At night, when complete darkness envelops travelers in the Great Dismal Swamp, when bobcats and birds loose screams that sound human, tales of ghosts in black waters and fiendish witches don’t seem far fetched.
Some mysteries of the swamp started as true stories. Where truth ended and embellishment began remains uncertain.
“People didn’t go in alone,” said Deloras Freeman, a visitor services specialist at the Great Dismal Swamp, her eyes wide, her voice a whisper. “They were afraid that these vapors that come up at night and that you see on the trails, that they were fatal.”
Many spooky legends from the swamp, she suspects, originated with sightings of foxfire, glowing fungi belched from swamp gasses that drift through the air like spirits.
Yet even today, some things about the swamp cannot be explained.
Compasses point unreliably in the swamp, a phenomenon that dates back to George Washington’s time. Perhaps something affects the magnetic field.
Freeman said at least one employee has no explanation for something he saw on a lonely swamp trail.
His tale and the others here come from Freeman as well as the “The Great Dismal Swamp in Myth and Legend” by Waverly Traylor.
The Dismal Town bride and groom
On a dark night about 40 years ago, a young park employee drove down the long, straight path of the Washington Ditch Trail.
His headlights shone on the waters of the ditch and the seemingly endless wall of trees and vines.
He was headed out of the swamp when his dog began to bark violently.
That’s when his headlights swept over a young man and woman dressed in colonial-era clothes.
They walked silently towards him, side by side.
All kinds of people ventured into the swamp; strange sights came with the territory. Perhaps their clothes were props for a picture of a play.
Whatever the reason, the young employee decided to help if he could. He stopped his truck and greeted them, but they said nothing in return.
At his side, his dog’s frenzy increased. The employee looked down to tell the dog to be quiet. “And when he looks back up,” Freeman said, “they are gone.”
The employee thought the young man and woman ran into the trees, Freeman said.
He looked all around his truck and even ventured briefly into the swamp beside the trail.
He found nothing.
After driving out of the swamp, the utter strangeness of what had happened finally dawned on him.
He became very afraid, more afraid than he could ever remember being before.
“He’d been to Vietnam, he was a scout there and he’d never really been afraid in the forest, ever,” Freeman said. “But this fear just overcame him.”
Years later, that employee, now a longtime employee like Freeman, told her the story. Freeman connected it to a tale that began more than two hundred years ago.
Before George Washington became the first president of the United States, he was a businessman who thought draining the swamp’s then-one million acres and turning it into farmland would make him a lot of money.
While Washington’s plans never panned out, he did manage to build the canal that bears his name from the swamp’s outskirts to Lake Drummond.
By the 1760s a small town had been built in the swamp to support the canal project.
Its name was Dismal Town.
As the tree cutting and ditch digging work continued, a young man and young woman who had grown up in Dismal Town fell in love and decided to marry.
On the day of the wedding, the young man walked into the swamp to go fishing for his post-wedding feast.
He had not returned by mid-afternoon, but the bride-to-be put on her simple, white wedding gown and waited.
When the light began to fade, a search party was sent out for the young man.
The bride-to-be stayed in Dismal Town until darkness fell, but then her worries overcame her and she, too, entered the swamp to look for him.
The search party returned.
The bride and groom did not.
The legend says they found each other in the swamp, but could not find their way back to Dismal Town.
Their ghosts are said to haunt the Washington Ditch Trail at night, always walking toward Dismal Town, but never making it home.
Swamp witch
Many tales of witches spring from the swamp, from cannibal witches to hermit witches to the tale of an innocent woman accused, maligned and killed for being a witch. She now haunts the Pasquotank River.
One notable tale surrounds the witch who taunted hunters.
The legend holds that the witch would change herself into a white-tailed doe upon seeing a hunting party and lead their dogs through the swamp until they nearly died from exhaustion.
All the same, the tale rarely scared hunters away from all the fine game hidden deep in the swamp’s wooded bogs.
One day, an old hunter decided to venture into the swamp with a Native American guide leading the way.
As they searched for game, they encountered the witch in human form.
Startled, she quickly changed into a white-tailed deer and pranced away.
The hunter’s dogs gave chase. This time, the witch’s wiles failed her. The Guide skillfully directed the chase into a bog filled with briars and brambles.
With thorns and vines trapping her on one side and dogs on the other, the witch turned herself into a tree stump rather than be caught.
The stump looked like a deer frozen in mid-leap.
With the witch cornered, the Guide called on an acquaintance – the Devil, who showed up very quickly.
Seldom does a tale involving the Devil benefit humans, but if ever there were a place for it to happen, it is the Great Dismal Swamp. The Devil brought with him a powder made of dried bear liver, dried toads and ground up rattlesnake rattles.
The Guide and the Devil sprinkled the concoction around the base of the stump. A huge flame surrounded it.
The Indian Guide danced and chanted as lightning flashed and thunder rumbled.
“Now the old witch will never roam the swamp again,” he told the hunter.
And she never did.
The stump, however, remained for many years. Freeman said she remembers seeing it just a few years ago, and that from the right angle it looked just like a fleeing deer.
Sadly, nothing remains of it today. It was destroyed in a recent fire, she said.
Fire Bird
Tales of horrors in the Dismal Swamp predate the arrival of European settlers in the Tidewater area.
According to Traylor’s book, two of the Native American tribes which controlled the area near what is now Norfolk believed that in the swamp once dwelled a great fire bird.
Its eyes burned like flames, and when it flew over the swamp its fiery wings would singe the tops of the trees and set them alight. The hideous beast would swoop down and snatch children and warriors in its beak and then carry them off to the center of the swamp.
The two tribes were often at war, but when the fire bird settled in the heart of the swamp, they joined together to fight the threat.
During one of their councils, a young brave named Big Bear fell in love with the beautiful maiden White Swan. But she was from the other tribe.
She loved him, too, but was already betrothed to the cruel and grizzled warrior known as Old Cold Heart.
White Swan fled to the wilderness to seek out the Swamp Spirit and ask for its help. The benevolent creature protected the swamp and those who lived in it.
White Swan found the Swamp Spirit in the form of a gnarled old cypress that belched smoke and ash. Big Bear, who had secretly followed White Swan into the forest, came out of the thickets and stood beside her.
They begged the spirit to find a way for them to be together, offering anything the spirit wanted in return.
The Swamp Spirit thought for a moment, then demanded their first-born child. White Swan and Big Bear agreed.
Then the fire bird revealed himself. He had been watching the couple the whole time.
They turned to run when they saw its flaming eyes, but the great bird was quick. It snatched Big Bear in its beak and lifted him into the air.
White Swan, afraid for the man she loved, chased the bird deeper into the swamp, running as fast as she could.
The Swamp Spirit helped by lifting her into the sky, helping her to fly and give chase.
The fire bird tried to smash Big Bear into a tree, but Big Bear tore himself loose from the bird’s beak and fell.
He landed in the fire bird’s giant nest. It was made of the tendons and muscles of lost tribesmen. The scalps of warriors ringed the nest; skulls and bones littered the ground.
Big Bear soon realized he was not alone. Seven baby fire birds lunged at him, hungry for a meal.
Their vicious beaks pecked at him and their fiery wings singed his skin.
He fought them one-by-one for many hours, as White Swan dodged and hid from the great fire bird in the sky.
Big Bear killed each of the young fire birds in turn. To kill the last he tore out its heart, ripped off its skin and threw the carcass over the edge of the nest.
White Swan then appeared in the nest, and the voice of the Swamp Spirit spoke to them.
“Fire Bird knows that she cannot raise her young in the swamp as long as we have such brave Indians here,” he said.
The fire bird left the swamp, stopping only long enough to swoop down and grab Old Cold Heart.
The legend says the bird left Old Cold Heart on a secluded island to live out the rest of his days. Maybe. Or maybe he served as a delicious snack for an angry bird.
Either way, White Swan and Big Bear could be together.
In the years that followed, water filled the fire bird’s nest. Native American lore holds that the nest formed Lake Drummond.
White Swan and Big Bear gave their first born to the Swamp Spirit, which turned the child into a white-tailed deer that protects the forest and leads hunters to safety.
Today scientists still argue over how Lake Drummond was truly formed. It may have been by meteor, but there’s no sign of it at the bottom of the lake.
There is no sign of a giant bird’s grisly nest, either.
?Gary A. Harki, 757-446-2370, gary.harki@pilotonline.com
