The Curse of Palmyra Island

By Curt Rowlett



Forteans and other students of the strange and bizarre are probably well
versed regarding the subjects of ghosts, hauntings and curses. Most of us
are probably familiar with the classic tales of haunted houses or haunted
places like a graveyard or a swamp. And for those stories with a more
nautical flavor, there is always the Bermuda Triangle and sightings of ghost
ships like the Marie Celeste and the Flying Dutchman. But can an island also
be haunted or cursed? (Strange readers will recall an article by Vincent H.
Gaddis in Strange #10, "Sable: Island of Tragic Ghosts," in which the author
recounts the haunted history of that particular island in the Atlantic Ocean).

As a former Merchant Marine and avid sailor, I have always been drawn to
strange phenomena as it relates to the world's oceans. My interest in
nautical forteana was rekindled recently as a result of reading a book by
Vincent Bugliosi titled And the Sea Will Tell, the true story of a double
murder that took place on isolated Palmyra Island in 1974. (1) While that
book primarily focuses on the murders that occurred there during that time
period, my fortean radar was significantly aroused by the continuous allusions
made by the authors and others who had been to the island regarding the
"Palmyra Curse." According to this story, although Palmyra appears to be a
tropical island paradise like something out of movie South Pacific, it is in
reality, a rather nasty place to be and there appears to be a
pattern of disaster and near-disaster associated with the place. Many
sailors who have visited the island in the time before and after the murders
took place have commented on the sense of "something not being quite right" on
Palmyra and speak in cloaked terms of a malevolent aura and a foreshadowing of
doom that the island seems to possess. Listen to Richard Taylor, a yachtsman
who spent time on Palmyra in 1977 and who had this to say in his testimony at
the murder trial:


I had a foreboding feeling about the island. It was more than just the fact
that it was a ghost-type island. It was more than that. It seemed to be an
unfriendly place to be. I've been on a number of atolls, but Palmyra was
different. I can't put my finger on specifically why, but it was not an
island that I enjoyed being on. I think other people have had difficulties on
that island.


And Norman Sanders, another yachtsman who conducted geological experiments on
Palmyra and who testified at the trial, had this to say about the island: “Palmyra is one
of the last uninhabited islands in the Pacific. The island is a very threatening place.
It is a hostile place. I wrote in my log: "Palmyra, a world removed from time, the place
where even vinyl rots. I have never seen vinyl rot anywhere else." He also wrote that
"Palmyra will always belong to itself, never to man. It is a very forbidding place."

It seems that many of these experienced and adventurous sailing people
ventured to Palmyra expecting to find an island nirvana, but like Fletcher
Christian and the mutineers of HMS Bounty who found that life on Pitcairn
Island deteriorated into a grim struggle for survival, so perhaps did their
romantic notions about Palmyra soon fall apart.

The murders that took place there are but one of a long list of calamities,
disasters and synchronicities that have been associated with Palmyra since
it's discovery in the late 17th Century. (Speaking of synchronicity, Kristan
Lawson's article "The Mysterious Appearance and Disappearance of Maria Laxara"
in Strange #16, discusses another mysterious island, Maria Laxara, which
apparently has a habit of "vanishing." Interestingly, a reproduction of a
rare nautical map that accompanies the Lawson article in that issue of
Strange, also shows the location of Palmyra Island near the bottom of the
illustration!).

Although officially listed as an island, Palmyra is actually an atoll. The
difference between an atoll and an island is that an atoll is formed by the
growth of coral around the rim of an ancient ocean volcano that has sunk below
the surface of the sea over eons of geologic time, giving the classic atoll a
circular or horseshoe shape. Hundreds of such atolls dot the massive area
that is the Pacific ocean. (Perhaps the most famous of these is Bikini atoll
where the U.S. Navy tested nuclear weapons in the 1950's). In proximity are
the legendary deep trenches of the Pacific: the Mariana and Tonga abyss,
incredibly some seven miles deep and the epicenter of many earthquakes. The
trenches also parallel strings of volcanic activity in the Pacific.

Palmyra island's coordinates are 5 degrees, 52 minutes North, 162 degrees, 6
minutes West, placing it in near the very center of the Pacific ocean or about
1000 nautical miles south- southwest of Hawaii in the North Pacific Ocean, or
about one-half of the way from Hawaii to American Samoa. The island measures
approximately a mile and a half in length by a half mile wide. My research
for additional information on Palmyra yielded little but a description of the
island from a United States government geographical survey that lends to the
image of the atoll as a remote and desolate place: “Lying six degrees above the
equator, (Palmyra consists of) about fifty islets covered with dense vegetation,
coconut trees, and balsa-like trees up to 30 meters tall....the west lagoon is entered
by a channel which will only accommodate vessels drawing 4 meters or less of water;
much of the road, the landing strip and many causeways built during (World War II)
are unserviceable and overgrown.

On a nautical chart, Palmyra is but a tiny speck in the middle of the mass of
blue that represents the Pacific Ocean. The island lies well off of the major
shipping lanes for vessels plying the Asian/American run and is geographically
perhaps one of the remotest places on earth and one of the last few truly
uninhabited islands left in the world. Local fauna consists of mosquitoes and
other insects, lizards, land and coconut crabs, a huge bird population, palm
and coconut trees and mangrove bushes. The interior is thick jungle. The
coral reef and lagoons at Palmyra are also a breeding ground for the dangerous
gray and blacktip reef sharks whose aggressiveness is well know throughout the
Pacific and has been noted by every person who has ever ventured to the
island, some with fatal consequences. (Many visitors to the island found that
swimming and even wading in the island's lagoons was completely out of the
question because of the large shark population and their fiercely aggressive
nature). And although an abundance of fish live on the reefs and in the
lagoons, the majority of them are inedible and poisonous because of Ciguatera,
a type of algae that grows on coral and which the fish contain in their flesh.

Palmyra Island was discovered by "accident"one night in 1798 by American sea
captain Edmond Fanning while his ship the Betsy was in transit to Asia. The
tale of the discovery of Palmyra is one of a psychic nature in that Captain
Fanning, alone in his cabin at night, was disturbed from sleep three times by
such a weird premonition of danger (whether through the sixth sense that has
kept many a seafaring man alive or something that can be directly attributed
to Palmyra itself) that he finally went out onto the deck and shouted for the
helmsman to heave to in the darkness. Dawn the next day revealed a dangerous
reef lying dead ahead of the Betsy that would have ripped the entire bottom of
the ship out and sent her to the bottom. As it turned out, this was the
northern edge of the coral reef that surrounds Palmyra Island. A Fate
magazine article of 1953 discusses this incident:


"He (Captain Fanning) retired at 9 p.m. as usual with conditions normal, but
awoke from a sound sleep between nine and ten (o'clock) to find himself on
the upper steps of the companionway. This worried him, since he had never
walked in his sleep before. After a little conversation with the first mate, who
was pacing the deck, he returned to his berth. He slept less than half an hour,
awoke again, and found himself once more at the head of the companionway.
This time he had more conversation with the mate and returned again to his
berth. Then for a third time he awoke, finding himself in the same position,
but fully clothed. This so disturbed Fanning that he was convinced that it
was (in his words) some kind of "supernatural intervention" and determined to
lay the ship to for the rest of the night. The other officers and crew were
surprised and evidently thought his mind (was) off balance. Leaving orders
that he should be called at daybreak, he retired again and this time slept
soundly. In the morning they came about and resumed their (same) course, but
had not sailed far when they discovered breakers (one mile) ahead. The helm
was instantly put (over)...and the roaring of the...breakers...was heard
distinctly...less than a mile away. All on board were impressed, realizing
that had they been running free for another half hour...not one would have
been alive by sunrise". (2)



Although Captain Fanning noted the position of the island in the ship's log,
he failed to make a timely report and the official credit for discovery went
to another American captain named Swale whose ship, the Palmyra, was blown off
course in a storm that pushed it onto the island in 1802.

In 1816, the Esperanza, a Spanish pirate ship loaded with gold and silver
plunder from the Inca temples in Peru, came under attack from another vessel
and a fierce battle ensued. Several crew members who managed to survive the
fight sailed off with the treasure only to wreck on a nearby reef. As the
ship was sinking, they managed to transfer the treasure to an island located
beyond the reef whose name was Palmyra. Stranded there for a year, they
supposedly buried the Inca gold under a tree on Palmyra and then sailed off in
rafts they had built. One raft was later rescued by an American whaling ship
with only a single survivor left onboard who soon succumbed from exposure and
pneumonia. The other raft was never heard from again. (This bit of
historical data sounds a little like the Oak Island saga where treasure
hunters have attempted for years to reach a supposed buried treasure in a pit
located under a tree. Theories as to who constructed the pit and what type of
treasure it contains also includes pirate activity and Inca/Maya treasure).

In 1855, a whaling ship was reported to have been wrecked on Palmyra's
dangerous reefs, but attempts to locate the ship and it's crew turned up
nothing.

Ownership of the island was granted to Judge Henry E. Cooper of Hawaii in 1911
from a purchase price of $750.00. He eventually sold all but one small islet
at Palmyra (Home Island), apparently believing the rumor that priceless Inca
artifacts of gold and silver, part of the pirate plunder of the Esperanza, was
still buried there under a tree. With the exception of Home Island,
possession of the rest of Palmyra eventually fell to the Fuller-Leo family in
1922 who were soon embroiled in a legal skirmish over ownership with the
United States in 1940. The United States wanted jurisdiction of Palmyra
assigned to the Department of the Navy in anticipation of World War II in the
Pacific. Although the private-ownership status of the island was eventually
resolved in favor of the Fuller-Leo family, the island was still used as a
naval air facility during World War II in the Pacific and became a base of
operations for air attacks against Japan. As a result, military relics can be
found in abundance there such as old gun emplacements, ammunition and fuel
dumps, abandoned war equipment, machine-gun bunkers, underground tunnels and
buildings, as well as what is left of the old landing strip, lending a
timeless and ghostly feeling to the place. For the most part, Palmyra was
used during World War II for long-range air patrols in the Pacific. The
island itself was attacked only once when a Japanese submarine surfaced
offshore and began shelling the beach with it's deck gun. A five-inch gun
battery on the island drove the submarine off. Hal Horton, a former Navy
officer was stationed on Palmyra from 1942 to 1944 and had this to say about
the island:

Once one of our patrol planes went down near the island. We searched and
searched but didn't find so much as a bolt or piece of metal. It was weird.
Like they'd dropped off the edge of the earth. Another time, a plane took of
from the runway, climbed to a couple hundred feet, and turned in the wrong
direction. They were supposed to go north and they went south instead. It
was broad daylight. We never could figure it out. There were two men aboard
that plane. We never saw them again. We had some very bad luck on that
island. Old salts in the Pacific called it the Palmyra Curse. [The
island]...is very small. You [could] fly over it at ten thousand feet and not
see it if there [were] a few clouds in the sky. Once we heard a plane over
head trying to find us, be he crashed in the drink before he could find the
runway. We didn't get to the poor guy fast enough. Sharks found him first.

In 1974, the grisly double murder of a sailing couple that became the subject
of And the Sea Will Tell took place on Palmyra. The evidence at the
subsequent trail for murder showed that the murdered couple, Mac and Muff
Graham of San Diego, were probably killed for their expensive sailboat, the
Sea Wind and the food stores it contained by an ex-convict who had taken up
residence on the island. It was six years before the skeletal remains of Muff
Graham were discovered washed ashore on Palmyra by Sharon and Robert Jordan,
another yachting couple, during their extended stay on the island in 1980.
Although the Jordans had heard stories from other yachting people about the
murders, they had never connected it to Palmyra until they discovered some old
newspaper clippings in a building in the jungle about the missing couple,
apparently left behind by someone attracted to the island because of the
notoriety of the murders. Days later while beach combing, Sharon Jordan found
a human skull and other bones that had apparently fallen out of a metal box of
World War II vintage that had washed up on the beach. (Her discovery of Muff
Graham's skeletal remains is in itself a long shot at the odds in that Sharon
Jordan just happened to be walking along that particular stretch of one of the
earth's most isolated beaches at what was most likely the only time that the
bones would ever be exposed. The next tide would have most certainly washed
the bones back out to sea to disappear forever). Evidence suggested that Muff
Graham had been either shot or bludgeoned, burned with an acetylene torch,
dismembered and her remains placed in a small metal storage container taken
from one of the old military rescue boats on the island and then dumped into
the lagoon. (The body of Mac Graham has never been recovered and is believed
to have been hidden in a second missing container somewhere on or near the
island).

John Bryden, a witness at the murder trial, was a rugged outdoor adventurer
who had spent fourteen months on Palmyra prior to the murders trying to start
a coconut plantation without success. Appearing not to be the type of
individual who could be easily frightened, he nonetheless testified at the
trial that "there were times when (Palmyra) felt like a foreboding place. It
sometimes felt a little bit spooky."

Tom Wolfe, a yachtsman who was on Palmyra just before the murders testified at
four different criminal trials in relation to the crime. Just one month prior
to the trial, Wolfe had an experience that is either a further bit of
testimony to the realm of synchronicity or a part of the strange residual
power that effects those who have had contact with Palmyra: One morning,
after a brutal storm had hit the coast along his beach front home located on
the Puget Sound in Washington, Wolfe went out for a walk along the shore to
see what kind of flotsam the storm may have deposited on the beach. A mere
forty feet from his house, he spotted a cylindrical object washed up on some
rocks. Uncovering the object, he was astonished to discover that it was a
tube containing a navigational chart of Palmyra Island! Recounting this story
to one of the defense attorneys in the trial, Wolfe could only wonder at what
strange forces could have caused the Palmyra chart to wash up literally at his
doorstep on the eve of his scheduled testimony during a critical stage of the
trail. He noted that "finding that damn chart was eerie (and) I'm not the
superstitious type, but I'll admit, it really shook me. It was if Palmyra,
the island itself, had reached out and touched me from three thousand miles
away." (If not a supernatural occurrence, one would have to wonder what the
astronomical odds were of such a thing happening).

And the list of strange things that occur in connection with Palmyra keeps
growing. Perhaps like the Sirens of Greek mythology whose sweet singing lured
sailors to their deaths on rocky coasts, Palmyra continues to beckon.

In 1981, John Harrison, a Canadian yachtsman along with his two daughters were
marooned on Palmyra after their sailboat was struck by a typhoon and de-
masted. Harrison and his daughters managed to get to Palmyra where they
subsisted on fish, coconuts and what they had salvaged from their vessel.
They remained on Palmyra for over a month while a somewhat bizarre legal
entanglement and the foot dragging of the United States and Canadian
government ensued over who should be responsible for assisting the three
castaways. They were eventually rescued by plane after spending days clearing
the old runway on the island. (3)

In 1987, acting on a tip from a fishing vessel, a sailboat was sighted by a
Coast Guard C- 130 aircraft just southeast of Palmyra. An aerial inspection
revealed no sign of life onboard the drifting sailboat and Coast Guard
personnel noted that the mast was broken off and that the sails were torn and
shredded. A week after the sighting, the vessel was boarded by Coast
Guardsmen who found the skeletal remains of owner Manning Edward onboard. The
cause of death was undetermined. But prior to leaving on his extended three
year voyage through the Pacific, Manning had spoken excitedly about his plan
to visit an uninhabited island called Palmyra.

In 1989, another sailboat named the Sea Dreamer, in transit from San Diego to
Hawaii was caught in a storm that pushed her far off course to the south. And
onto Palmyra Island. After a brief stay on the island, the boat again
departed for Hawaii and disappeared. An extensive search by the Coast Guard
between Palmyra and Hawaii and even along the coast of the United States
failed to turn up any trace of the Sea Dreamer and the four members of the
Graham Hughes family that was her crew. (Again in the spirit of
synchronicity, you will recall that the murdered couple, Mac and Muff Graham,
were also from San Diego and their vessel was named the Sea Wind).

Sources:

1. Vincent Bugliosi with Bruce B. Henderson, And the Sea Will Tell (Ivy Books/Ballantine Books, 1991.)

2. H.F. Thomas, "Premonition of Danger," Fate (March 1953). See also Vincent H. Gaddis, Invisible HorizonsBooks, Inc., 1965.)
(Ace
3. Edward E. Leslie, Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls (Houghton Mifflin Company, p. 517-520.)


Palmyra Island is a profoundly unique and unspoiled tropical paradise in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Privately owned and a possession of the United States, this remote atoll is inhabited only by unsurpassed and exotic wildlife. The pristine and virgin waters surrounding Palmyra are some of the richest in the world, teeming with game fish. Located halfway between Hawaii and American Samoa, Palmyra Island is the northernmost part of the Line Islands which also includes Christmas, Fanning, and Washington. It consists of a coral reef that rings 19 major islets, many of which are connected by causeways. Of its 13 square miles or 8,320 acres, 600+/- acres are dry area at high tide. Approximately 1,000 miles south southwest of Honolulu and 350 miles north of the equator, Palmyra is situated at 5 degrees 52 minutes north latitude and 162 degrees 5 minutes west longitude.

Due to Palmyra's high average rainfall of 150-160 inches per year, the atoll is covered with dense vegetation, including numerous species of tropical plants, extensive coconut trees, and 90-foot balsa-like trees. Wildlife thrive on the islets, and the lagoons and reefs are filled with marine life. Temperatures average in the mid 80's year round and like Hawaii, the island is cooled by the trade winds.

It is even said that there is treasure buried on one of Palmyra's islands from the Spanish ship Esperanza which shipwrecked in 1816. The island was annexed by the Hawaiian Islands in 1862. From 1940 to 1947, Palmyra was occupied by the U.S. Navy, who undertook substantial dredging to open a channel from the sea to the west lagoon. It was at that time that a causeway system was built to connect most of the islands. Additionally, a 6,000 foot runway was constructed and utilized by the U.S. Forces. Palmyra has periodically been inhabited since 1951.