Cora, the Witch of the Outer Banks

    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. As a child, our summer house was within a five-minute walk of the tree, yet I never knew the tale of it.

As my friends told it, the tree was the execution site of a witch named Cora. Cora lived in the area with a baby. In some of the stories, it was her child. Others leave out the details of the parentage. Both were considered strange by the local population, for they were not tied to any of the well-established families living on the island. For those who arrived on the island by other means, shipwrecks for one, there were beliefs on how to live there. Of those expectations, which were fitting for the time, young, unmarried women did not live alone, far separated from their neighbors.

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.

(For the sake of location clarity, I will refer to this area as it is currently known, Frisco, NC. Prior to 1898, the area was known as Trent, a name from the first English settlers. The name change came from the post office, when it was established in the town. Brigand’s Bay, the location of the tree, was previously, King’s Point.)

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. The most infamous name in terms of American witch trials. 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 due to her living situation. Matters came to a climax when the body of a young man was found washed on the beach and small footprints were found leading away from the body into the woods. The small footprints led to the general assumption that they belonged to a woman.

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. During the disagreement, lightning stuck the tree. When the smoke cleared, both Cora and the baby were gone. In some stories, there is an added touch of the baby turning into a cat to flee the scene. A witch's familiar, if you will. In place of the two, letters spelling the name of “Cora” were engraved into the tree. That mark was still on the tree in the early 2000s.

"Witchcraft in Salem Village," William A. Crafts (1876) Pioneers in the Settlement of America: from Florida in 1510 to California in 1849. Boston, Published by Samuel Walker and Company

North Carolina did have witchcraft trials. Certainly, none of these trials or any others in the United States ever gained the notoriety of the Salem Trials, but they did still happen. Among those who lived in the colony, there was a belief in witches and their supernatural abilities. A law dating to 1679, calls for local officers to investigate felonies, witchcraft, sorcery, and other magic arts. By the telling of the legend, there would not be any documentation of Cora being accused of witchcraft in a court because Captain Blood was promising vigilante justice. This creates an element to the legend which makes for the possibility that part of it could be true. Without the documentation, how much, if any will never really be known.

Additionally, there are a few problematic pieces with the story, namely that witches were not burned at the stake, or at trees in the United States. Even the accused witches at Salem were not burned. 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 was no record of an Eli. The other captain’s name was Tom Smith, and with no known origin it is harder to trace this name.

Even so, if the tale is not true, there has not been a different explanation for the carving in the tree and no one has admitted to carving it.

In the spirit of a paranormal inquiry into the legend, I went to visit the tree in 2013, bringing with myself a digital recorder. I asked the standard questions: “who is here?” “why are you here?” and the burning, “did this really happen?” After reviewing the recording afterwards, there was only one voice to be heard, it was not in answer to a question. A lone, female voice could be heard whispering the name, “Thomas.”