THE PIRATE HAUNTING OF SOMES SOUND.
And a tiny bit about LaRue Spiker.
LaRue Spiker was a news story herself. Brilliant, an editor and writer, the chair of many state committees, Civil Rights advocate and gay, she could fashion stories out of just a few facts.
Some of her best news stories are about Mount Desert Island and its more haunted aspects.
In 1967 she wrote several stories for the Lewiston Sun Journal, a daily paper in Maine, further south and inland from Mount Desert Island. One of those stories focused on Somes Sound and Valley Cove, which is near Southwest Harbor.
“The place,” she writes, “should have been soothing as always, but something that day wasn’t.”
It was a foggy day. Ducks, she said, paddled by. On Eagle Cliff, a hawk let out a cry. The fog came, it subsided, it came again. And as LaRue left, she thought about that feeling she had from the now increasing and incoming fog, how it could hide secrets and landscapes and things even more than the ducks and hawk that it was obscuring.
“Imagine spending eternity in a search for something you had put away for safe-keeping,” she wrote. “Frustrating enough to put an edge on the temper of any ghost.”
She’d kept clippings from a newspaper defunct even in 1967, the Mount Desert Herald. The articles were written by O. H. Fernald, a pastor. The stories told of treasures, hidden on Mount Desert Island.
Hidden by pirates.
Some of those stories passed on by Dr. Fernald to the paper to LaRue are passed on still today, floating a bit in the collective unconsciousness of Mount Desert Island.
Others are a bit lost, just like treasures, ready to be scavenged.
FLYING MOUNTAIN’S GROTTO
The first of LaRue’s stories is about Flying Mountain, which is often local kids’ first hike. It involves a bit of a scramble, an adorable peak and a happy trip back down.
According to LaRue, there is a grotto there. You can enter it during low tide and it brings you up through the mountain.
A freebooter and a smuggler, LeBlon met there. Back in the 1700s, an eavesdropping pirate listened to some local lads who knew all about the cave. He was a pirate, so he was all in on this.
He was the sort of unnamed pirate who did a lot of his trade in the Caribbean and had a good amount of wealth. He’d even, the story goes, attacked a Spanish man-of-war and survived. But, then, his luck ran out when he went after a British frigate, the Shannon, right in Boston Harbor.
He fled in his boat. The British chased him for three days.
And on the third day, at dusk, our unnamed pirate was cornered in Somes Sound. The British anchored in Southwest, sure that they had captured him. But the priate? He wasn’t anywhere. No body. No treasure. No ship. Just a small boat, unmarked and lacking oars. He had to be dead. Or he had to have hidden the treasure in the cave and “scuttled” his ship, sunk it deep in the Sound, and gone back in the cave, ready to hide.
Some say that when he was hiding, the water came in, and he never came back out, except as a ghost.
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