The story of “The Telltale Seaweed” was collected by Alexander Woollcott and published in the Portable Woollcott in 1946. It is regularly featured in collections of American folktales and ghost stories.
Woollcott’s version of the story begins in the early 1900s and depicts two women driving along Cape Cod on a vacation when their car broke down. It was a cold and particularly dark October night, and they knew it was unlikely that they would find help before daybreak. They could see a nearby house, so they went there to seek shelter from the cold and rain.
No one answered their pounding at the door. Looking through the windows, they realized the house was abandoned; a thick layer of dust covered the floors and furniture. The women decided to spend the night inside, because the house provided more shelter from the elements than did their car. They brought blankets into the house’s library and prepared to settle in for the night. As they were drifting off to sleep, they both were startled to see the apparition of a dripping wet sailor by the fireplace. One of the women called out for it to identify itself but the vision seemed to melt away.
In the morning the women awoke wondering if the night’s disturbance had been a dream or hallucination, but then they found a puddle of water and some seaweed lying on the otherwise undisturbed dust on the floor where the apparition had stood. One of the women saved the seaweed, and they returned to their car to await help.
A passing motorist towed them to the next town, and while they ate breakfast in a tavern, waiting for their car to be repaired, they asked the tavern owner about the empty house. The owner told them that the house was said to be haunted by a son of the family that owned the place; the son drowned at sea after being shunned by his father. Local townspeople believed that the fear of the ghost had driven the family away.
A year later, one of the women was relating the experience at a dinner party when a fellow guest—curator of a museum that dealt with marine life—requested to see the seaweed. Finding that she still had it, she gave it to him for examination. He told her that it was a rare form of seaweed that only grew on dead bodies.
Woollcott wrote that the story was told to him as factual by Alice Miller, who had in turn been told it by Mrs. G. H. Putnam. However, when Woollcott went to Mrs. Putnam to ask for specifics—the location, the names of the people in the story, and so on—she apologized and said she had forgotten the whole thing, and she could not remember as much as the name of the person who originally repeated the tale to her.
In a footnote, Woollcott says that he has heard a more recent version of the story: the curator of the Botanical Museum in St. Louis claimed the story had been distorted in retelling. He said that the setting was specifically Woods Hole, Massachusetts, the ghost was that of a man who drowned in Australia on his honeymoon, and the seaweed was a type found only in Australia. Woollcott claimed that this curator actually gave him the seaweed in question, and that he kept it in his library, pressed in a book.
The story uses several techniques to achieve credibility. First, Woollcott asserts that it was presented to him as the truth. To confirm the narrative, he tries to reduce the distance between the original narrator and himself by tracing the tale’s origins, yet reaches a dead end, which makes the account less believable. The footnote, however, uses a separate technique to prove authenticity; Woollcott brings in testimony from an expert to dispute the original story’s authenticity and substitute a more scientifically valid version, and then Woollcott confirms this version by claiming to possess physical proof of the ghost’s appearance.
One image from this tale—the ghost of a drowned sailor leaving behind seaweed that is only found on dead bodies—seems to recur in other ghost stories. For example, it appears in some distorted versions of the Flannan Isles lighthouse story, based on an unsolved case of three lighthouse keepers disappearing from a lighthouse off the coast of Scotland in 1900.
Katherine D. Walker
See also Amityville Hauntings; Haunted Houses; LaLaurie House; McPike Mansion
Further Reading
Botkin, B. A. 1984. A Treasury of New England Folklore: Stories, Ballads and Traditions of Yankee Folk. New York: Crown.
Drake, Samuel Adams. 1998. New England Legends & Folklore. Edison, NJ: Castle Books.
Oring, Elliott. 2008. “Legendry and the Rhetoric of Truth.” Journal of American Folklore 121 (480): 127–166.
Woollcott, Alexander. 1946 (1962). The Portable Woollcott. New York: Viking Press.