Canada’s mystical Sable Island has been the temporary home of shipwrecked sailors, transported convicts, and pirates. The island, which is shaped like a crooked smile, is accessible by air or by sea. According to Google, Sable Island has six inhabitants who live there year-round but about 25 people come and visit at various times. Though few do, it’s possible for anyone to visit Sable Island and hike its dunes and walk along its beaches, watching the 560 wild horses that populate the little strip of land. Before you set sail, note that visitors do need advance permission from Parks Canada to visit. I found a website with some beautiful videos of the wild horses.

Sailors of years past considered the little island with dread. It was known as the graveyard of the Atlantic, an island hidden by waves, storms and fog that meant only death and destruction. Since 1583 there are more than 350 recorded shipwrecks on Sable Island, and it is one of these shipwrecks that occasions today’s story, from Feb 7, 1900. Whether the story is true, I leave it to you to determine.

From Ohio’s Marietta Daily Leader comes the Legend of Sable Island.

“One of the grimmest legends of Sable Island dates from the wreck of the Amelia; and there is enough evidence of truth connected with it, writes Gustav Kobbe in Ainslee’s, to show what bloody deeds were added on that occasion to the terrors of shipwreck. [Note: Ainslee’s was an American magazine published in the early 20th century.]

Capt. Torrens, who commanded the gunboat which was dispatched to Sable Island after the wreck of the Amelia, was one of the survivors of the second disaster. A passenger on the lost transport was Lady Copeland, on her way to join her husband. The captain of the gunboat had been told that she wore on her forefinger a ring of peculiar artifice.

The story has it that Capt. Torrens, wandering over the island one night in search of possible survivors, was attracted by the piteous whining of his dog in front of a small, open shelter, known to have existed at that time, but long since toppled to pieces. Approaching the shelter, he was started to see the figure of a woman all in white and holding toward him the bleeding stump of a forefinger. While he was gazing at the apparition, it rose, silently glided past him and dove into the sea. But time and again thereafter the white woman with bleeding forefinger was seen wandering over the sandhills.

It is probably only part of the weird legend that Capt. Torrens, feeling sure that a shocking crime had been committed, tracked the guilty pirate until he discovered his family on the coast of Labrador, and learned that the ring had been sold in Halifax. It is a fact, however, that many years after the disaster Lady Copeland’s ring was discovered in a jewelry store in Halifax and was returned to her family. From that hour her ghost has ceased to haunt the island.”