CUTLER’S COVE

Location: Cutler’s Cove is a rocky inlet near Rocky Point Beach in Coeursville, Massachusetts, roughly two miles from the border of Essex and Suffolk Counties.

Description: Cutler’s Cove is a small bay off Rocky Point Beach on Cutler’s Parkway near Broad Sound in Massachusetts Bay. It is bordered by a rocky reef and cliffside dotted with small shanties and cabins near a lighthouse. During the summer, it is a prime vacation spot in addition to a hangout for teenagers. Several boaters also cruise the water as they indulge in fishing in waters sports and divers appreciate the clear water close to shore to explore the wrecks of ships left underwater over years of storms.

Ghostly Manifestations: Tall, thin and topped with a head of thick shaggy brown hair turning white, Ebenezer Sharp has been running the Cutler Marina near the cove since 1965. A former employee of the late Captain Amadeus Cutler, he has been a fisherman and a captain as well as a professional deep-sea diver in some aspect at one time of his life. Today, he lives in the hold of the permanently moored ship known as the Sea Witch. To those willing to buy him a drink, he will share the stories of ghosts and phantoms of the high seas, many of which from around the cove itself.

“The longest lasting story of these waters involves the ship of Redbeard the pirate.” Sharp begins. “He was a sailor and a seaman in these waters who took to plundering British ships for the early colonists, but after the war he continuing his illegal pirating and started extending to both Dutch and American ships as I was told. Called the new Blackbeard, he ordered his men to call him Redbeard as he swore to sink more ships than Edward Teach (the original Blackbeard) ever did. The English Navy, meanwhile, hunted him out and trapped him in the cove and that’s where Redbeard met his end as his ship burned down around him. Ever since then, visitors to the cove have claimed to have seen his ship with it’s decrepit tattered sails, ruined masts and war-torn hull drifting against the tide and sometimes vanishing in the dark.

“She appears often in the cold winter months whenever the fog lifts off the bay and drifts inland like a blanket erasing the land from the sea. I’ve seen her darkened masts poking from the white of the mist like the blackened bones of a dead man that has risen from the bottom of the sea. She drifts slowly against the current like a craft trying to ram in to the rocks and always vanishes in the thickening fog. Sometimes, oft not I have swear, I’ve heard Redbeard hisself laughing from the boat as if he has finally had the last joke.”

Redbeard is not the only local phantom in the bay. Some visitors and tourists have sighted a non-descript figure on the beach that vanishes at a moment and never leaves footprints. In March of 1969, local oceanographer, Professor Lemuel Poisson, was sitting on the rocks near the marina smoking a cigarette in a quiet moment when he saw the figure coming closer and closer. As he thought it was right upon him, he offered a cigarette to the figure, but found himself alone and no sign of another person on the entire beach. The ghostly figure in gray has been seen by over forty-eight witnesses in over twenty years. Most of the sightings of the ghosts have occurred before every major storm to hit New England since 1948.

Boaters have also claimed to see something glowing in the water under their boats. One fisherman described it like a man with a flashlight walking the bottom of the bay. Divers exploring the sunken ships have seen the glowing shapes floating around the wrecks on the bottom. One man checking lobster traps was so spooked by the lights following him around that he fired a pistol into the water trying to kill whatever was lurking underneath him.

In June of 1969, a gang of teenagers holding a barbecue at Rocky Point Beach saw an entirely new ghost different than the others. One of them had brought along his Great Dane and the dog spent most of its time upon arrival running around and romping through the water and tide. It then started getting dark and the activity died down as the kids talked around their campfire, but then the dog started barking at the surf. It started raising a huge fuss as its owner came to see what it was barking it. Rumors then take over the story as dog and owner watched a figure of a man stagger from the sea in a old-fashioned deep-sea diver’s costume. It was the kind with the huge metal helmet and weighted-shoes. The figure just kind of walked out of the tide, stood staring at the campfire and the kids and then turned and vanished back into the tide. While most people might have been frightened by the odd visit, the kids actually became fascinated by it and returned several times to see if the phantom diver would return.

“Several others have seen the phantom diver.” Sharp reports. “They’ve seen him wandering the reefs or standing on the hill with seaweed hanging from his body. No one has seen his face, but all who have sighted him claim there is no head inside the helmet looking out.”

History: Coeursville was founded in 1645 by a small community of the most wealthy and elite families of the area: The Blakes, The Weatherbys, The Kingstons, The Magnuses and others and it was incorporated from a community to a city in 1769. Cutler’s Cove was once land the Magnus family set aside for the Cutler family who had served them in some aspect once as servants or employees from their shipping firm. The Cutlers actually made friends with Spanish pirate, Captain Eduardo Vasquez who sometimes frequented the bay and even shared some of the Magnus’s fine food with him. Another reported figure was Former Naval Captain Herman Learner who might have been the Redbeard of local folklore. As Learner used the cove to hide his ship and men from the British, he helped defend the area from the British in the Revolutionary War but was overwhelmed eventually and sunk in nearby Nahant Bay.

The Cutlers, meanwhile, built a small port that over time became the modern marina of the present for the other local families to dock their boats. Never acquiring much money, Captain Amadeus Cutler was enjoying his sailing ship in the bay one day in 1964 when a speedboat cruised into his path. The pilot of the speedboat wasn’t paying attention and rammed Cutler’s simple schooner and sent it sinking into the bay. Dying childless, the marina was left to his wife and after her death; it was left to the parks department of the city in 1977.

Identity of Ghosts: Cutler’s confused ghost is reported to be the confused diver wandering the beach. Before she died, his wife who spent the last days of her life living in the lighthouse was reputed to have dabbled in a bit of witchcraft while contacting her husband for advice on how to run the marina and keep it going. Legend claims he wanders the reefs looking for his lost boat or the craft that sunk him. Still yet, one rumor claims that Cutler never died, but faked his death to leave town with a mistress or to escape his debtors.

While local lore links Captain Learner to Redbeard, more recent research points out that Redbeard was actually Abraham Magnus, ancestor of the modern Magnus family. This is substantiated by Learner being known as having black hair and the Magnus family having redheaded family members every generation or so. However, this is contradicted by the fact that Redbeard purportedly hated the Magnus family since it was they who turned his position over the British Navy. Nevertheless, Edmund Magnus, the current head of the family and owner of the family-shipping firm, has participated in every Colonial Days festival by dressing up as Redbeard and entertaining the tourists who visit the city. Edmund is the nephew of C.L. Magnus, expoused from the Magnus Companies for embezzling money and goods from the shipping firm. 

Professor Lemuel Poisson, however, has an explanation for the glowing shapes seen in the cove. He identifies it as a local plant life known as phosphorus porifera or as it is better known “glowing seaweed.” The plant-life generates its own luminescence and was once used in the Nineteen Century by divers because of the way it glows in the depths. Unfortunately, he cannot explain reports of it floating against the current as many witnesses have seen.

Comments: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You, Episodes “A Clue For Scooby-Doo” and “Go Away Ghost Ship.” Professor Lemuel Poisson from “Scooby-Doo, Where’s The Crew.” Hauntings based on Rhode Island’s Block Island, Hatteras Beach of North Carolina and Pawley’s Island of North Carolina.