Seibold and Adams ghost stories

They’re not so easy to find anymore, but David Seibold and Charles Adams III, years ‘n’ years ago, write a series of books of what we might call local ghost stories of southern New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and Delaware. Patty and I always bought one or more of them while we were on vacation.

One of the stories they collected–well, maybe it’s not actually a ghost story, strictly speaking; but it’s certainly a weird story!

Explain This… If You Can

How do you see a whole town that isn’t really there? Or maybe it does exist–but it’s thousands of miles away. If you’re not sick, goofy, or intoxicated, how do you see a thing like this? And how many others have seen the same, but never, ever mentioned it because they were afraid of what people would think of them?

Not an easy story to forget.

Image result for images of legends of long beach island

I don’t know if this is a proper ghost story, or what. But it’s certainly a strange story. Let me quote from Legends of Long Beach Island by David Seibold and Charles Adams III (copyright by the authors, 1985), page 16. Short but sweet:

“Our storyteller… has more. His father swears he once saw a red-roofed, white-building village propped on the horizon a short distance from Holgate [on the southern tip of Long Beach Island, NJ]. Out fishing, he looked to the east, out to sea, and unmistakeably saw the buildings–terra cotta roofs, almost Spanish in style. He knows well it couldn’t have really been there. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, but it wouldn’t go away.”

Now there’s nothing between Holgate, NJ, and Portugal but mile after mile of the Atlantic Ocean. If we believe the witness was telling the truth–and why shouldn’t we?–then how do we explain what he saw? Does Brigadoon have a sea-going counterpart? Or was this the ghost of Atlantis? Or some as-yet unexplained natural phenomenon?

Go figure.