THE FERRYMAN’S FEE (OCTOBER 25TH)

The Ferryman’s Fee

It began in the early 1800s, when Wilmington’s families noticed their dead would not stay at rest.

Coins placed on the eyes were gone by morning, lids forced open as if pried with a knife. Rings vanished from stiffened fingers, leaving purple grooves. Lockets snapped from bloated necks. Worst of all were the teeth — pulled clean from jaws, gums torn ragged, coffin wood beneath them scored with scratches where iron slipped.

At first, no one spoke of it plainly. Some muttered of vandals or desperate thieves. Others blamed animals burrowing in shallow graves. But the pattern grew too sharp. Whoever was doing it had a steady hand and a hunger too vile for sense.

And always, always, there was the lantern.

On fog-thick nights, a sickly glow drifted along the Cape Fear. It swayed low, never bright, as if meant only to be half-seen. With it came the faint creak of oarlocks, though no splash of water followed. Men fishing late swore they glimpsed the outline of a skiff, but never the man inside.

Few ever saw him in town. He bought no bread, drank no ale, spoke to no soul. His life was the river. His face was long and hollow, his eyes pale as fish scales. What all agreed on was this: he was always there, and always watching.

The name came when the first graves were found empty of their coins. The old folk muttered that those pennies were meant to pay a soul’s passage into the next world. If someone was prying them off, stealing them in the dark, then he wasn’t just a thief — he was ferrying the fare of the dead away. And if there were no coins to take, he pried out the gold teeth instead.

They called him “the ferryman.” At first it was half a joke. But when men began to vanish, the jest curdled.

A fisherman never came back from setting his nets. A drunk staggered out of a tavern and was found days later washed into the reeds, his eyelids pressed shut with coins no one had given him in life. Families began to say the ferryman had grown tired of robbing corpses. Now he was taking the living too, dragging them down into the black water to pay a debt only he understood.

Then one October morning, his skiff was found splintered in the reeds. The hull cracked, the oarlocks empty, the lantern still guttering. But the ferryman himself was gone.

In his place lay another man — half-drowned, skin swollen green, eyes staring at nothing. He breathed, but only barely. The fishermen who dragged him ashore swore he mumbled without pause, clawing at the air as though he still was swimming to the surface.

They leaned close and caught the words:

“The ferryman hid it…”

He said it again and again, voice bubbling with water, the rest tumbling out in broken scraps too twisted to follow. By nightfall he was dead, jaw locked, lips still twitching as if trying to spit out the final verse.

By sundown the story had bled into the taverns. Some swore the ferryman had drowned and cursed the man to carry his secret. Others believed the survivor had glimpsed where the sack of stolen teeth and coins lay buried before the river claimed him.

What no one doubted was the refrain. It spread faster than ale, louder than laughter. People made a rhyme of it, a chant to push back the fear. They sang it drunk, voices slurred, but their eyes fixed to the floorboards. Some said finishing the verse was bad luck, others said it summoned the ferryman’s skiff to your door.

And every telling, every whisper, every slurred song began the same way — the same words the dying man gasped on the riverbank:

“The ferryman hid it…”