Read along and let us know what you think.“There are 13 of us,” says my sister, nodding meaningfully as I join her at the door of the historic Whalehead Club. Whoa! Thirteen. On a moonlight ghost tour. Now that. Is. Spooky. . . .
Spooky, of course, is what we’re after on this nearly full-moon October night in the old mansion-turned-museum on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. But alas, once we get going, I’m not really feeling it. We make our way from room to darkened room, up the staircase and down, listening to unlikely tales of smoking paintings and self-igniting candles and murder in the kitchen, and I’m thinking ho-hum.
Uh — wait a minute. Murder in the kitchen? Of the lady of the house’s ne’er-do-well brother, you say? Well, that is interesting. But hmm. There was no mention of any such event in the regular historical tour we took a couple of days earlier. Are you sure about that? Well, it certainly does add that necessary little frisson to the evening.
But it doesn’t quite fit with the picture of wealthy industrialist Edward Collings Knight Jr. and his wife that you get on the daytime audio tour of their winter vacation home near Corolla, a village on the northernmost reaches of the Outer Banks. There are (Mc)mansions galore on the Banks these days, of course, but back in the Roaring Twenties, the Knights’ splendid 21,000-square-foot, five-story art nouveau house, with its sweeping grounds on Currituck Sound, was truly one of a kind. And unlike many a McMansion, it was a welcome addition to the neighborhood, bringing jobs and riches to a fairly impoverished region.
So murder and coverup? Seems out of sync with old-timers’ memories of the Knights’ generosity and graciousness. But then again, the wealthy pair did have their little, oh, oddities. There was Marie Louise’s passion for hunting and her preference for pants over party dresses. And then the couple’s separate (though adjoining) bedrooms. The tour describes this as “common for the period.” But what about that other, not-so-common adjoining bedroom to Knight’s, where his friend and doctor, Harry Knapp, routinely slept? Okay, Knight had a heart condition. But still. . . .
I could be completely wrong, of course, but hey. I’m not the only one to wonder about the arrangement. Two years ago, at my nephew’s wedding on the Banks, the maid of honor, a local girl, planted the seeds with her stories of Banker lore and gossip about the Knights and their grand house. When she was a kid, the place was nothing but an abandoned wreck that teens liked to prowl around. Ditto the empty lighthouse keeper’s residence beside the nearby Currituck Beach Lighthouse. You know how stories pile up around mysterious places like that.
Today, the mystery’s mostly in the mind. Both buildings have been rescued and spiffed up to perfection as part of Currituck Heritage Park, a 39-acre enclave on the sound that encompasses the Whalehead Club, the still-operating lighthouse (last one built on the Banks, in 1875, its red bricks left unpainted to distinguish it from its iconic black-and-white brethren farther south), a wildlife center and Historic Corolla Village, a group of restored buildings that formed the little fishing village in the late 19th century.
Poking around the park on a drizzly day, we pick up some less well-known Outer Banks history. Because Roanoke we know. And Kitty Hawk, of course. But who knew that in the early 20th century, the waterfowl were so plentiful on Currituck Sound — the body of water separating the Banks from the mainland is on the Atlantic Flyway, the north-south migration route for many a goose, etc. — that locals did a booming business selling their catch to restaurants in the Northeast? Pretty soon, natch, the sportsmen wanted in on the action, and hunt clubs proliferated. Then the Knights built their haven, dubbed Corolla Island, so that Marie Louise — sorry, no ladies in the clubs — could get her hunting jollies, too.
After the Knights died and the waterfowl declined (totally unrelated!), the estate served variously as a World War II Coast Guard receiving station, a weekend playground for a wealthy Washington meatpacker (he gave it its present name), a boys’ academy and a secret research center for a company trying to develop a solid rocket fuel. Wouldn’t have been hard to keep things secret around here: Before a paved road from the more southerly town of Duck was laid in 1985, this was one tough spot to get to. “It was a really desolate place,” declares our ghost tour guide.”
