Carolina Beach: The Weirdest Beach in the World

Lifeguard Stand where faceless apparition in gray was seen

If you follow me on Facebook at Theresa's Haunted History of the Tri-State, you've probably seen me post about my recent vacation to Carolina Beach, North Carolina. We had a wonderful family beach vacation, yet still managed to cram in as much haunted fun as we could.  We had beach and boardwalk days, but then we also had ghost walk and museum days and just overall had a really fun time together.  One day in particular we combined our beach fun with our spooky fun....

It started with a Google search.  Although I had read several books about the hauntings around Wilmington and Pleasure Island, I hadn't taken much time to just peruse what the online community had to say about the Carolina Beach area specifically in terms of spooky happenings.  The first website that came up was Ghosts of America.  Now, this isn't necessarily a site I would recommend to a serious researcher, but I've found some pretty off-the-wall stuff posted on there for West Virginia, so I wasn't too surprised to read what someone had submitted for Carolina Beach.

Apparently there is a stretch of Carolina Beach located off the  800 block of Carolina Beach Avenue that sounds like it must be the most haunted beach in all of America, if not the world!  (LINK to original post) The person submitting the tale had witnessed or had heard about the following at this location:

*A full-bodied apparition wearing a gray hoodie, which flapped in the breeze, come up out of the surf and head towards the lifeguard stand before disappearing.

*A giant cigar-shaped UFO

*Seneca Guns---strange, unexplained booming noises that seemingly come from the ocean. These are heard throughout the Carolina Coast and I'll be dedicating a special blog post to them later on!

*A giant manta ray estimated to be the size of two pick-up trucks

*Waterspout and various dangerous riptides

*A large bale of marijuana covered in barnacles

*A Civil War era button marked with the word 'Liverpool'

Haunted beach's public parking lot, across from Kupboard Grocery

Pretty crazy, right! That's a lot of stuff to happen in one little stretch of beach, so I knew we had to go.  Our main access point to the beach was at the boardwalk, since it was near our rental house, restaurants, etc. But, this location was actually sort of a hidden gem.  We easily found the place the person from the ghost site was talking about.  When we got there, there was only a few public parking spots, but they were all empty. The walk to the beach was nearly level and we had the majority of it to ourselves.  Seriously, there were only about 3 other families there when we arrived.

Unfortunately for me (because I'm a weirdo) nothing weird happened during the 4+hours we were there. But, we actually had a pretty cool time. My son, Luke, enjoyed collecting shells, building sand castles, and testing himself on how deep he could go out into the surf without me freaking out.  I stayed where it was pretty shallow since the waters were kinda rough from all the recent storms we had, but I had a fun time.  And while I'd like to remember this stretch of beach as being 'that haunted beach we went to,' I'll remember it instead as the location where I got the worst sunburn of my life!

Luke playing in the haunted surf