The pirates ghost

On Ocracoke Island is a small channel of water known as Teach's Hole.
 This inlet is reported to be the spot where the pirate Edward Teach,
better known as Blackbeard, preferred to anchor his ship. It's also said
 to be where he met his end, and some say his ghost haunts the spot to
this day.

Blackbeard roamed the Atlantic from around 1716 until 1718, robbing
ships from the West Indies to the Carolinas. He had a reputation for
unbridled ferocity. When Blackbeard went into battle, he strapped
multiple pistols and multiple cutlasses to his body. Most frightening of
 all, he wove fuses into his long, black beard and set them on fire just
 before he stepped on to the captured ship. This towering figure, armed
to the teeth, sporting a sparking, flaming beard must have been
absolutely terrifying. Ships' captains would surrender without a shot
being fired.

Blackbeard's reign on the high seas came to an end on November 22,
1718. Virginia Governor Alexander Spotswood sent a ship commanded by
John Maynard down to the North Carolina coast to track down and kill
Blackbeard. Maynard surprised Blackbeard and a skeleton crew anchored at
 Teach's Hole. In the ferocious battle that followed, Blackbeard was
shot five times and stabbed no less than twenty. The pirate crew was all
 killed or captured.

Blackbeard's head was chopped off and hung from the bowsprit of
Maynard's ship. The pirate's headless body was thrown overboard. Legend
has it that the headless body swam around Maynard's ship three times
before sinking below the waters.

Ever since then, it's been said that Blackbeard's ghost haunts the
spot known as Teach's Hole. Many people have reported seeing a strange
light moving beneath the water in the cove. This ghostly light is
thought by some to be Blackbeard's spirit, swimming through the waters,
searching for his missing head.

There are those who believe that on stormy nights you can hear
Blackbeard's voice calling out in the wind. On nights when the angry
wind is roaring and the hard rain coming down, many people have heard a
horrible roaring coming from this hidden cove. They say that it's a
unearthly noise that sounds like a pained human voice bellowing "Where's
 my head?"

While his reign as terror of the seas was short, Blackbeard's legacy
lives on in the legends of North Carolina. We're also learning even more
 about this frightening pirate every day, ever since the discovery of
the wreck of The Queen Anne's Revenge.
 Archaeologists and historians have been working on recovering and
restoring artifacts from this sunken ship captained by the notorious
pirate, and we're discovering fascinating details of what life was like
on an 18th Century pirate ship.

While Blackbeard's viciousness has gone down in history, these
stories may be a fact of history being written by the winners. Except
for the final battle, there's no record of Blackbeard ever having killed
 anyone. The show with the massive arsenal and flaming beard may have
been deliberately designed to avoid a fight. Blackbeard seems to have
understood that having a reputation for being a bloodthirsty murdered
could save you the trouble of actually being a bloodthirsty murderer.

And while pirates are considered that bad guys of history, it's hard
not to sympathize with the pirates over the British Navy. Pirate crews
were better treated and better paid that Navy crews. Furthermore, pirate
 crews were on their ships by choice, as opposed to the Navy crews, many
 of whose members would have been pressed into service.

Pirate ships were also essentially democratic institutions. The
pirate captain would be elected by the crew, and generally selected on
the basis of competence and fairness as a leader. The captain's
decisions on where and when to sail would be put to a vote, and his
authority became absolute only during battle. This was a stark contrast
to the British Navy at the time, where the captaincy of a ship was based
 more on being born to the right family than on any ability to
competently lead a crew.

It's also important to remember what the pirates were stealing and
from whom. A large portion of the vessels passing through the Atlantic
at this time were holding enslaved human beings as cargo. When
intercepting a slave ship, pirate crews would routinely free those
otherwise destined for a life of unimaginable misery. These men would be
 offered the opportunity to join the ship's crew. With chances of their
being able to return home being tragically small, it's an offer many of
them took up. Records show that as much of half of any given pirate
ship's crew in the early Eighteenth Century would have been composed of
freed Africans. Even Blackbeard's trusted second-in-command who died
fighting with him at Teach's Hole was one of these men, known to us only
 as Black Caesar.
While many pirates did kill and plunder, they were killing and
plundering from people who were themselves killing, plundering,
enslaving, and exploiting lands which had been invaded and were held by
force. What seemed to offend the authorities so much about the pirates
was not their tactics, but that somebody else was getting a cut of the
action