GHOST SHIP POINT

(aka Malheureux Point)

Location: Locally nick-named Ghost Ship Point and Dead Man's Rock, the actual name of the promontory is Malheureux Point, and it is located at the end of a dirt road off Highway 39 near Shell Beach and the Fort Pike Natural Reserve north of Alluvial City east of Lake Borgne and north of Blind Bay in St. Bernard Parish near New Orleans, Louisiana where Interstates 10, 55 and 90 interest at the mouth of the Mississippi River.

Description of Place: New Orleans is located on land that was created by years of soil and clay being washed south by the Mississippi River. It is surrounded by swampland and several islands and promontories or long slender pieces of land in Orleans Bay. Malheureux Point receives its nick-name from the spectral image of the Jess Belle, a Nineteenth Century steam ship that vanished in a storm off New Orleans on October 8, 1860. Several sightings of the ship have appeared in proximity of the point, but they are not limited to the New Orleans area. The Jess Belle has also been reported off Gulfport and Pascagoula, Mississippi and Mobile, Alabama.

Ghostly Manifestations: Ghost ships are a recurring theme in several paranormal legends. Among them, the Flying Dutchman is the oldest and most prevalent. The story goes that a sea captain named Bernard Fokke was sailing the Dutchman around the Cape of Good Hope in the early Eighteenth Century when he ran into a violent storm. Swearing against God or the Devil, he was cursed to be a portent of death forced to captain a crew of corpses to guide those sailors lost at sea into the afterlife. Since then, the Flying Dutchman has been seen sailing the open sea with a skeleton at its bow. Other ghost ships include the Eliza Battle and the James T. Staples riverboat in the Mississippi River along Alabama. Further north near Memphis, Tennessee, the flaming visage of the Sultana appears to witnesses where it exploded and sank, disappearing just before its ghostly victims manage to drag themselves ashore dripping wet. In the Osumi Strait near Kagoshima, Japan, a legendary ship called the Funayuhrei travels silently in a thick fog at night trying to sneak up on others ship in the strait. While not necessarily a ghost ship, the Mary Celeste is still a popular maritime story since its entire crew vanished in 1859. While not nearly as popular as some of the others, the Jess Belle is still yet another sea-bound mystery.

"I think you're going to find that the stories about the Jess Belle have a bit more relevance to them than say the Dutchman or the Sultana." Historian Arwin Sprouse is a curator for the Louisiana Historical Museum in Baton Rouge and a part-time paranormal researcher with the New Orleans Paranormal Society. "Since she vanished in 1860, she's been seen almost a hundred times by almost a thousand people between 1870 and 1957. She's been seen before several storms and drifting off the bay by several reputable people.

By written records, the first known appearance of the Jess Belle occurs in the dusk of September 13, 1871 in the ship's log of a clipper ship called Neptune's Trident off Curlew Island. Manned by Captain James Sparrow, he had his second officer make the report: "In the late after noon hours as we passed Curlew and were looking for the lights of Orleans, we came across a single steam-powered paddle wheel being tossed and abated by the open gulf waters. Seeing as it seemed to be in distress and wondering what a paddle wheel was doing this far out, we did try lending out assistance. We tried contacting her three times, but there was no sign of life on her decks and our efforts to reach her seemed fruitless. Every time we traversed to where we thought her to be, she seemed to move further out to sea. As light decreased, we lost sight of her, but the last time we gained sight of her, we managed to gain a name off her bow. We are sad to report that the Jess Belle despite our efforts might be lost beneath the waves."

There are no reports of the crew of the Trident learning the truth of the Jess Belle as a ghost ship, but their efforts to find her sound uncannily like the stories of several other ships coming and going from New Orleans who have seen her bobbing in the waters off shore. In several accounts, she is always seen in the pre-dawn or late dusk hours when light is at a minimum and even surrounded by fog in the winter months. From November 1899, fishermen described her "sailing so close to us that we could have boarded her with nary a sound from her paddles or engines as if she were being pulled along by spectral hands." From Andrew Jackson Davis, a gambler who once rode the Jess Belle as a child, he recalls looking out his state room on a ship out of Gulfport and recognizing the Jess Belle coming upon them hard a stern as a huge shadow out of the fog. He braced to sustain the impact, but no crash ever came. No one else saw the ship, and he didn't tell his story until ten years later after another sighting. Sprouse believes his story is genuine because he doubts the likelihood of the crew or other passengers repeating the tale out of reprisal.   

The most famous sighting of the Jess Belle out of all the accounts comes from April 24, 1931. What makes this sighting so popular is the sheer number of witnesses who testified to it and the independent accounts that confirmed it. On that day, the Naval Destroyer USS Decatur was returning to port with a shipload of sailors and was heading to New Orleans at half-speed after midnight when they sighted a single unidentified paddlewheel seemingly abandoned in their path. A signal went out, several men rushed to deck and claxons went off to warn of the crash. Instead of threatening a ship as it had in 1899, 1903 and 1911, it was now in the line of harm by a much larger and much more modern steel battleship. Efforts to warn the craft went unheeded and the battleship hung a hard left to miss collision. It seemed a dead hit as the larger steel craft bore down on the smaller ship, just barely scraping across the bow of the smaller ship, but as they passed and looked behind them... there was nothing to be found. Not a sign of wreckage, not a cry for help, the only thing those sailors found was inky black sea and darkness all around them. One of the crewmen on board was future Arkansas lawyer and state assembly man Harold Garber, who repeated the story years afterward. After Garber's death in 1963, Judge Leonard Winslet who was a young ensign at the time repeated the story almost verbatim.

Such off-shore stories are few and far between. Most of the current tales are reported from shore, and usually in the vicinity around Malheureux Point though from different perspectives.

"During a mild rain storm in 1973," Sprouse adds. "A couple of shrimpers docking their boat reports seeing a paddle wheel craft heading toward New Orleans. It didn't look odd at the time, but a few minutes later, State Patrol Officer Marion Tisdale saw the same ship coming at full speed past the Interstate 10 bridge and vanishing on the other side. A few minutes later, several witnesses reported seeing a mysterious paddle wheel coming out of the fog that night and following the shoreline, and that account was further supported by several other witnesses after the newspaper published the story. Now, if that wasn't the Jess Belle trying to reach home, what the hell was it?"

The town greatly benefited from the use of steamship travel from the 1840s to the 1890s. Among them was the Horace Gladstone which was built in the Fulton Shipyards in Memphis in 1853 and commissioned in 1860. Her original captain was Nathaniel Lethbridge, a Northerner from Ohio who returned home at the on-set of the Civil War. He left it to his second officer, Percival Entenille, who renamed her the Jess Belle after his future wife. She stayed on the St. Louis to New Orleans route afterward until she vanished in a storm on October 8, 1860, although at the time it was rumored she might have been seized by Union spies on board and taken further north to Chicago. One erroneous 1973 reference even claims the Jess Belle was lost off the Florida Keys in the Bermuda Triangle, but as Sprouse concludes, that claim was likely made to further embellish the reputation of the Triangle. Yet, another account claims Captain Entennile's body was recovered at Malheureux Point, hence the name, Dead Man's Point, but most historical records disagree since it was already known by that name even by Entennile's time. The story of that nick-name is actually linked to the rumors about a pirate skirmish that occurred there in the late 17th Century.

The debate on the whereabouts of the Jess Belle ended when the wreck was moved closer toward New Orleans Bay from its resting place near Curlew Island by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Not discovered until August 2010, the ship's double-expansion engines were found by BP oil engineers in Chandelur Sound ten miles from their believed sinking spot. How the ship made it this far south off its route was not explained until a high school student named Zack Martin found an odd piece if iron ore stuck in the boat's compass that did not belong to any part of the ship. It is now theorized that the compass might have been tampered with by the ship's engineer to discredit Captain Entenille and gain control of the craft. Rumor is that engineer Corey Scully believed Entenille to be sympathetic to the North, but this is unconfirmed. A more personal theory involves an unconfirmed love triangle between the captain, his wife and Scully.