PORTLAND, Maine — Lydia Carver has been dead a long time, 215 years, to be exact.
The engaged bride-to-be drowned in a shipwreck off the Cape Elizabeth coast in 1807, along with more than a dozen other souls.
Since then, her mortal remains have moldered under an impressive slate tombstone in a cemetery overlooking the sandy beach where it’s said her lifeless corpse was found beside an unworn wedding dress.
There are few verifiable facts about Carver but ghost stories about the spectral bride, haunting the beach in her dripping trousseau, are endless.
And it doesn’t matter whether you believe them.
Uneasy spirits like Carver don’t need actual supernatural forces from beyond the grave to keep them walking among us, on this mortal plane. They just need compelling, tall tales, ones that grow more fabulous and infamous over time.
A ripping good ghost story is more powerful than death itself, keeping its subject alive in the minds of the living, for all eternity.
“Folklore can be stronger than the truth and make a stronger point than the truth ever could,” Southern Maine Community College history professor Herb Adams said. “I could talk till I was pale as a ghost myself and not be as clear as a good ghost story.”
But let’s start with the facts.
The night was dark and foggy as the wooden schooner Charles made its way back to Portland from Boston on July 12, 1807.
The ship was off course and Capt. Jacob Adams seemed to know it. He’d sent the mate ahead, to the bow, to watch for the rocks that still menace a mariner’s path to Portland Harbor.
It didn’t help.
The Charles ground hard upon the submerged Watt’s Ledge just east of Richmond’s Island. The ship then flopped over on her side as ocean waves began to roll over it.
“It is not in the power of language to describe what were the feelings of those unfortunate persons who were at this time clinging to the vessel,” the weekly Portland Gazette wrote in its report. “Before any relief could be afforded (which was eight o’clock the following morning) 14 persons were washed from the wreck or perished through fatigue occasioned by the violence of the sea.”
Ocean water swirls around a shell (left) on Cape Elizabeth’s Crescent Beach, while cold ocean water (top right) rolls around Richmond’s Island. Lydia Carver’s gravestone towers above all others in a small cemetery overlooking the island where she died off Cape Elizabeth. Credit: Troy R. Bennett / BDN
Some passengers tried to swim for the tantalizing island shore, according to Portland’s other newspaper, the daily Eastern Argus. But the surging surf and jagged, unforgiving rocks were too fierce for most.
Jacob Adams managed to get to a nearby exposed hunk of ledge but then tried to swim back, hearing the wails of his wife and others still aboard. He never made it, perishing along with many others.
When the final tally was counted, five people survived the disaster — either by clinging to the wreck or swimming ashore — and 15 were dead.
“Death affected their course, and added their names to the registry of mortality,” the Argus wrote.
The captain, and several other victims, were interred a day later at Portland’s Eastern Cemetery after a funeral service conducted by local superstar preacher, the Rev. Elijah Kellog.
Among those buried that day were Mary Stonehouse, her daughter Eliza Hayden and Haden’s baby.
“They buried the little 10-month-old boy right in its mother’s arms,” Herb Adams said, adding that he has no family relation to the doomed sea captain.
As for Carver, the papers barely acknowledged her. The Gazette published her name but the Argus only called her a “young lady from Freeport.”
Neither outlet said anything about Carver’s engagement, a wedding dress where she was found or her funeral details.
Thus, Carver’s enduring legend was not born in the newspapers.
But there were other mythmakers in the printing business back then, and they soon took up the story.
Among the best known was Thomas Shaw, an unschooled Revolutionary War veteran and miller from Standish who liked making up poetry in his spare time.
“Shaw wrote enough hymns and ballads to fill a small trunk (now owned by the Maine Historical Society),” Donald A. Sears wrote in the March 1972 edition of New England Quarterly. “A number of these were printed, often in Portland, and were hawked about Maine as far inland as Augusta.”
Shaw rode his horse to Portland for the Eastern Cemetery funerals and composed a long poem about the tragedy while he clip-clopped along. Within two days, he’d delivered it to his printer and, a week later, Shaw was selling it in Standish, Portland, Windham, Buxton and Saco.
“This week I had 4,500 copies printed off and disposed of nigh 3,000,” Shaw wrote in his diary.
His 29-stanza poem sported 16 ominous black coffins at the top of the page, which has made it a prize for contemporary collectors. The narrative is melancholy and melodramatic.
“Come let us weep, with those that weep,” it went, “for their lost friends, plung’d in the deep.”
Judging by his sales figures, Shaw must have contributed to embedding the tragedy in public consciousness. But he did not mention Carver by name or include anything about her story.
But Shaw was not the only working poet with access to a printing press.
Another rhyming scribe, named Eben Robbins, was also at work. Of Robbins, history remembers nothing but this single broadside ballad with his name at the bottom. His poem lacks Shaw’s creepy coffins but his language sounds like a ghost story.
“By the ungrateful wave, behold this damsel as she lay, a gliding o’er the boisterous sea. Her bride-bed was the grave,” he wrote, the first to describe her as a bride-to-be.
In all, Robbins devotes eight of his 64 stanzas to Carver.
“My lovely Lydia once was mine, in death’s cold arms now entwined,” the poem laments in the voice of her intended, who is hoping to be, “With her in realms above the skies, where death can’t break the sacred ties to all eternity.”
The only other surviving words written about Carver at the time of her death are those inscribed on her gravestone.
“Sacred to the memory of Miss Lydia Carver,” it reads, in part, “AE 24: Who with 15 other unfortunate passengers, male and female, perished in the merciless waves.”
The slate marker is still striking and undimmed with the passage of time. It’s much fancier than any of the others in the small cemetery.
“Other people from the shipwreck are buried there under plain field stones,” Adams said. “It’s obvious she was much beloved — and still is.”
Over the years, as the creaky newspaper accounts gathered dust in libraries, and Shaw and Robbins’ dramatic poetry faded into obscurity, it’s likely Carver’s very noticeable stone kept people asking questions — and making up stories when they could find no answers.
Thus, as the true, historic written details slipped away, more dramatic storytelling elements filled the gaps in the area’s collective memory.
“Believers and non-believers alike tell ghost stories,” Jeanie Banks Thomas wrote in “Ghosts in Contemporary Folklore,” published in 2007. “If the content of a narrative ceases to be interesting to its audiences, it ceases to be told.”
In other words, ghosts don’t keep stories alive in our memory — even if they’re real. It’s the stories which keep the spirits alive, or at least undead and roaming inside our heads.
These days, Carver is more famous than ever, her tale appearing in numerous contemporary ghost story collections and newspaper articles.
This year’s “Walk Among the Shadows” event in the Eastern Cemetery even features a woman portraying Carver dressed in a wedding dress, seaweed around her shoulders, shouting at the captain of her doomed ship.
In all present-day retellings, Carver is more than a drowned young woman. Instead, she’s a beautiful corpse, washed up on the beach right next to the wedding dress she never got to wear.
They also say Carver can often be seen, dressed in white, pacing Crescent Beach at night, leaving footprints in the sand with no beginning or end. Sometimes, she even treads Route 77, flagging down cars and asking for a ride before vanishing into thin air.
Next to Carver’s cemetery, at the Inn By the Sea, mysterious phone calls from empty rooms, and elevators operating by themselves, are chalked up to Carver’s unquiet presence.
How a woman who died in 1807 would know how to operate a touch-tone telephone, elevator or understand hitchhiking is anyone’s guess.
“It’s perfectly logical, if ghosts are at all logical,” Adams said.
Adams believes folklore is nearly as important as fact, employing it in his history classes as an illustration of a secondary source.
“It’s like that old line from the John Ford movie ‘The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,’” Adams said. “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
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