Looking for His Assassin
Nathaniel Smiley came over with the great Scottish migration of 1739 and built a prosperous life along the river at Erwin. In 1773 his son Matthew was murdered at his own table, shot "by an unknown assassin through the open shutter of his cabin." Matthew had no known enemies. The investigation found no suspect and no motive, and no one was ever charged.
Not long after the burial, people along that stretch of the river began meeting a glowing figure after dark, a man who approaches travelers inquisitively, studies each face in turn, and vanishes once he has looked his fill. He has been doing it ever since. The old families say it is Matthew Smiley, still checking every passing face for the one that pulled the trigger.
The Mermaids of Mermaid Point
Before the Buckhorn Dam raised the water, the joining of the Deep and Haw rivers exposed a broad sandbar, and in the mid-1700s, that sandbar had a reputation. Mermaids, it was said, swam two hundred miles up from the coast to rest there, wash the salt from their hair, and comb it out in the moonlight.
Patrons walking home from a nearby tavern would see them on the bar, laughing, singing, splashing, and if anyone called out or crept closer, the creatures slipped beneath the dark water and were gone. That these sightings reliably followed a night at the tavern is, the old telling insists, entirely irrelevant. The name stuck: the spot where the Cape Fear is born is called Mermaid Point to this day.
The Red-Bearded Specter
Neill "Red" McNeill was six-foot-six, a former Scottish sailor who roamed the upper river claiming unpatented land with his friend Archie Buie. Struck down by fever west of the Yadkin in 1761 and knowing death was coming, he split a gum log and hewed his own coffin between the chills, and left one instruction: bury me across the Cape Fear, near Erwin.
When the burial party reached the river it was running too high to cross, so they buried Red on the near bank instead. Soon after, travelers began meeting a towering red-bearded ghost on that stretch of road, arm extended, forever pointing west toward Smiley's Hill, toward the far bank where he was supposed to lie. In 1765 a great flood tore his coffin out of the ground and washed it ashore. It was reburied on the proper side of the river, as asked. The pointing ghost was never seen again.
Sources & further reading
- Campbell University: "Ghost stories and spooky tales from the Cape Fear River"
- They Passed This Way, 1955