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The huntsman thought he’d found some unexpected dinner. He only planned to ride to his father’s house, but didn’t hesitate to chase his dogs when they broke for the creek. When he held his lantern, turning its light to search for the animal’s eyes, he was left petrified. His dogs whined and recoiled in terror. There were no eyes staring back at him. There was no animal at all. An iridescent vernal light retreated from the canopy as he regained himself, shouldering his shotgun to shoot. But it was too late. Whatever he saw disappeared back into the darkness — and his dogs refused to give any pursuit.
This huntsman was not alone in his experience. Newspaper articles of the time and local lore identify dozens of other hunters, hounds, and local passersby who experienced strange occurrences on Abbotts Creek. All these legends attribute these supernatural encounters to the same entity, leftover spirits of the American Revolution.
A Sportsman’s Ghost Story
Some 140 years earlier, British General Cornwallis stood on the shore of Abbotts Creek. Behind him was a track record of frustration as he failed to destroy General Nathanial Greene’s Patriot Army. Tired, outmaneuvered, and desperate, he scavenged the surrounding area for food and supplies.
But Abbotts Creek was teeming with patriotic support. Local militias chased the loyalists away three years prior, after a Tory gang hanged the pro-independence preacher of the local church. Cornwallis was surrounded by wilderness, a hostile populace, and an increasingly burdened supply train.
As he stared into the water, deep in thought, Cornwallis decided to trade weight for speed to catch up with Greene’s army. Turning around, he ordered his men to start digging into the sloping bottomland.
There on the muddy creek banks of North Carolina’s piedmont, his soldiers buried barrels of silver and gold. “Better to carry food we eat than gold we can’t spend,” he thought to himself. Besides, once he caught up with Greene, he could recover the treasury.
But that wasn’t the only thing Cornwallis hid on Abbotts Creek. Patriot skirmishers constantly harassed his Army, resulting in more than a few casualties. So along with his payroll, he buried his dead — postmortem guards of the king’s gold.
Cornwallis’ Last Guard
For the next century, Cornwallis’ ghosts roamed the creek, making sport of sportsmen and their hounds. Hunters following their dogs became lost in the dark hardwood forests of the rural Carolina foothills, led away by flashing orbs of otherworldly light.
The best hounds treed these specters, mistaking them for game. Old timers even brought axes on their hunts to chop down the treed ghosts. But the specters always slipped away, wasting the huntsman’s pursuit. Few hunters returned to the creek a second time.
Local newspapers, books, and historians kept the stories of Abbotts Creek’s ghost alive into the middle of the 20th century. Some folks even claimed they found the treasure.
But the tales eventually died out. Modernity and development crept up on North Carolina, and as progress grew the traditions waned. The hunters’ forests became housing developments and strip malls. Nowadays newcomers dismiss these stories as hoaxes, tall tales designed to keep people away from moonshine stills and prime game land.
But the specters don’t care what modernity thinks about them. A century after Cash and Mean chased Cornwallis’ ghosts, two local boys went hunting on Abbotts Creek.
With their grandparents’ old shotguns, they aimed to bag some woodcock. As the December sun hid behind the foothills, they left the bottomland empty handed. Sitting on the tailgate of their truck, they felt the fog roll over the heights above the creek. An eerie silence followed. They grabbed their guns and listened. No wood ducks whistled, no deer grunted.
Then, from the canopy, they saw a green, iridescent orb of light flicking through the dormant trees. There were two of them, floating without sound at a steady pace as if on patrol. Stunned, more by curiosity than fear, the two boys watched motionlessly. After a few minutes, the specters disappeared back into the darkness as quickly as they came.
You won’t find this in any news stories today. I know because I was one of those young boys. The land we hunted was on my family’s 300-year-old farm, ground Cornwallis marched through on his way to Guilford Courthouse. So, is there actually any treasure? Do Cornwallis’ ghosts still haunt the Carolina countryside? I don’t know if any treasure lies beneath Abbotts Creek. But I do know that Cornwallis’ last guard is still on patrol.