The Pascagoula River not only continued to sing, it began to sing more often and with more of a mournful, haunting melody. William Baxter wrote in 1848 that he had heard the river sing many times, and that he was told it was singing the song of an eternal love that refused to die. He said the music “resembled the breathing of an aeolian harp.” All of the scientists who had attempted to explain the phenomenon up until that time failed; that is still true today.

According to legend, the missionary who stood on the bank as the light-skinned tribe joined their mermaid goddess in the river said on his deathbed that the souls of the dead Indians could be saved and the strange music stopped if a priest, on a Christmas midnight, would row his canoe out alone to where the music could be plainly heard and drop a crucifix into the water; however, neither priest nor canoe would likely ever be seen again. So far as is known, no priest has yet taken the risk.

The Army of the Marching Dead

Misty figures - horses and horsemen beneath Confederate flags - rose from the thick gray fog.

Charleston, South Carolina, is a beautiful, heritage-conscious city filled with historic homes, churches, parks—and with its share of ghosts. Some of the ghosts are ordinary phantoms, well known but of little concern to the city’s residents; they include the “Gray Man” who has kept guard at one of the church cemeteries longer than any person knows, and Madame Talvande, long-ago headmistress of Charleston’s most fashionable girls’ school, who, one spring day in 1829, allowed the fifteen-year-old daughter of a wealthy planter to “escape” and elope with a New Yorker, and who still walks the halls of the old school building in self-punishment for her negligence. But there is one ghost—or, rather, army of ghosts—which stirs up such sadness that it is seldom mentioned.

During the years of the War Between the States, no street in Charleston was busier or noisier than narrow little Trapman Street, which ran from Broad to Queen, because it was out of range of federal siege guns. All day and all night, Confederate army traffic rolled up and down Trapman. Then, after the war was over, when there was no more regular army traffic, it became a quiet, deserted strip of dust and sand—that is, until midnight.