Newport's Ghost Ship Came Home in 1750. Its Crew Never Did.

One fine morning in 1750, farmers and fishermen at Easton's Beach in Newport, Rhode Island, watched a brig stand in toward shore with all its sails set and its colors flying. They expected it to hit the breakers and break apart. Instead it came ashore, almost miraculously intact, and when they climbed aboard there was no one on it. The longboat was gone.

As the story was told and retold, the scene below deck grew eerier: coffee boiling on the stove, breakfast laid out, tobacco smoke still hanging in the air, a dog and a cat the only living things aboard. An 1885 newspaper went further and invented a mutiny and a murder. It is exactly the kind of story a town keeps adding to when it can't explain the original.

The original is strange enough. John Ross Dix's 1852 Hand-Book of Newport, and Rhode Island names the captain as John Huxham and says the Sea Bird was coming home from Honduras. Newporters supposed, Dix wrote, that the crew found themselves too close to the breakers, fled in the longboat and drowned. It was only a guess. No word of Huxham or his men ever came.

The Newport Historical Society holds letters described as witness accounts of the ship coming ashore, and it published a 20-page study of the case in 1973.

The ship itself carried on. It was refloated, sold to Newport merchant Henry Collins and renamed the Beach Bird. According to later accounts, the British seized it after occupying Newport in 1776 and made it an armed galley. The ship got a new name, a second career and a war.

Its crew got none of that.

Read the full story at A Hand-Book of Newport, and Rhode Island, 1852

Hot Take: The most unsettling detail in this story isn't the missing men. It's the coffee.