The haunted history of the ghost ship Dash

I have made a habit of standing on as many points along the New England coastline as possible and one can simply inhabit, in a moment, the moody, treacherous, rocky Gothic settings that gave rise to Lovecraftian imagery and weird, witchy, haunted tales. The atmosphere of a Gothic novel creeps over you; encroaching mist along the outcroppings. Nowhere felt as immersive to me as the coast I’ve described in southern Maine. Into that atmosphere, a ghost ship was born after it never came home.

Along Casco Bay and around the Harpswell-Freeport region, repeated, spectral sightings of a schooner named the Dash have been seen along the irregular, rocky coastlines for over two centuries.

The Dash, at any moment, may try in vain to dock again to change her fate. She might be an omen of inclement weather or she may appear to collect the spirit of a relative of a former crew member. A harbinger of death, the ship has repeatedly appeared to startle the living and carry the souls of the dead like Charon’s boat across the river Styx in Greek myth.

A wooden-hulled privateering vessel, a schooner built in the Harpswell-Freeport region in 1813, amid the ongoing War of 1812, to scout for (and plunder with full license of the United States) enemy British ships, the Dash was successful on what had been reportedly 15 notable, valiant runs. But on her 16th, she disappeared. All her Freeport-based crew were lost.

Poet John Greenleaf Whittier wrote his own homage to the Flying Dutchman as reinterpreted for the Dash. “The Dead Ship of Harpswell” eternally seeks a peaceful port and is forever foiled in safe passage. Published in The Atlantic magazine in June 1866, Whittier’s poem gave the real-life tragedy of the Dash and her crew additional immortal power.

Author Robert P. Tristram Coffin, forever drawn to his native Maine lore, wrote his own homage to ghost ships in his 1936 novel John Dawn, additionally pulling from the ongoing lore of the Dash. Incidentally, this very writer is the reason why it’s nearly impossible to kill the “Witch’s Curse of Bucksport Maine” myth we’ve written about before. (While there were no witch trials in Maine and the “curse” is, in fact, an admittedly curious flaw in a gravestone and not a spell, Coffin’s poem cemented a curse in the American imagination as if it were a real event). When people want to see something as haunted or want a more interesting explanation for a curious but otherwise mundane thing, something paranormal is created, for better or worse.

But the Dash does have an outsized history that shifts it out of the realm of poetry and folklore alone. During her run as a privateering vessel, the Dash and other ships like her were regarded as a sort of sea militia working for the United States against a stifling British blockade of New England ports. The Dash was armed with several working cannon and several model ones (to make her appear more armed than she was; these were known as “Quaker” guns, noting the pacifism of the Society of Friends). The Dash was particularly successful and considered uniquely lucky. But perhaps that in itself tempted fate.

In January 1815, her luck ran out when Captain John Porter is said to have lingered too long saying goodbye to his newly wedded wife and it took two signal-gun firings from the ship to bring him back aboard. Perhaps reluctance founded in a dread premonition? Accounts say that once the Dash left Freeport for the Gulf of Maine, she did so racing another American privateering vessel, the Chamberlain, and her swift, impressive speed launched her headfirst into a winter storm. She was never seen again. At least, not whole. And not with a living crew.

A few months after the Dash’s disappearance, fishermen began spotting her prow piercing through thick fog, silently heading toward Freeport at a fierce clip even when no wind was driving the sails. Her name was legible; Dash floating along at eye level, and the silent crew stood aboard, staring toward the port they never got back to. Reports of the ship would come in batches from locals, fishermen and other sailors; the fog evidently the perfect atmosphere to draw this ghost ship back home. The legend of the Dash expanded from mere omen and ill weather, taking on greater importance as an usher of souls; coming to collect descendants of the lost crew and fold them into the fog of the great unknown.

She’s even drawn fire.

An entertaining though incredulous account repeated again and again in books, articles, and blogs written throughout the last sixty years, claims that in the early days of World War II — when Allied forces monitored harbor strongholds and ports of interest — during a patrol around the Casco Bay area a British ship noted as the HMS Moidore fired on the Dash as it pierced through an oppressive fog. The anachronistic, startling tall ship and black mast, the word Dash clearly visible upon her prow, supposedly took the blasts and disappeared again.

The only problem is there hasn’t been an HMS Moidore — or even a USS Moidore — to have fired on the Dash. Moidore doesn’t appear on any log of ships deployed by either country. It’s possible the term Moidore for a ship goes back to privateering at a time when the U.S. and Britain were not allies, but on opposing ends of a revolution. A moidore is a coin of Portuguese currency that was commonly found in England and her colonies. A currency mentioned in classic adventure stories like Robinson Crusoe and Gulliver’s Travels, moidores could easily have been captured loot during the Dash’s days of privateering. Perhaps the idea of a British ship firing again on an American ship along the Maine coast was just an echo of the War of 1812, when Maine was particularly vulnerable, coming back to haunt the former rivals-turned-allies at a time when the whole world was fraying at the seams.

It’s quite possible that in the thick murk of fog and in the immense anxiety of World War II, an unknown, unregistered ship was fired upon by a patrolling vessel, and it’s possible the ship they saw disappeared again, but the truth of it wasn’t pinned to an actual vessel or verifiable military record. So it’s easy to think it’s all part of the ghost lore.

What is frighteningly true, however, is that Nazis reached Maine. On April 23, 1945, the USS Eagle 56 was fired upon and sunk by a German U-boat 853 in Casco Bay. Only 13 of the 62 crew members survived. Because the attack came at the end of the war, and the U-boat had not received orders of any surrender, the sinking of the Eagle was reported as an engineering and boiler failure rather than an escalatory attack from a foreign adversary. It wasn’t until 2001 that the full truth came out and the U.S. Navy finally awarded Purple Hearts to survivors and family members that had been denied them under the guise of an accident rather than an attack. Perhaps there’s a haunting to be had in this injustice; perhaps these war dead, with the truth of their deaths hidden and covered up at the time, have left their own ghostly imprint upon the bay, drawing forth further inexplicable sights, sounds, and activity.

The Dash is also a harbinger of death. Journalist and Maine native Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, was the editor of the Progressive Review for fifty years and the founder of the national Green Party, among other movements, has his own Dash tale to tell. In an essay compiled in the “memoirs” section of his site, he notes that folklore became deeply personal one day as his mother gazed out to sea over lunch in 1975 and exclaimed that she saw the ghost ship of Harpswell, adding her own uncanny sighting to the generational tale Whittier evokes in his poem.

“My reaction was to think, there she goes again. And then to think no more about it. A few hours later, down on the shore, my father had a heart attack and died. As we returned from the hospital and parked the car, my mother suddenly cried, ‘The ghost ship of Harpswell’ […] We went inside and pulled out a volume of John Greenleaf Whittier’s poems and found it. The ghost ship of Harpswell had been the privateer Dash, which had been lost at sea after compiling its remarkable record. It would be later said that women saw the vessel just before their husbands died, but would make nothing of it.”

I read these accounts and then stood on the exact coastal edges at Wolfe’s Neck Preserve noted in some of the Dash sightings, imagining a scene of deep fog, old ships piercing through as if parting the veil between worlds. I felt like I could see it unfold before my eyes, the peculiar acoustics rattling around my ears in a confounding manner. It sets the mind to spinning. The day I visited this coastal curiosity I was taken under by the muse herself. Immediately, as if I’d channeled it, I wrote a fictional story about a ghost ship and her vengeful female captain. Additionally, I’ve pinned the setting of a forthcoming Gothic novel to this very spot. The curious rocky coast of this bay continues haunting me in the most visceral ways.