February is 'Ghost Ship Month'

Mark your calendars. North Carolina has named February 'Ghost Ship Month.' Students around the state will be reading about ghost ships, abandoned vessels that sailed the seas, sometimes because a crew abandoned ship and sometimes because the ship was haunted. From the Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C.:

The Chapel Hill Public Library Foundation is pulling together a series of events for its "Ghost Ship Month" in February. Simpson will be among several speakers to appear in town and at local schools during the month, which have a focus on shipping and wrecks off the coast of North Carolina. Even today, [writer and UNC professor Bland] Simpson said, "I feel like, when I walk into a library, I'm walking into a gold mine. I just feel like oxygen is rushing out of the doors as you walk in." Simpson heads the creative writing program at UNC Chapel Hill, and his works include "Ghost Ship of Diamond Shoals." The book, described as a nonfiction novel, is about the unsolved mystery of a ship called the Carroll A. Deering. That ship was wrecked off the N.C. coast in 1921, running up on the shoal off Cape Hatteras. However, when rescuers reached the vessel, they found the sails set, but the entire crew was missing. The fate of the crew has never been determined. The events in February also will include appearances by Kevin Duffus, president of the Graveyard of the Atlantic museum; Richard Lawrence, who is part of the state agency supervising the recovery of Blackbeard's ship off the coast; Linda Molloy, director of the Chicamacomico Lifesaving Station; Tim Noonan, who wrote about the recovery of gold from the S.S. Central America; Carole Boston Weatherford, author of "Sink or Swim," about a lifesaving station on the Outer Banks manned entirely by black rescuers; Bill Hooks, author of "The Legend of the White Doe," about Virginia Dare; and Elizabeth McDavid Jones, who wrote "Ghost Light on Graveyard Shoal," a children's historical mystery about a story from the Outer Banks.