CAULDRON POINT
Location: Cauldron Point is a scenic cliff side within Ecola State Park located near Cannon Beach, Oregon north of Oswald West State Park. The Astoria Country Club and Moss Gardens border it to the north and the Golden Rock Beach to the south.
Description: Ecola State Park offers year-round recreation for all sorts of modern day explorers. The shoreline of the 1300-acre park borders three and a half miles of clean hard sand. Numerous miles of trails through towering Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock offer breath-taking views of the Pacific Ocean along with the geological rock formations created by millennia of receding tides beating and hitting the shore. Among these pristine rock formations, many in excess of fifty feet tall and sticking out a hundred feet out of the cliffs, are landmarks such as Cauldron Point, Haystack Rock and Shipwreck Point. Albatross and other sea-faring birds search the tide pools here for food and migrating gray whales can be seen during the winter and spring. Cabins that can be rented exist along the trails of nearby Tillamook Head. In the 1930s, the Lighthouse Lounge provided the best in seafood and continental cuisine until it closed down in the 1960s. The old restaurant was demolished in 1995.
Ghostly Manifestations:
Ecola State Park located on the shoreline of Cannon Beach, Oregon offers pretty
much the same old view of the Pacific Ocean as it did a century ago when the
first explorers arrived here. In the mist of the Pacific seawater, travelers and
visitors can see the perfect blue horizon of the ocean stretching into infinity,
the balance of sea and land supporting the life that lives here and perhaps
something a bit more into the next life. Somewhere between ten to twelve
individuals a year have reported seeing an old time sailing ship in the distance
that doesn’t seem to be quiet real. Often buffeted by unseen winds, the ship
could not possibly exist, but it does and it has the support of a very local fan
club to support its existence.
Michael Walsh is a long time native of nearby
Astoria. The son of Jerome Walsh of the local historical society, Michael is a
foremost expert in Naval history pertaining to piracy of the high seas and of
One-Eyed Willie, the local name of pirate William Charles Morgan, who once
sailed these waters. It is supposedly his ship, “The Inferno,” which sails
these waters where he met his demise, but the skeptical and cynical firmly claim
that it is the suggestion and romanticism for the sea and the local lore, which
causes witnesses to see this apparition.
“I’ve seen the Inferno three times since
1985.” Walsh insists vehemently. “It always sails south to north in the same
direction he was heading when he clashed again the British Armada in 1651. Its
sails are always at full mast as it bobs against the waves. More often at night,
the hazy gray image of the three-masted schooner has appeared once during the
turbulence of a full storm sailing straight for the rocks to be dashed to its
fate, but it never seems to make it. Before it makes it, the mist always seems
to erase it away or the sea and tide carry it away to be seen another day.”
In 1989, close to the local Fourth of July
picnic in the park, a crowd of nearly fifty people crowded dangerously close to
the cliff to videotape what they thought was the ship coming out around the
rocks in the cliffs. First one person noticed the rigging of the ghostly craft
poking over the tops of the rocks and rushed to tape it, but then several others
joined him to similarly gain evidence of the ghostly ship. In the confusion and
pushing, one tourist lost his camera over the top of the cliffs and one person
started screaming it was coming. Out of the small crowd, only seven said they
saw the ship sail out and vanish from view while everyone else walked away upset
and believing to be the victims of a hoax. While it seemed that the Inferno was
able to choose its own witnesses, one father of three managed to tape a brief
twenty-seven seconds of a vague gray craft more than a hundred yard off shore
sail out of the horizon and then melt into the air.
Since then, park rangers and joggers have
reported seeing mysterious lights bobbing off shore and hearing cries out of
nowhere from would-be sailors on non-existent crafts. One female biologist
collecting specimens off the beach in 1994 claimed that she was not interested
in wandering the beach a second time because she felt she was being watched by
an unseen figure on the cliffs. Unable to shake the feeling, she decided to head
to her car while she still had the light to see the trail up the cliff, but as
she ascended and dusk approached, a voice wafting from out of the shore kept
calling her to return. In fact, Walsh has heard this voice as well.
“One Halloween,” Walsh tells the story.
“I was leading a troop of boy scouts down on the beach and I heard someone
softly calling, ‘Mikey, Mikey… Mikey…’ It sounded like someone right
next to me and I’d turn my head away from the scouts and no one would be
there. I’d ask the boys if they had heard anyone, and they’d say they had
only heard my voice the whole time. I haven’t even been called Mikey since I
was a kid.”
According to Lt. Clarke Deveraux, one of
Walsh’s oldest friends, the Coast Guard had a strange encounter in the bay as
they patrolled the coast on maneuvers. According
to Deveraux, who was one of the officers on board during the experience, a Coast
Guard Cutter actually came close enough to the Inferno to almost actually board
her. It was November 1996 (or March 1995 depending on the version Deveraux
tells) and the fog was extremely thick around Cauldron Point. Maneuvering by
lighthouse, the men on the cutter started seeing this dark shape coming at them
from the fog. Failing to register on radar, the craft slowly started coming into
view in the form of a huge dark gray hull with tall barren masts twelve feet off
the port side of the cutter. As officer and mortal gathered at the railing, they
saw the dark shape of the Inferno pass with ten feet of them. Thin, starving men
more dead than alive clung to the railings wearing torn rags and stared back to
the living looking for peace. Lasting barely three minutes, both crews glared
into the eyes of the other from behind thin veils of smoky mist. Deveraux said
there had to be fifty to hundred men on board, but his story has varied over the
years depending on the version he tells. In all versions, the Inferno is on the
port side and he can see into the eyes of the men on board. Sometimes the sails
are bare or sometimes they are full. Sometimes it lasts as long as ten minutes.
As the ship vanishes into the pitch white fog, the call of One-Eyed Willie
emanates from the craft for full astern or not at all. Not one of Deveraux’s
friends in the Coast Guard have confirmed that anything was ever sighted out of
the ordinary in any of the times they were in the fog off the cliffs.
“Well, you see,” He explains with a
conniving Corey Feldman-like grin. “They never came out to see it, and we were
all ordered from ever reporting it to the press, but it was there, surely as
I’m sitting across from you.”
History:
One of Ecola State Park’s
first attractions was a beached whale. In 1806, Captain William Clark and twelve
members of the Corps of Discovery climbed over rocky headlands and fought their
way through thick shrubs and trees to get to the whale in what is now Ecola
State Park. Today, a paved road from Cannon Beach makes the trek to the park
much easier for visitors.
Identity of Ghosts:
The Inferno was the ship of William Charles Morgan, a pirate and buccaneer who
traveled up and down the Pacific coast of North America from 1614 to 1626. Known
locally around Seattle as “One-Eyed Willie,” he reputed lost an eye while in
combat with the Spanish Navy in 1622. Despite brief incarceration in a Spanish
fort near modern-day Mockingbird Heights, California, Morgan sailed as far south
as San Quintin, Mexico where he left behind a pregnant lover (although it's
unrevealed if he knew about her condition) and as allegedly
far north as Heceta Straight off Canada where he concealed firearms. The model
for the traditional image of the movie buccaneer, his habits and traits were
transferred into pirates like Edward Teach, Jean Lafitte, Eduardo Vasquez and
Edward Learner. Morgan allegedly created the habit of walking prisoners off a
gangplank so that their bodies would not graze the side of the Inferno as they
fell into the water, but this is unconfirmed. There are no known accounts of any
historical pirates using or taking credit for a gangplank. In 1626, Morgan, AKA
One-Eyed Willie, was confronted by the British in one last confrontation and
according to oral legend was backed into a bay under the cliffs as the British
Navy collapsed the cliffs down around him. Written diaries report that they sunk
the ship out at sea. Nevertheless, legend says this happened closer to Astoria
and that Morgan and his crew survived
in the caves and tunnels in the area for about five more years and buried their
riches somewhere in the
cliffs.
In 1935, local scavenger Chester Cobblepot announced to the
local newspapers that he knew where to find the treasure and then
vanished to be never seen again. Though believed to have retired in obscurity
with the treasure, his remains were found in 1985 in a series of caves under the
local Moss Gardens. He had been
killed in a cave-in. The youths that had discovered him while exploring the
caves also reportedly confessed they had found the Inferno intact in an underground cavern, but
the tide then washed it out as the cavern was opened up once more to the outside
sea. As
a matter of fact, most of the so-called hauntings started after the alleged ship
was supposedly washed out, but as trafficked as the shoreline is, no one has ever
reported seeing it drifting in the bay. If the so-called ghost ship sightings over the years had been this
antique derelict ship floating in and out on the tide like a modern Mary
Celeste, one would believe someone would have caught up with it.
In 1998, however, a serious amount of wooden wreckage was found scattered over the shore of Loomis Lake State Park in Washington to suggest the drifting craft had finally shattered unattended against the bay. However, the litter of splintered wood, bone and tarnished brass over almost a hundred feet was reported as debris washed over the cliff from a missing shanty so the actual truth about the ship has yet to be told. Historically, the Inferno rests somewhere under the waters off Heceta Head where the British Army sunk it in 1626..
Comments: The Goonies (1985) - Location description based on Ecola State Park, Cannon Beach, Oregon. Hauntings based on the Palatine Light at Block Island near Rhode Island.
Mockingbird Heights from "The Munsters" (1963-1964); Pirate Charles Morgan from Episode: "The Treasure of Mockingbird Heights"