought out and tied to the tree. An argument that ensued between the Salem captain and another captain who believed that the case should be handled inland, at a proper court; and during the disagreement, lightning stuck the tree. When the smoke cleared, both Cora and the baby were gone. In place of the two, was Cora’s name engraved in the tree. To look at it to this day, it does not look like a knife had carved the letters; they look grown into the tree, as if the letters were part of the tree.
There are a few problematic pieces with the story, namely that witches were not burned at the stake or at trees in the colonies. Secondly, in written documentation of the legend, the captain’s name was Eli Blood. There is a Blood family line in the Salem area, but there is no record of an Eli. The other captain’s name was Tom Smith, and with no known origin, a search of the name did not return any results. One could say that with such a common last name that there may be a Captain Tom Smith somewhere in history; just in this case, he eludes us. Except for the name in the tree, there is no evidence that this story is anything more than a legend. Or so I thought until I did a paranormal investigation at the tree in 2013. I asked the standard questions of: how, what, why, did this really happen? After review, there was only one voice on the digital recorder, a female whispering the name “Thomas.” Just a legend or not, it is quite peculiar to be given the first name of one of the captains of the story. In this case, I would say to each one of you, do you believe it or not?
