The Palatine Ghost Ship Has a Real Shipwreck Underneath It

For generations, Block Islanders described a burning ship appearing offshore each winter. The ghost had a name: the Palatine. The strange part is that underneath the apparition sits an actual shipwreck, surviving crew depositions and a mass grave.

In late December 1738, during a snowstorm, a British merchant ship bound from Rotterdam for Philadelphia ran aground on Block Island. Its real name was the Princess Augusta. Accounts disagree on how many German Palatine emigrants boarded, from about 240 to 340. Jill Farinelli's history of the voyage, as reviewed by the Massachusetts Historical Society, counts only 68 who survived the crossing; disease and hunger killed most of the rest at sea. About 20 more died after reaching the island. Their mass grave still appears in Rhode Island's historical cemetery records as the "Palentine Graves."

From there, history hands off to folklore, and folklore was not kind. In the version that spread, islanders lured the ship onto the shoals with a false light, murdered the starving, freezing passengers, set the Palatine afire and sent it burning out to sea. John Greenleaf Whittier's 1867 poem "The Palatine," published in the Atlantic Monthly, carried the legend into mainstream circulation. The surviving officers' depositions, found in 1925 and published in 1939, tell a different story: islanders helping survivors ashore.

The offshore light itself predates Whittier. Early 19th-century Block Islanders were already reporting a recurring flame-like glow near the wreck site. Explanations have ranged from atmospheric effects to glowing plankton. No one has settled it.

Block Island did not need to invent a wreck. It only needed to decide what kept glowing offshore.

Read the full story at Massachusetts Historical Society, March 2, 2018

Hot Take: Most of the dead never saw Block Island; disease and hunger took them at sea, the kind of death that never becomes a legend. Nobody tells ghost stories about a fever.