In the year 1823, every whaling ship out of Massachusetts Bay carried a vial of witch-ash in its crow’s nest—charred remnants from the gallows of 1692. Sailors swore it warded off the Gray Mist, a fog said to carry the shrieks of hanged women. All except Captain Josiah Caine, who called it “hysteria peddled by fishwives.”
His ship, The Damnation’s Profit, hunted the white whale called Meneptah—a beast with barnacles shaped like screaming faces. On the eve of their third voyage, an old Wampanoag woman boarded, her cloak stitched with quahog shells. “Your great-grandmother signed Rebecca Nurse’s death warrant,” she hissed. “The sea remembers.”
Josiah threw her a Spanish dollar. “Pray I don’t harpoon your ghost next.”
For nine weeks, the sea gave nothing. Then, on a moonless night, the lookout cried: “Meneptah breaches!” But as Josiah plunged his rusted harpoon, the whale’s flesh tore like parchment. Beneath lay not blubber, but a woman’s skeletal hand clutching a bone harpoon etched with J.C.—his own initials.
The Gray Mist descended.
Men began vanishing. First the cook, found inside a sealed barrel with his throat full of seawater. Then the mate, strangled by rigging that slithered like eels. Each corpse bore a barnacle on their tongue, each barnacle a tiny carved witch-mark.
On the final night, Josiah faced the mist alone. From its depths emerged a spectral whaling boat rowed by women in nooses, their oars made of gallows wood. At the prow stood the Wampanoag woman, now young, holding his harpoon. “The sea collects debts,” she said. “Your line began with ash. It ends with brine.”
When The Damnation’s Profit washed ashore in 1824, its hull was pristine—but every timber dripped saltwater that never dried. In Josiah’s cabin lay a logbook, its last entry scrawled in black kelp: “She has my bones. Let Salem burn twice.”
To this day, fishermen avoid Salem Sound when the fog glows faintly yellow. They say you can still hear Josiah’s crew arguing whether the dripping from the hold is seawater… or witch-blood.
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