The Curse of Palmyra Island

by Curt Rowlett

Labyrinth13 is now available for purchase at Lulu.com

First publishing, August 1999. © All rights reserved. This article may not be reproduced in whole or in part without the express, written permission of the author (Permission to link to this article on the World Wide Web is hereby granted).

Students of the strange and bizarre (like the author) are probably well versed regarding the subjects of ghosts, hauntings and curses. Most of us are probably familiar with the classic tales of haunted houses or haunted places like a graveyard or swamp. And for those stories with a more nautical flavor, there is always the Bermuda Triangle and sightings of ghost ships like the Marie Celeste and the Flying Dutchman.

But can an entire island also be haunted or cursed?

As an ex-Coast Guardsman, former Merchant Marine and avid sailor, I have always been drawn to strange phenomena as it relates to the world’s oceans. My interest in nautical high weirdness was rekindled recently as a result of reading a book by Vincent Bugliosi titled And the Sea Will Tell, the true story of a double murder that took place on isolated Palmyra Island in 1974.

While that book primarily focuses on the murders that occurred there during that time period, my internal radar was significantly aroused by the continuous allusions made by the authors and others who had been to the island regarding the "Palmyra Curse."  According to this tale, although Palmyra appears to be a tropical island paradise like something out of the movie South Pacific, there also seems to be a supernatural pattern of disaster and near-disaster associated with the place. Many sailors who have visited the island in the time before and after the murders took place have commented on the sense of "something not being quite right" on Palmyra and speak in cloaked terms of a malevolent aura and a foreshadowing of doom that the island seems to possess. Listen to Richard Taylor, a yachtsman who spent time on Palmyra in 1977 and who had this to say in his testimony at the murder trial:

"I had a foreboding feeling about the island. It was more than just the fact that it was a ghost-type island. It was more than that. It seemed to be an unfriendly place to be. I’ve been on a number of atolls, but Palmyra was different. I can’t put my finger on specifically why, but it was not an island that I enjoyed being on. I think other people have had difficulties on that island."

And Norman Sanders, another yachtsman who conducted geological experiments on Palmyra and who testified at the trial, had this to say about the island:

"Palmyra is one of the last uninhabited islands in the Pacific. The island is a very threatening place. It is a hostile place. I wrote in my log: "Palmyra, a world removed from time, the place where even vinyl rots. I have never seen vinyl rot anywhere else." He also wrote that "Palmyra will always belong to itself, never to man. It is a very forbidding place."

It seems that many of these experienced and adventurous sailing people ventured to Palmyra expecting to find an island nirvana, but like Fletcher Christian and the mutineers of HMS Bounty who found that life on Pitcairn Island deteriorated into a grim struggle for survival, so perhaps did their romantic notions about Palmyra soon fall apart.

The murders that took place there are but one of a long list of calamities, disasters and synchronicities that have been associated with Palmyra since it’s discovery in the late 17th Century. (Speaking of synchronicity, Kristan Lawson’s article "The Mysterious Appearance and Disappearance of Maria Laxara" which appeared in Strange Magazine #16, discusses another mysterious island, Maria Laxara, which apparently has a habit of "vanishing." Interestingly, a reproduction of a rare nautical map that accompanies the Lawson article in that issue of Strange Magazine, also shows the location of Palmyra Island near the bottom of the illustration!).

Although officially listed as an island, Palmyra is actually an atoll. The difference between an atoll and an island is that an atoll is formed by the growth of coral around the rim of an ancient ocean volcano that has sunk below the surface of the sea over eons of geologic time, giving the classic atoll a circular or horseshoe shape. Hundreds of such atolls dot the massive area that is the Pacific ocean. (Perhaps the most famous of these is Bikini Atoll where the U.S. Navy tested nuclear weapons in the 1950's). In proximity are the legendary deep trenches of the Pacific: the Mariana and Tonga abyss, incredibly some seven miles deep and the epicenter of many earthquakes. The trenches also parallel strings of volcanic activity in the Pacific.

Palmyra island’s coordinates are 5 degrees, 52 minutes North, 162 degrees, 6 minutes West, placing it in near the very center of the Pacific ocean or about 1000 nautical miles south-southwest of Hawaii in the North Pacific Ocean, or about one-half of the way from Hawaii to American Samoa. The island measures approximately a mile and a half in length by a half mile wide. My research for additional information on Palmyra yielded little but a description of the island from a United States government geographical survey that lends to the image of the atoll as a remote and desolate place:

"Lying six degrees above the equator, (Palmyra consists of) about fifty islets covered with dense vegetation, coconut trees, and balsa-like trees up to 30 meters tall....the west lagoon is entered by a channel which will only accommodate vessels drawing 4 meters or less of water; much of the road, the landing strip and many causeways built during (World War II) are unserviceable and overgrown."

On a nautical chart, Palmyra is but a tiny speck in the middle of the mass of blue that represents the Pacific Ocean. The island lies well off of the major shipping lanes for vessels plying the Asian/American run and is geographically perhaps one of the remotest places on earth and one of the last few truly uninhabited islands left in the world. Local fauna consists of mosquitoes and other insects, lizards, land and coconut crabs, a huge bird population, palm and coconut trees and mangrove bushes. The interior is thick jungle. The coral reef and lagoons at Palmyra are also a breeding ground for gray and blacktip reef sharks whose aggressiveness is well know throughout the Pacific and has been noted by every person who has ever ventured to the island, some with fatal consequences. Many visitors to the island found that swimming and even wading in the island’s lagoons was completely out of the question because of the large shark population and their aggressive nature. And although an abundance of fish live on the reefs and in the lagoons, many of them are inedible and poisonous because of Ciguatera, a type of algae that grows on coral and which the fish contain in their flesh.

Palmyra Atoll (from U.S. National Atlas 1970)

Palmyra Island was discovered by "accident" one night in 1798 by American sea captain Edmond Fanning while his ship the Betsy was in transit to Asia. The tale of the discovery of Palmyra is one of a psychic nature in that Captain Fanning, alone in his cabin at night, was disturbed from sleep three times by such a weird premonition of danger (whether through the sixth sense that has kept many a seafaring man alive or something that can be directly attributed to Palmyra itself) that he finally went out onto the deck and shouted for the helmsman to heave to in the darkness. Dawn the next day revealed a dangerous reef lying dead ahead of the Betsy that would have ripped the entire bottom of the ship out and sent her to the bottom. As it turned out, this was the northern edge of the coral reef that surrounds Palmyra Island. A Fate magazine article of 1953 discusses this incident:

"He (Captain Fanning) retired at 9 p.m. as usual with conditions normal, but awoke from a sound sleep between nine and ten (o’clock) to find himself on the upper steps of the companionway. This worried him, since he had never walked in his sleep before. After a little conversation with the first mate, who was pacing the deck, he returned to his berth. He slept less than half an hour, awoke again, and found himself once more at the head of the companionway. This time he had more conversation with the mate and returned again to his berth. Then for a third time he awoke, finding himself in the same position, but fully clothed. This so disturbed Fanning that he was convinced that it was (in his words) some kind of "supernatural intervention" and determined to lay the ship to for the rest of the night. The other officers and crew were surprised and evidently thought his mind (was) off balance. Leaving orders that he should be called at daybreak, he retired again and this time slept soundly. In the morning they came about and resumed their (same) course, but had not sailed far when they discovered breakers (one mile) ahead. The helm was instantly put (over)...and the roaring of the...breakers...was heard distinctly...less than a mile away. All on board were impressed, realizing that had they been running free for another half hour...not one would have been alive by sunrise".

Although Captain Fanning noted the position of the island in the ship’s log, he failed to make a timely report and the official credit for discovery went to another American captain named Swale whose ship, the Palmyra, was blown off course in a storm that pushed it onto the island in 1802.

In 1816, the Esperanza, a Spanish pirate ship loaded with gold and silver plunder from the Inca temples in Peru, came under attack from another vessel and a fierce battle ensued. Several crew members who managed to survive the fight sailed off with the treasure only to wreck on a nearby reef. As the ship was sinking, they managed to transfer the treasure to an island located beyond the reef whose name was Palmyra. Stranded there for a year, they supposedly buried the Inca gold under a tree on Palmyra and then sailed off in rafts they had built. One raft was later rescued by an American whaling ship with only a single survivor left onboard who soon succumbed from exposure and pneumonia. The other raft was never heard from again. (This bit of historical data sounds a little like the Oak Island saga where treasure hunters have attempted for years to reach a supposed buried treasure in a pit located under a tree. Theories as to who constructed the pit and what type of treasure it contains also includes pirate activity and Inca/Maya treasure).

In 1855, a whaling ship was reported to have been wrecked on Palmyra’s dangerous reefs, but attempts to locate the ship and it’s crew turned up nothing.

Ownership of the island was granted to Judge Henry E. Cooper of Hawaii in 1911 from a purchase price of $750.00. He eventually sold all but one small islet at Palmyra (Home Island), apparently believing the rumor that priceless Inca artifacts of gold and silver, part of the pirate plunder of the Esperanza, was still buried there under a tree. With the exception of Home Island, possession of the rest of Palmyra eventually fell to the Fullard-Leo family in 1922 who were soon embroiled in a legal skirmish over ownership with the United States in 1940. The United States wanted jurisdiction of Palmyra assigned to the Department of the Navy in anticipation of World War II in the Pacific.

Although the private-ownership status of the island was eventually resolved in favor of the Fullard-Leo family, the island was still used as a naval air facility during World War II in the Pacific. Palmyra also became a base of operations for air attacks against Japan. As a result, military relics can be found in abundance there such as old gun emplacements, ammunition and fuel dumps, abandoned war equipment, machine-gun bunkers, underground tunnels and buildings, as well as what is left of the old landing strip, lending a timeless and ghostly feeling to the place.

Primarily, Palmyra functioned as a refueling station during World War II for long-range air patrols against Japan and extended submarines missions in the Pacific. The island itself was attacked only once when a Japanese submarine surfaced offshore and began shelling the beach and a dredging barge with it’s deck gun. A five-inch gun battery on the island drove the submarine off.

Hal Horton, a former Navy officer was stationed on Palmyra from 1942 to 1944 and had this to say about the island:

"Once one of our patrol planes went down near the island. We searched and searched but didn’t find so much as a bolt or piece of metal. It was weird. Like they’d dropped off the edge of the earth. Another time, a plane took of from the runway, climbed to a couple hundred feet, and turned in the wrong direction. They were supposed to go north and they went south instead. It was broad daylight. We never could figure it out. There were two men aboard that plane. We never saw them again. We had some very bad luck on that island. Old salts in the Pacific called it the Palmyra Curse. (The island)...is very small. You (could) fly over it at ten thousand feet and not see it if there (were) a few clouds in the sky. Once we heard a plane over head trying to find us, but he crashed in the drink before he could find the runway. We didn’t get to the poor guy fast enough. Sharks found him first."

In 1974, the grisly double murder of a sailing couple that became the subject of And the Sea Will Tell took place on Palmyra. The evidence at the subsequent trail for murder showed that Mac and Muff Graham of San Diego, who had ventured to Palmyra for an extended stay of up to a year, were probably killed for their expensive sailboat, the Sea Wind and the food stores it contained by an ex-convict who had also taken up residence on the island.

- End of Excerpt -

Murder victim Muff Graham's skull, found on Palmyra

NOTICE: I am always looking to update the story regarding the alleged "curse" of Palmyra Island and would love to hear from anyone who has information to share, particularly from those who have experienced any sort of strange occurrence while visiting the island. Please contact me at: Labyrinth13

Labyrinth13 now available for purchase!