CAULDRON POINT
Location: Cauldron Point is a scenic cliff side within Ecola State Park located near Cannon Beach, Oregon north of Oswald West State Park. The Astoria Country Club and Moss Gardens border it to the north and the Golden Rock Beach to the south.
Description: Ecola State Park offers year-round recreation for all sorts of modern day explorers. The shoreline of the 1300-acre park borders three and a half miles of clean hard sand. Numerous miles of trails through towering Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock offer breath-taking views of the Pacific Ocean along with the geological rock formations created by millennia of receding tides beating and hitting the shore. Among these pristine rock formations, many in excess of fifty feet tall and sticking out a hundred feet out of the cliffs, are landmarks such as Cauldron Point, Haystack Rock and Shipwreck Point. Albatross and other sea-faring birds search the tide pools here for food and migrating gray whales can be seen during the winter and spring. Cabins that can be rented exist along the trails of nearby Tillamook Head. In the 1930s, the Lighthouse Lounge provided the best in seafood and continental cuisine until it closed down in the 1960s. The old restraunt was razed in 1995.
Ghostly Manifestations: Ecola State Park located on the shoreline of Cannon
Beach, Oregon offers pretty much the same old view of the Pacific island as it
did a century ago when the first explorers arrived here. In the mist of the
Pacific seawater, travelers and visitors can see the perfect blue horizon of
the ocean stretching into infinity, the balance of sea and land supporting the
life that lives here and perhaps something a bit more into the other life.
Somewhere between ten to twelve individuals a year have reported seeing an old
time sailing ship in the distance that doesn’t seem to be quiet real. Often
buffeted by unseen winds, the ship could not possibly exist, but it does and it
has the support of a very local fan club to support its existence.
Michael Walsh is a long time native of nearby
Astoria. The son of Jerome Walsh of the local historical society, Michael is a
foremost expert in Naval history pertaining to piracy of the high seas and of
One-Eyed Willie, the local name of pirate William Charles Morgan, who once
sailed these waters. It is supposedly his ship, “The Inferno,” which sails
these waters where he met his demise, but the skeptical and cynical firmly
claim that it is the suggestion and romanticism for the sea and the local lore,
which causes witnesses to see this apparition.
“I’ve seen the Inferno three times since
1985.” Walsh insists vehemently. “It always sails south to north in the same
direction he was heading when he clashed again the British Armada. Its sails
are always at full mast as it bobs against the waves. More often at night, the
hazy gray image of the three-masted schooner has appeared once during the
turbulence of a full storm sailing straight for the rocks to be dashed to its
fate, but it never seems to make it. Before it makes it, the mist always seems
to erase it away or the sea and tide carry it away to be seen another day.”
In 1989, close to the local Fourth of July
picnic in the park, a crowd of nearly fifty people crowded dangerously close to
the cliff to videotape what they thought was the ship coming out around the
rocks in the cliffs. First one person noticed the rigging of the ghostly craft
poking over the tops of the rocks and rushed to tape it, but then several
others joined him to similarly gain evidence of the ghostly ship. In the confusion
and pushing, one tourist lost his camera over the top of the cliffs and one
person started screaming it was coming. Out of the small crowd, only seven said
they saw the ship sail out and vanish from view while everyone else walked away
upset and believing to be the victims of a hoax. While it seemed that the
Inferno was able to choose its own witnesses, one father of three managed to
tape a brief twenty-seven seconds of a vague gray craft more than a hundred
yard off shore sail out of the horizon and then melt into the air.
Since then, park rangers and joggers have
reported seeing mysterious lights bobbing off shore and hearing cries out of
nowhere from would-be sailors on non-existent crafts. One female biologist
collecting specimens off the beach in 1994 claimed that she was not interested
in wandering the beach a second time because she felt she was being watched by
an unseen figure on the cliffs. Unable to shake the feeling, she decided to
head to her car while she still had the light to see the trail up the cliff,
but as she ascended and dusk approached, a voice wafting from out of the shore
kept calling her to return. In fact, Walsh has heard this voice as well.
“One Halloween,” Walsh tells the story. “I
was leading a troop of boy scouts down on the beach and I heard someone softly
calling, ‘Mikey, Mikey… Mikey…’ It sounded like someone right next to me and
I’d turn my head away from the scouts and no one would be there. I’d ask the
boys if they had heard anyone and they’d say they had only heard my voice the
whole time. I haven’t even been called Mikey since I was a kid.”
According to Lt. Clarke Deveraux, one of
Walsh’s oldest friends, the Coast Guard had a strange encounter in the bay as
they patrolled the coast on maneuvers.
According to Deveraux, who was one of the officers on board during the
experience, a Coast Guard Cutter actually came close enough to the Inferno to
almost actually board her. It was November 1996 (or March 1995 depending on the
version Deveraux tells) and the fog was extremely thick around Cauldron Point.
Maneuvering by lighthouse, the men on the cutter started seeing this dark shape
coming at them from the fog. Failing to register on radar, the craft slowly
started coming into view in the form of a huge dark gray hull with tall barren
masts twelve feet off the port side of the cutter. As officer and mortal
gathered at the railing, they saw the dark shape of the Inferno pass with ten
feet of them. Thin, starving men more dead than alive clung to the railings
wearing torn rags and stared back to the living looking for peace. Lasting
barely three minutes, both crews glared into the eyes of the other from behind
thin veils of smoky mist. Deveraux said there had to be fifty to hundred men on
board, but his story has varied over the years depending on the version he
tells. In all versions, the Inferno is on the port side and he can see into the
eyes of the men on board. Sometimes the sails are bare or sometimes they are
full. Sometimes it lasts as long as ten minutes. As the ship vanishes into the
pitch white fog, the call of One-Eyed Willie emanates from the craft for full
astern or not at all. Not one of Deveraux’s friends in the Coast Guard have
confirmed that anything was ever sighted out of the ordinary in any of the
times they were in the fog off the cliffs.
“Well, you see,” He explains with a conniving Corey Feldman-like grin. “They never came out to see it and we were all ordered from ever reporting it to the press. But it was there, surely as I’m sitting across from you.”
History: One of Ecola State Park’s first attractions was a beached whale. In 1806, Captain William Clark and twelve members of the Corps of Discovery climbed over rocky headlands and fought their way through thick shrubs and trees to get to the whale in what is now Ecola State Park. Today, a paved road from Cannon Beach makes the trek to the park much easier for visitors.
Identity of Ghosts: The Inferno was the ship of William Charles Morgan,
a pirate and buccaneer who traveled up and down the Pacific coast of North
America from 1645 to 1657. Known locally around Seattle as “One-Eyed Willie,”
he reputed lost an eye while in combat with the Spanish Navy in 1651. Despite
brief incarceration in a Spanish fort near modern-day Mockingbird Heights,
California, Morgan sailed as far south as San Quintin, Mexico where he left
behind a pregnant lover and as allegedly far north as Heceta Straight off
Canada where he concealed firearms. The model for the traditional image of the
movie buccaneer, his habits and traits were transferred into pirates like
Edward Teach, Jean Lafitte, Eduardo Vasquez and Edward Learner. Morgan
allegedly created the habit of walking prisoners off a gangplank so that their
bodies would not graze the side of the Inferno as they fell into the water, but
this is unconfirmed. There are no known accounts of any historical pirates
using or taking credit for a gangplank. In 1626, Morgan, AKA One-Eyed Willie,
was confronted by the British in one last confrontation and according to oral
legend was backed into a bay under the cliffs as the British Navy collapsed the
cliffs down around him. Written diaries report that they sunk the ship out at
sea. Nevertheless, legend says that Morgan and his crew survived in the caves
and tunnels in the area and buried their richest somewhere in the cliffs.
In 1935, local scavenger Chester Cobblepot
announced to the newspapers that he knew where to find the treasure and then
vanished to be never seen again. Though believed to have retired in obscurity
with the treasure, his remains were found in 1985 in a series of caves under
the local Moss Gardens. He had been
killed in a cave-in. The youths that had discovered him while exploring the
caves also reportedly had found The Inferno intact in an underground cavern,
but the tide then washed it out as the cavern was opened up once more to the
sea. As a matter of fact, most of the so-called hauntings started after the
alleged ship was supposedly washed out, but as trafficked as the shoreline is,
no one ever reported seeing it drifting in the bay.
In 1998, however, a serious amount of wooden wreckage was found scattered over the shore of Loomis Lake State Park in Washington. The litter of splintered wood, bone and tarnished brass over almost a hundred feet was reported as debris washed over the cliff from a missing shanty.
Comments: The Goonies (1985) Location description based on Ecola State Park, Cannon Beach, Oregon. Hauntings based on the Palatine Light at Block Island near Rhode Island.