Laura Wright 
When most people hear the name Ellis Island, they think of immigration.
For millions of people, the island represented the gateway to America, the place where newcomers entered a new world in search of another life.
But Ellis Island had a long and colorful history before it became synonymous with immigration.
Long before the great immigration station welcomed its crowds, stories of executions, buried treasure, mysterious deaths, and ghosts were already attached to the island.
Some of those legends were old even before the famous buildings of Ellis Island existed.
When Ellis Island Was Oyster Island
The island was once known as Oyster Island, a name inspired by the countless oysters found in the surrounding waters and favored by Dutch settlers.
During the early eighteenth century, Oyster Island essentially served as a penal island.
Pirates were among those who met their deaths there, reportedly hanged from the branches of trees growing on the island.
Over time, those executions produced some of the island’s earliest ghost stories.
The Executed Pirates
Shortly after the War of 1812, Captain Morgan turned his attention to piracy.
He eventually met his fate on Oyster Island, where he was executed along with four members of his crew.
Approximately 40 years later, Captain Gibbs was reportedly hanged from the same tree.
Much of the island’s early folklore centered upon pirates who had either been imprisoned or executed there.
Their ghosts were supposedly seen hanging from the trees long after their deaths.
Hannah Scrachum and the Buried Treasure
By the 1830s, the legends surrounding the island had begun to expand.
According to one story, a pirate had hidden an enormous cache of gold and treasure somewhere on the island.
The treasure had a supernatural guardian.
She was a mysterious lady in white named Hannah Scrachum.
Anyone who approached the hidden treasure supposedly risked encountering her. Hannah would scream to frighten intruders away, and people passing the island in boats sometimes claimed they could hear her cries coming from the distance.
The Haunted Island
By the late nineteenth century, the island’s reputation had become a practical problem.
Management reportedly had difficulty keeping night watchmen.
Shadowy figures were seen wandering across the grounds after dark.
Some resembled pirates.
Other male apparitions appeared wearing long capes and tri-cornered hats.
Even the old tree associated with the pirate executions was reportedly still standing behind the governor’s house during the 1890s.
And the ghosts were not the island’s only danger.
The Bottomless Well
Near the old governor’s house stood an ancient well.
When the governor’s residence was originally constructed, an attempt had been made to locate a reliable water supply. An artesian well was desired, and digging eventually reached approximately 1,000 feet below the surface without producing drinkable water.
The abandoned shaft remained.
By this period, the opening was approximately four feet wide and 80 feet deep.
Quicksand had developed at the bottom.
Anyone unfortunate enough to survive a fall into the shaft could become trapped in the murk below.
It was estimated that four men died in the well.
None of their bodies was ever recovered.
Ghosts Inside the Buildings
The strange activity wasn’t confined to the grounds.
Most of the buildings standing on the island during the 1890s reportedly had stories of their own.
Doors and windows moved without anyone touching them.
Lights switched on and off inside empty rooms.
More extraordinary were reports from people who claimed they had watched entire scenes from the past repeat themselves.
The executions were among them.
Spectral figures appeared to walk toward the old hanging tree.
Then their bodies dropped.
The same deaths supposedly played out again and again in the darkness.
What Happened to Watchman Sprague?
One particularly strange incident involved a night watchman named Sprague.
Sprague was considered dependable and normally checked in regularly while making his rounds.
Then, one night, he failed to report.
His coworkers became concerned.
One possibility was especially frightening.
Perhaps Sprague had fallen into the old well.
The boards surrounding it were deteriorating, and there wasn’t enough money available to construct a better barrier.
A search party set out across the island.
They eventually found Sprague.
He was alive.
But he was unconscious.
Something Attacked Him
A garden spade was lying beside the injured watchman.
When Sprague regained consciousness, he explained what had happened.
He had set down the spade while attempting to move a rock.
Then something he could not see picked up the tool and struck him in the head with it.
Whatever had attacked Sprague left no conventional explanation behind.
He survived the encounter.
The island’s reputation survived with him.
The Great Fire of 1897
Then the island changed dramatically.
A tremendous fire swept across Ellis Island in 1897.
Most of the buildings were destroyed.
Remarkably, no lives were lost in the blaze.
Something else apparently disappeared with the old structures.
Reports of the hauntings decreased after the fire.
The old Ellis Island, with its pirate legends, phantom executions, shadowy figures, mysterious well, and haunted buildings, had largely vanished.
But that didn’t mean the island’s ghost stories were over.
A Different Kind of Haunting
Ellis Island continued to acquire new stories.
Modern witnesses have reported unexplained voices inside its dark and vacant buildings.
Others have described the unmistakable smell of burning candles when no obvious source could be found.
The character of the hauntings, however, had changed.
The ghosts associated with the island’s earlier history had been joined by stories connected with the immigration era.
Hope and Despair on Ellis Island
For millions of immigrants, Ellis Island represented hope.
But not every experience there was happy.
During the early decades of the twentieth century, spouses and families were sometimes separated during processing.
People were detained.
Others were quarantined away from their loved ones.
And thousands of people reportedly committed suicide while on the island.
That history created a very different atmosphere from the old tales of pirates and buried treasure.
Yet the result was much the same.
Another generation of ghost stories became attached to Ellis Island.
The Ghosts of Ellis Island
The haunting traditions of Ellis Island therefore stretch across very different periods of its history.
There were pirates hanging from trees.
A mysterious lady in white guarded buried treasure.
Shadowy figures wandered the grounds.
Spectral executions repeated themselves in the darkness.
Men disappeared into a dangerous well and were never recovered.
A night watchman claimed an unseen attacker struck him unconscious with his own garden spade.
Then fire destroyed most of the old island.
The hauntings diminished.
And as Ellis Island entered another chapter of its history, new ghosts took the place of the old ones.
Today, the island is remembered primarily as a gateway through which generations entered America.
But long before those immigrants arrived, people were already telling ghost stories about Ellis Island.
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