Tonight we sleep above a ghost ship.
Literally. Have you ever experienced a bit of history so real it gave you shivers up your spine? This evening I got a bit of that. We’re docked at Bobby’s Fish Camp, established in 1956. Same year I was born, as it happens. This place defines rustic. A few cheap cabins for rent, a rundown building with a restaurant and a rusty fuel pump on a straight dock with no electricity or water. An abandoned sailboat tied up at the end collects waterlilys between it and the dock. Giant oaks dripping with Spanish Moss block the sky while the murky green waters of the river lap endlessly at the roots. You get the idea. One might get the impression that nothing ever happens here. It does look it. But man, is the story I got different. I walked up to the restaurant to see what was on the dessert menu after we had supper on the boat and got to talking to the lady there. You know how much I love the old steamships and I noticed there are pictures of them all over the place. There are also Swedish flags and lots of framed newspaper articles. Hmmm. Swedish flags, here? She was making brownies so I went back and got Gretchen and Reese and we went up for dessert. While the brownies baked I looked around more and talked to Lora Jane, who as it turns out is Bobby’s daughter. She led me to a counter loaded with dozens of three ring binders, each one stuffed with the history of Bobby’s Fish Camp and the family. A picture of a stern-wheeler on the walls caught my eye, and she explained that it was her great grandfather’s. He’d built it along with several others but the “James T. Staples”, or “Big Jim” was his favorite. She has binders stuffed with the entire story of the boat, the suicide, the ghost, the explosion, and the princess. It was a fantastic tale to read on a dark and rainy night while sitting underneath the same trees and in the very place where it all happened. The Dahlbergs, who have run Bobby’s since 1956, got their start when a real life Swedish princess, Augusta Dahlberg, b 1833, ran away to America with her commoner love, Robert Dahlberg. (I didn’t get her maiden name.) Born of Swedish nobility she left it all to run away to Bladen Springs, AL. Now she and her descendants are buried not two miles from where I write. Her tombstone reads: “Think of her, speak of her, not as departed. Short is the distance which parts us today. Linger those deeds that have brightened her way.” The binders are spilling over with newspaper articles, government census forms, marriage licenses, civil war documents; a literal treasure trove of family history. There is even, and this gave me serious chills, an authentic and original boarding pass from the White Star line, sailing from Southampton, dated April 10th, 1912. That’s right, they think one of the relatives was on board the Titanic, a Gerda Dahlberg. Her fate is unknown. The family here hasn’t verified her connection, or if she was a survivor. (Later I looked her up. Some records show she survived, others, including the Titanic museum in Sevierville, list her as deceased.) But someone in the family passed down the boarding pass and a life jacket. That is not something you expect to pick up and handle at a tiny fuel stop on a river in Alabama. It all documents the life and times of the descendants of Augusta Dahlberg. One of her descendants was Bobby’s grandfather, Norman Staples. He’s the one who built Big Jim and ran a thriving river trade. On a census form he listed his occupation as sportsman/gambler. Big Jim ran up and down the river for five years, 1908 to 1913. On the wall of the restaurant is the original document registering the boat in 1908. She was 225 feet long, 40 feet wide, had 2 decks, a sharp head and a square stern. On a Thursday in 1913 she was lost in a mysterious explosion and that is where the story gets really interesting. Norman lost the Big Jim in a card game, rumor has it, and one week later on a Sunday afternoon at 1:30, committed suicide at the age of 44 with a shotgun blast to the chest. Six days later all the negros on the boat quit and ran off after seeing an “apparition” in the engine room. Three white crew also left that day, one of which jumped overboard and swam to shore to get away from the boat. Later that day all the rats on board were seen to leave the ship. These are newspaper stories I’m quoting. There are framed newspaper articles all over the walls of the restaurant and in the binders. This was the news of the day, the ‘apparitions’, along with people being thrown off mules and Indians dying of smallpox. On the seventh day, exactly one week after Norman committed suicide, at 1:30, Big Jim blew up in an explosion that killed 26 and blew the front part of the boat off. Sabotage was immediately suspected, because the engineers claimed the boilers could never create that big of an explosion. Dynamite hidden in a log was suspected, as this was sometimes done on purpose to eliminate a rival. Another possibility was from local farmers who sometimes hid dynamite in fence posts to keep rivermen from stealing them for firewood. It was a different world then, eh? A newspaper article quotes “an old black man” who said, as Big Jim passed upstream on the trip to her new owners, “This is Big Jim’s last trip. I’ve seen her pass by many a time, but this is the last.” The ship blew apart but didn’t sink. From the newspaper story: “The boat hung on a ledge of rock under the water for some time, then loosed itself and drifted downstream, finally sinking at a spot below Bladon, just opposite the grave of her former owner who was near. It was as close as she could get, and just one week after his untimely death.” That spot is where Lucidity rests tonight. Two miles from the grave, less than 100 feet from where Big Jim went down. Lora Jane pointed out the very spot, just off our starboard side. Norman was her great grandfather on her daddy’s side. She has done an intense amount of research on the entire family history, from the Swedish princess to the explosion. She just returned from a trip to Sweden, suitably documented in a binder, where she dug into family history even more. She met cousins and photographed cemeteries with relatives in them. Stood in the chapel where her great great great grandmother, a Swedish princess, once worshipped. Fascinating stuff. And don’t forget the context; I’m reading these binders in a building as old as I am, after dark, in the exact spot it all happened, while the granddaughter herself tells me the details. Very very cool. I may have some of the history wrong, I was taking notes as fast as I could but there were a lot of “great greats” being thrown around and I may not have gotten them all right. But the basic story is accurate. Here, in what appears to be nowhere Alabama, is a spine-tingling old story loaded with history and draped in Spanish moss. This is why I love to travel.
If you ever come this way, stop for fuel at Bobby’s Fish Camp and read the binders.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_T._Staples
