Reminds me of that old song

Where the deep blue pearly waters
Wash upon white silver sands

I learned it from a Sonny James recording, but the original apparently was by a guy named Don Rondo, in 1957.

Gorgeous.

All the green stillness one could wish. And moss like cushions on the rocks. Someplace in the midst of this there's a place to sit and be. Not do, but be. Listen to the breeze and the soft ripple of water and let the soul take delight.

Apples. Red, green, yellow, or a combination of all three. They've been tagged as the "forbidden fruit" of the Garden of Eden, and no wonder; a woman eating a sweet, superlatively juicy apple has tempted many an otherwise innocent painting into erotica.

But apples also can be tattletales, as they are in this story from Connecticut. The best version can be found in Michael Norman and Beth Scott's 1995 book HISTORIC HAUNTED AMERICA.

Is it any wonder that Clement Clark Moore, in his poem "A Visit from Saint Nicholas", compares Santa Claus to "a peddlar just opening his pack"? The peddlar, whose itinerant wanderings survived up into Mom's childhood, was very like Santa, indeed. He generally would come into a community only once or twice a year, carrying all his wares in a great pack on his back. Unlike Santa, though, he walked everywhere, with a stick that served him as support and, if need be, weapon. (When Mom was a little girl, the peddlar drove a panel truck.)

And his pack was as full of surprises as Santa's too. In it he carried necessities and what hillbillies once called "fooleries": cloth, needles, thread, tinware, seasonings for the kitchen, small tools, pipe tobacco, and all sorts of funny gimcracks for the little ones. He also would carry news from village to village. He would sell all he had, go back to his suppliers, wherever they might be, and replenish his stock for another trip.

One such man came to what was then Nine Mile Square (near modern Franklin), Connecticut, in 1693, when winter was turning its back and spring was tiptoeing in after it. His name was Horgan, according to tradition. He was greeted happily by the community, and by the end of his first day in the village he had sold nearly everything in his pack.

Unfortunately, he chose a poor place to spend the night.

Every community has a bogeyman, and in Nine Mile Square that man was Micah Rood. He reminds me of a man in a Charlie Daniels song. . .

People didn't think much of the old man
They all thought he acted funny
The old man didn't care about nothin' at all
All he cared about was money. . .(The Legend of Wooley Swamp)

Micah Rood was surly at best and downright evil at worst. Unlike Lucius Clay in the song, though, Rood had one other thing he cared about: his orchard, which was full of trees that produced beautiful red apples, which he refused to share with anybody. He was even known to sit up with a blunderbuss and fire at anyone who tried to steal fruit.

Nobody knows for certain why Horgan stayed at Micah Rood's that night. When the trouble began, early the next day, Rood swore the man had gotten up and left before daylight.

The trouble was that Horgan was found beaten to death under one of Rood's apple trees that morning, his nearly empty pack ripped open and his nearly full money pouch empty.

Suspicion is no good without evidence, but the only evidence wasn't anything that would stand up in court. There was something funny happened that spring in Micah Rood's orchard; the apple blossoms, usually pure white or creamy pink, all had peculiar streaks of blood-red slashed through their petals, and on the tree where Horgan's body was found, they had no pink or white at all.

Still, Micah Rood might have bulled his way through, had not something even more peculiar happened when the apples began to mature. The pulp, normally a lush juicy white, suddenly began to have red in it in the shape of drops of blood.

Micah Rood, it's said, was driven mad by what happened to his beloved apple trees. No longer did he run anyone off who tried to steal fruit; on the contrary, he begged them to take whatever they wanted. When the sheriff went to talk to Rood again about Horgan's murder, figuring the old man was ready to confess now, he found him dead in a chair by a window that overlooked his orchard.

Not much else to tell, except that Norman and Scott say there are still trees in that area that produce fruit with blood drops in the pulp--descendants of Micah Rood's apple trees.

And on that bloody note, fair thee well.

Alexander Hamilton was dead; Aaron Burr had been acquitted twice on murder charges and had fallen into deeper infamy when he, an Irish adventurer named Harman Blennerhassett, and a general named James Wilkinson were implicated in a plot to form their own kingdom, with Burr, apparently, to be its nominal head of state, in the new territories of the Louisiana Purchase.

After this travesty, Burr fled the country in 1808 and lived in Paris for four years. Upon his return he would suffer the greatest tragedy of his checkered life: the loss of his beloved daughter, Theodosia.

Burr had married, in 1783, Theodosia Bartow Prevost, a widow said to be some fifteen years older than he. Of the two daughters she bore him, only one survived childhood. This daughter, also named Theodosia, was Burr's pride and joy. The older Theodosia died when her daughter was eleven.

Theodosia's education was overseen by her father and was remarkable for a woman of her time. When she was eighteen, she married Joseph Alston, a young South Carolinian who would eventually be elected governor of his home state. Theodosia gave birth to a son in 1802, whom she named Aaron Burr Alston.

Theodosia did not thrive in South Carolina. The hot humid Low Country climate was not good for her health, and neither were the calamities her father brought upon himself. There are letters and writings of hers extant in which she complains of nervousness, boredom, worry and ill health. At the same time she was writing letters to various government officials and to First Lady Dolley Madison (of whom her father had been a suitor; Burr had actually introduced the vivacious widow Dorothea Payne Todd to James Madison, whom she eventually chose over Burr) trying to work out some compromise by which her father, acquitted of treason but nonetheless disgraced, could return from his European exile, which he did in June 1812.

Theodosia might have gone north to spend time with him save for her own great tragedy: her only child died of fever on June 30. She suffered a complete collapse and was unable to begin the journey until the end of December, sailing on the schooner PATRIOT on December 30.

That was the last time Theodosia was ever seen alive. Somewhere off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the PATRIOT was lost with all hands.

And therein lies a great North Carolina mystery. The best version of the story of Theodosia Burr's portrait comes from John Harden's 1949 book THE DEVIL'S TRAMPING GROUND AND OTHER NORTH CAROLINA MYSTERY STORIES.

As Harden tells it, an elderly widow, Mrs. Mann, who lived in a shack on Nags Head, was in possession of a portrait of an exquisitely lovely young woman. Mrs. Mann had had the portrait since 1812; it had been part of the spoils from an unmanned vessel cast up on Nags Head in that year and was given to her by her first husband, who helped salvage the cargo. In 1869, when Mrs. Mann was on her deathbed, she gave the portrait in payment to a Dr. William G. Pool, who attended her in her final days. Dr. Pool made inquiries following his acquisition, eventually concluding that the portrait was a likeness of Theodosia Burr Alston--a conclusion that was seconded by members of the Burr and Alston families, to whom he sent photos during his search. Theodosia, according to the Alstons, had had the portrait done and was taking it with her as a gift to her father.

The rough waters off Cape Hatteras, which have earned their reputation as the graveyard of ships, will forever hold the secret of Theodosia's death. Over the two centuries since she vanished there have been reports of pirates who confessed to having boarded the PATRIOT and forcing all hands to walk the plank, including a lovely young woman; there is another story that Mrs. Mann, or someone else living on the sands of the Outer Banks, cared for many years for a woman who was found barely alive one cold morning in the winter of 1812-1813 and who lived out her life in their care, bereft of her reason, eventually drowning in the sea she came from. One very dubious tale even ties Theodosia to the Female Stranger, about whom I blogged back on May 8th, who died in Alexandria, Virginia in 1816; however, the Female Stranger's tombstone says explicitly that she died at age twenty-three, a decade younger that Theodosia would have been in 1816.

And there have been reports for many many years of the ghost of a young beautiful woman who walks the sands of Cape Hatteras. Perhaps she is some nameless woman lost to the sea; perhaps she is Theodosia. Unless she speaks, no one will ever know.

Until next time, fair thee well.

The above is a contemporary engraving of the famed duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, fought on July 11, 1804, ending in Hamilton being mortally wounded and dying the next day.

The two men are a prime example of what can happen when politics and hot tempers override common sense. Political opponents for nearly twenty years, the trail to the dueling grounds at Weehawken, New Jersey had become a broad path to destruction in the contested election of 1800. The sitting Federalist president, John Adams, had basically made himself so unpopular through a series of political blunders that he had no chance of a second term. The vote came down to Congress, where Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, who already had a reputation for political duplicity, were in a dead heat to step into the presidency. Hamilton, although he favored neither man, threw his considerable power behind Jefferson; he thus became president, and Burr vice-president.

Hamilton had by 1804 suffered several reversals of fortune, the most tragic being the death of his oldest son in an 1801 duel. Burr, too, was looking for new worlds in politics; his incompatibility with Jefferson made it likely that Jefferson would drop him from the ticket in the upcoming election, and Burr was planning to run for governor of New York--where Hamilton had powerful political connections (not the least being the Schuylers, his wife's inlaws).

A report of apparently very personal slurs on Burr's character by Hamilton, published in an Albany newspaper in April 1804, was the immediate cause of the duel. The author, Charles Cooper, did not repeat the slurs, and a bewildered Hamilton could not recall making any recently. The writer Gore Vidal has speculated that Hamilton had insinuated that Burr was carrying on an incestuous relationship with his only daughter, Theodosia, and that it was a private report of this filth that sent Burr over the edge.

In New York, duelling was already illegal, which is why, when Burr issued his challenge and Hamilton accepted, the grounds at Weehawken, New Jersey, were chosen. The rest is of course history; Hamilton took his shot and deliberately missed. According to the code of duello, this was a perfectly acceptable behavior, and would have given both men an out--Burr could have returned a deliberate miss and honor would have been satisfied. Hamilton, however, did not make his intention known, and according to the code, Burr's shot to kill was likewise perfectly acceptable.

Hamilton died the next day and has been practically deified ever since; Burr has become a hissing villain, despite being acquitted of murder charges twice in the wake of the duel. His subsequent career included the infamous plot to form a separate country in the newly-acquired territories of the Louisiana Purchase and the heartbreaking loss of his daughter Theodosia at sea in 1812.

Hamilton, for all that he may have called the ambitious Burr a dangerous man, was equally dangerous however, because of his political ideas. Hamilton was the spiritual father of the idea, now held by Karl Rove and others of that ilk, that one party should hold a permanent majority in government. Hamilton was a true elitist, believing the vote should be extended only to men of education, wealth and property. And he believed that the presidency, and election to the Senate in particular, should be for life.

Fortunately, with the election of Jefferson, in which he chose to throw his weight behind a man whose ideas were not compatible with his, the tide turned against Hamilton's beliefs, and would, by the time of Andrew Jackson's election to the presidency a quarter-century later, become moot--until the twenty-first century.

So who truly was the more dangerous man that day in a hot New Jersey July?

History hasn't really decided. I'd say Hamilton was. But, since Burr fired the fatal shot, it's been axiomatic that he was.

And with that odd conundrum, fair thee well.