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Dead Men Do Tell Tales | Goat Island, Newport, Rhode Island · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Goat Island's Pirate Graves, located in Newport, Rhode Island.
0:25
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:28
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:29
Kristin: So grab your favorite mug and cozy up.
0:32
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:35
Kristin: Every place carries its dead with it, whether it means to or not.
0:39
Kristin: Some histories are chiseled into marble, polished and preserved, meant to be found by anyone who comes looking.
0:45
Kristin: Others are pressed into the mud and tide grass, left at the quiet corners of forgotten graveyards, waiting for someone to remember they exist at all.
0:53
Kristin: This is one of those stories.
0:56
Kristin: Pirates hold an uneasy place in American memory.
0:58
Kristin: They're more costume and caricature now, more myth than man, more legend than history.
1:03
Kristin: But in the 17th and 18th centuries along the coasts and in the ports, they were real and constant menaces, hunted, feared, and occasionally celebrated.
1:12
Kristin: Hollywood remembers them as swashbucklers.
1:15
Kristin: History remembers them as something far grimmer.
1:18
Kristin: Do you know how their stories actually ended or where their bones came to rest?
1:22
Kristin: Goat Island is just one of their tales.
1:25
Kristin: Twenty-six men are buried here on the north side of a small island in Newport Harbor.
1:30
Kristin: No headstones mark them, no fence protects them.
1:33
Kristin: The harbor has gone on with its business for nearly 300 years, largely indifferent to what it holds.
1:39
Kristin: This is their story and how they came to rest here.
1:43
Kristin: Good Island is a small strip of land in Newport Harbor, easy to miss unless you know what you're looking for.
1:49
Kristin: Today it's home to little more than a marina, a hotel, and a quiet stretch of harbor selevelment.
1:54
Kristin: Most people who walk past it have no idea what the ground beneath it holds.
1:58
Kristin: But its history runs deeper and stranger than any of that suggests.
2:03
Kristin: Purchased from the Narragansan people in 1658, the island has since served as pasture land, harbor fortification, and during the Second World War, a Navy torpedo station that helped arm much of the American fleet.
2:16
Kristin: Running quietly beneath all of that is the reason we're here today.
2:20
Kristin: A burial ground for men the colony wanted forgotten.
2:23
Kristin: By the early 1700s, Newport was no stranger to piracy.
2:27
Kristin: The colony had a complicated relationship with the trade.
2:31
Kristin: Pirates brought gold, goods, and business to a port that welcomed all of it.
2:35
Kristin: But by 1714, Caribbean pirates had turned on the very towns that once tolerated them, and Newport's patience ran out.
2:43
Kristin: What happened in Newport that July marked the end of that era, in the bloodiest way the colony knew how.
2:49
Kristin: The man at the center of the story wasn't born a pirate, but then again, who would be?
2:54
Kristin: Charles Harris was the first mate of a Boston-owned logwood ship called the Greyhound of Boston, homeward bound from Honduras in January of 1722, when a ship flung the black flag with a skeleton on it, ran them down and forced them to surrender.
3:08
Kristin: The pirates were led by Captain George Lothar, sailing the Happy Delivery.
3:13
Kristin: His crew burned and captured the Greyhound to the waterline, and gave her surviving officers a choice familiar to any sailor unlucky enough to be taken, join, or take your chances elsewhere.
3:25
Kristin: Harris, along with four of her men, were forced aboard.
3:28
Kristin: Within days, persuaded by one account calls the adventurous spirit of the ship's company, he signed the articles.
3:35
Kristin: Sailing with Lothar's crew was another Englishman, Edward Lowe, a former Boston resident with a reputation that would soon ellipse his captains.
3:43
Kristin: Lowe was, by every surviving account, exceptionally cruel, personally responsible for dozens of deaths, and known to force captured sailors into acts of degradation before killing them.
3:54
Kristin: By the time Harris rose to command his own vessel, a sloop called the Ranger, his fate was already bound to Lowe's.
4:01
Kristin: For over a year, Harris sailed under Lowe's shadow, raiding merchant vessels from the Caribbean up along the American coast.
4:08
Kristin: In early June of 1723, the two pirate ships, Lowe's Sloop Fortune and Harris's sloop Ranger, were working the waters off Long Island when they spotted what they took for an easy target, a merchant vessel or perhaps a whaler.
4:23
Kristin: But it was neither.
4:24
Kristin: It was his Majesty's ship Greyhound, a Royal Navy post ship under Captain Peter Solgard, sent out specifically to hunt Lowe down.
4:32
Kristin: By coincidence, it chaired the same name with the merchant ship Harris had lost 18 months before.
4:38
Kristin: The two Greyhounds had nothing to do with one another, but the second one would decide the rest of Harris's life.
4:44
Kristin: The pirates ran up their black flags and gave chase, not realizing what they were chasing.
4:50
Kristin: When Sulkorn revealed his colors and returned fire, the two sloops broke off immediately, later swapping their black flags for a red one, a bloody flag.
4:59
Kristin: In a bid to signal they'd fight to the death rather than surrender, but the wind failed them.
5:04
Kristin: Both sides took to their oars.
5:06
Kristin: Sulkorn put 86 men on the Greyhound's oars and closed the distance quickly.
5:11
Kristin: By early afternoon, the Greyhound came alongside the ranger, and the crews fought hand to hand.
5:17
Kristin: One pirate, rather than surrender, put a pistol to his own head.
5:21
Kristin: By four o'clock, Harris called for quarter.
5:24
Kristin: Low ship, badly damaged, slipped away into the dark near Block Island and escaped.
5:28
Kristin: He would go on committing atrocities at sea for another year before vanishing from the historical records.
5:34
Kristin: Sometime around 1724, his death was never confirmed.
5:38
Kristin: Harris, though, wasn't so fortunate.
5:40
Kristin: The Greyhound sailed into Newport Harbor on June 14, 1723, with a broken ranger in tow and dozens of prisoners in irons.
5:49
Kristin: Newport had never seen anything like it.
5:52
Kristin: Word spread up and down the New England coast that one of the largest halls of pirates the colonies had ever seen in years was now sitting in the Newport jail.
6:01
Kristin: A court of admiralty convened, seated by Rhode Island's own governor, Cranston, alongside the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, and a bench of appointed judges.
6:10
Kristin: The Advocate General for the Crown didn't mince his words in his opening address.
6:15
Kristin: Calling the accused enemies of mankind, men who had renounced the benefit of all lawful society, nearly every defendant offered the same plea, that they had been forced men, taken unwillingly from captured ships and compelled to serve under threat of death.
6:31
Kristin: It was, as the prosecution dryly noted, the plea of every pirate ever tried.
6:36
Kristin: For some it was true, and the court believed them.
6:39
Kristin: Across several rounds of trial, a ship's doctor was cleared after witnesses confirmed he'd never taken up arms, and spent his time on board reading, visibly miserable among the crew.
6:49
Kristin: A teenage boy forced into service because he could play the violin was also released.
6:54
Kristin: So was a young indigenous man taken from a fishing boat off Nantucket, whom the court found had clearly been pressed into service against his will.
7:03
Kristin: Several others swore just as forcefully that they never wanted to be any part of it, and they were believed too.
7:09
Kristin: Not everyone with the same story was so lucky.
7:12
Kristin: Joseph Libby was nineteen, a fisherman from Marblehead, Massachusetts, who had been taken by pirates a full year before Paris had ever crossed paths with the Greyhound.
7:22
Kristin: He had been captured alongside a friend and shipmate Philip Ashton, who managed to escape the pirates by marooning himself alone on a Caribbean island, rather than keep sailing with them.
7:32
Kristin: Libby, though, had no such chance.
7:34
Kristin: He had produced testimony from the ship's captain swearing he had been forced aboard, but the ship's doctor told the court he'd seen Libby plunder captured vessels, and fire a weapon more than once, which was enough.
7:46
Kristin: Libby was found guilty.
7:47
Kristin: But for twenty-six men, the evidence of willing participation was too strong.
7:53
Kristin: Taking up arms, sharing in plunder, firing on the Greyhound itself.
7:57
Kristin: Among them was Harris, only twenty five years old, who had gone from force conscript to captain of his own pirate sloop in little more than a year.
8:06
Kristin: On July 19, in 1723, Newport turned out for a public spectacle that would be remembered for generations.
8:13
Kristin: Drinking started early at the White Horse Tavern.
8:15
Kristin: Crowds lined the route from the jail on Bull Street through the town to Gravely Point.
8:20
Kristin: A spit of land jutting into the harbor, families leaned from second-story windows.
8:25
Kristin: Children and dogs ran ahead of the procession.
8:27
Kristin: Boats crowded the harbor so onlookers could watch for the water, and sailors climbed the rigging of anchored ships for a better view.
8:34
Kristin: A single drummer beat a funeral cadence as the sheriff led the condemned to the gallows, carrying the ceremonial silver oar that marked the authority of the Admiralty Court.
8:44
Kristin: Ministers had visited the prisoners in their final days.
8:47
Kristin: Several wrote letters home, and one composed a poem that would later be printed and circulated.
8:53
Kristin: It took two hours to hang all 26 men.
8:56
Kristin: One eyewitness called it the most doleful sight the colony had ever seen, filled with what he described as the awful noise of their dying moans.
9:05
Kristin: Their black pirate flag, nicknamed Old Roger, a skeleton holding an hourglass and a dart, was hung from the corner of the gallows as they died beneath it.
9:13
Kristin: When the drumm stopped and the crowds began to drift back toward the taverns and their homes, the work wasn't finished.
9:20
Kristin: Twenty-six bodies still hung from the gallows, and what Newport chose to do with them says just as much about how the colony saw these men as the trial itself did.
9:29
Kristin: They weren't gibbleted, left hanging as a public warning, as was a common practice elsewhere.
9:35
Kristin: Instead, they were carried by boat to Goat Island and buried where the tide would reach them, on shore, between the high and low tide marks.
9:42
Kristin: This detail is worth pausing on.
9:45
Kristin: The Christians of that era, this narrow strip of shore, submerged at high tide and exposed at low, was considered unhollowed ground, the same principle that kept the unbaptized and the excommunicated out of consecrated cemeteries.
9:59
Kristin: Pirates were considered enemies not only of one nation, but of civilization itself.
10:04
Kristin: Men without a country.
10:06
Kristin: Burying them here, neither fully at land nor fully at sea, was a deliberate refusal of ordinary burial rites, a way of casting them out even in death.
10:15
Kristin: No stones were raised, no names were carved, and the Atlantic had done exactly what it was left to do.
10:21
Kristin: Three centuries later, the shoreline holds their secrets still, block the Newport waterfront today, and almost nothing hints at what happened here.
10:30
Kristin: Graveley Point, where the hangings took place, no longer exist in any recognizable form.
10:35
Kristin: It was filled in during the 19th century and now lies beneath the marina and hotel.
10:40
Kristin: A small historical marker in the adjacent Mary Ferzoli Park is the only public acknowledgement that anything happened on that ground at all.
10:48
Kristin: Goat Island itself has moved on in its own way.
10:51
Kristin: Now a marina, restaurant, and a gated condominium development, with a quiet green light that once guided ships, now marking little more than a pleasant harbor view.
11:00
Kristin: Somewhere beneath that shoreline.
11:02
Kristin: In the ground that has shifted, eroded, and been built over for three centuries.
11:07
Kristin: 26 men remain exactly where the colony of Rhode Island decided to put them, unmarked and unclaimed.
11:14
Kristin: It's sometimes said that Newport's Hanging holds the record as the largest max execution in American history, but it doesn't.
11:21
Kristin: That grim distinction belongs to the execution of 38 Dakota men in Mankato, Minnesota, in 1862.
11:28
Kristin: What happened at Graveley Point was more precisely the largest single execution of pirates the American colonies ever carried out.
11:36
Kristin: And for the men buried on Goat Island, that distinction was final enough.
11:40
Kristin: Or perhaps it wasn't final at all.
11:43
Kristin: The pirates were buried between the tides, so that the rising and falling sea would deny them rest.
11:48
Kristin: Some believe in Newport it worked too well, and that the pirates never left Goat Island.
11:54
Kristin: Restless men denied even a marked grave.
11:56
Kristin: Local tour guide John Brennan once described sitting on the island, above the mass grave of the 26 men, when about two dozen glowing lights came down from the north end of Narragansid Bay.
12:08
Kristin: They moved fast, two or three feet above the water, and drifted past him, then vanished south.
12:14
Kristin: In his book Pirate Ghosts and Phantom Ships, New England paranormal author Thomas de Augustino collected stranger stories.
12:22
Kristin: On dark, misty nights, it said the hanged men rise from the water and wander the shores of Goat Island and the ground where they died, searching for their ships so they can finally sail from their makeshift graves.
12:34
Kristin: One clam digger abonnet shores across the bayonera Ganson claimed to see a ghostly ship glide past him, then drift over the land toward Gravely Point.
12:43
Kristin: Perhaps it was the Ranger, come back at last for its crew.
12:47
Kristin: It's a fitting kind of haunting if it's real.
12:50
Kristin: Three hundred years ago, a different voice, though, raised the same idea without meaning to.
12:54
Kristin: In a sermon on the hanging, printed that same year, Boston Minister Cotton Mather wrote that the 26 dead men were calling out to the living still, terrible preachers in ghostly apparition, their voices rising from the dead to warn them.
13:08
Kristin: Mather meant it as a metaphor.
13:11
Kristin: Standing on the shoreline today, it's harder to be so sure.
13:14
Kristin: The next time you find yourself in Newport, Rhode Island, among those who see nothing more than coastal charm and post guard views.
13:21
Kristin: Listen a little closer.
13:23
Kristin: Somewhere beneath the marinas and harbor lights, another Newport is still waiting to be noticed, one built on pirate splendor, and the men the sea was never asked to forgive.
13:33
Kristin: For now, the stories of Goat Island slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
13:39
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil of Goat Island's pirate graves, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
13:47
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.