By the grey woods,—by the swamp
Where the toad and the newt encamp,—
By the dismal tarns and pools
Where dwell the Ghouls …
Edgar Allen Poe
No place in all of North Carolina has a more sinister name than the Great Dismal Swamp. Many motorists who cross the Virginia-North Carolina border into Camden County via US 17 pass through one of the world’s most famous wilderness areas without ever knowing it. Beside the roadway sprawls an almost impenetrable jungle, the northernmost link in the chain of large swamps of the mid-Atlantic coastal plain.
Drainage has reduced the Great Dismal from two thousand square miles to its present six hundred square miles. Nonetheless, the morass of cypress forests, peat bogs, lakes, and streams envelops a massive parcel of land in southeastern Virginia and northeastern North Carolina. The swamp is roughly half the size of the state of Rhode Island. There remains a popular misconception that all or most of the Great Dismal is located in Virginia. To the contrary, almost 60 percent of the existing swamp is within the North Carolina counties of Camden, Currituck, Gates, Pasquotank, and Perquimans.
Scientists estimate the age of the Great Dismal at between six thousand and nine thousand years. Once under the sea, this natural treasure emerged as a landform when the continental shelf last made a significant shift.
William Byrd, in his historic quest to survey the dividing line between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728, provided America with its first written description of this enormous wilderness: “The ground of this swamp is a mere quagmire, trembling under the feet of those who walk upon it…. Never was rum, that cordial of life found more necessary than in this dirty place.” The Indians who lived in northeastern North Carolina and southeastern Virginia in Byrd’s day maintained a healthy respect for the place. At times, their respect bordered on fear. Consequently, few of their number were willing to brave the Great Dismal after the sun went down.
Now, almost three centuries later, the swamp maintains its ominous, mysterious aura. While some of the unusual animals that once inhabited it—the American buffalo, for example—vanished long ago, a variety of dangerous beasts such as bears, wildcats, and venomous snakes and spiders thrive in this primeval tangle of vines, thick vegetation, and unstable ground.
There exist some remote portions of the Great Dismal that have never been seen by human eyes. Over the years, countless men have ventured into the swamp, never to be seen again. It is not surprising, then, that the place is the origin of many eerie legends and frightening tales. Unusual sights and bloodcurdling sounds reported from the swamp have inspired a variety of stories involving ghosts, spirits, ghouls, witches, fairies, strange creatures, fierce beasts, and other supernatural beings.
Hunters, drawn to the swamp because of its prodigious quantity of game, have sometimes gotten more than they bargained for. Take Harvey Pruitt, for example. On a hunting and trapping expedition into the Great Dismal many years ago, Pruitt encountered a horrifying creature that may well have been a Bigfoot. The legendary Bigfoot is most closely associated with the Pacific Northwest, but one of the first published reports of its existence concerned a sighting in the Balsam Mountains of western North Carolina; indeed, at least one sighting has been noted in more than fifty of the state’s counties. A contemporary account of the Dismal Swamp Freak—as the creature was locally named—provided a brief physical description: “This hideous thing, almost as huge as a bear, covered with long black hair, ran on its hind feet. It resembled a bear, but I would swear on a stack of Bibles, that it could not be a bear. When Harvey chanced upon the thing and surprised it, it screamed like a panther. It ran as fast as a deer, but of course it couldn’t be a deer.”
As soon as the swamp monster caught sight of Pruitt, it gave chase, forcing the hunter to flee for his life through the briers and brambles. After surviving the ordeal, the intrepid outdoorsman assembled a group of fellow adventurers the following day. The heavily armed men took to the swamp to find “the most frightening varmint [Pruitt] had ever seen.” Using his incomparable knowledge of the Great Dismal, Pruitt tracked down the creature, captured it, and brought it out of the wilderness alive. He confined it in a cage on his property.
News of Harvey Pruitt’s amazing discovery spread quickly. People who lived on the fringes of the swamp came to behold the wonder that the Great Dismal had produced. Old-timers swore that nothing of its kind had ever been witnessed in these parts. In their bewilderment over what the beast was, someone recalled tales about escaped slaves who had reverted to a wild state after taking up refuge in the swamp. But the Dismal Swamp Freak was not one of them.
Try as he might, Harvey Pruitt could not induce the captured beast to eat the food he prepared for it. Ultimately, it wasted away and died a caged animal.
What was the Dismal Swamp Freak? Could it have been the only Bigfoot captured to date in the entire world? Are there more of its kind lurking in the vast recesses of the swamp?
Although the Dismal Swamp Freak was not a humanoid, this wilderness has done strange things to some of the people who have been fearless enough to take up residence in it. In 1912, the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot printed a report about a weird swamp dweller who inhabited a long, coffin-like structure. He was described thus: “The hermit who lives here is a friendly, short man with unshaven face, and unshorn mass of gray hair. He speaks an unintelligible gibberish. He was dressed in a most inconceivable assortment of cast-off clothing, each garment ingeniously patched and mended until little of the original cloth remained.”
Mysterious lights have been witnessed in the Great Dismal for as long as its history has been recorded. Scientists have deemed the bluish white lights to be swamp gas. And then there are the ghosts that float about the swamp. Sir Thomas Moore, the noted Irish poet, visited the Great Dismal in 1803 while serving as consul to Bermuda. There, he heard the story of the ghost of an Indian girl who was frequently seen paddling her eerie white canoe in the waters of the swamp. Moore immortalized her ghost in his classic poem “The Lake of Dismal Swamp.”
Two decades before Moore visited the Great Dismal, its wilderness was the setting for ghostly drama during the American Revolution. It was a wartime incident here that produced the phantom French voices that can still be heard in the North Carolina portion of the swamp.
In its quest to aid the American war effort, France sent troops across the Atlantic. One of its warships, laden with gold to pay the troops fighting in the colonies, was forced to seek shelter at Hampton Roads because of a savage storm. Once inside the protected waters of that Virginia harbor, the ship hastened up the Elizabeth River to avoid a confrontation with British vessels. In the process, the French ship was sighted by an enemy man-of-war, which gave chase. In the course of the pursuit, the fleeing ship was forced into shallow water. Fearing that his vessel would be grounded, the captain ordered it burned after the cargo of gold was loaded into smaller boats. On came the relentless British. The French crewmen hid the gold in the river and along its banks. They then fled deep into the Great Dismal, where their British attackers finally overtook them. In the bloody hand-to-hand combat that ensued, all the French sailors were slaughtered. To this day, their voices can still be heard echoing across the expanse.
Located on US 17 approximately three miles south of the Virginia-North Carolina border, the Great Dismal Swamp Canal Visitor Center is an excellent place for motorists to get a safe view of the historic swamp. But this is about as close as most folks should get. For, you see, lurking within the jungle nearby are known and unknown terrors that belong only in a place so aptly named the Great Dismal Swamp.