Ghosts and Legends of Lake Erie's North Coast by Victoria King Heinsen

Author:Victoria King Heinsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.

KELLEYS ISLAND AND

THE LAKE ERIE TRIANGLE

Most people are aware of the Bermuda Triangle in the western section of the Atlantic Ocean. If one were to draw boundaries on a map, the vertices of Miami, Puerto Rico and Bermuda form a nearly equilateral triangle with the legs extending through or encompassing the Bahamas, Turks and Caicos and the island Shakespeare brought to the attention of his fascinated audiences with The Tempest: Bermuda.

In this, the shortest but most delightful of Shakespeare’s plays, if the Bard truly is the author, we read one of the first references to the Bermuda Triangle. A British ship wrecked in the Bermudas earlier in the sixteenth century, thus bringing attention to these beautiful tropical islands, certainly fascinating to the English suffering from the chill winters of their homeland. In the play, Prospero (who is a king from Italy), his daughter Miranda and other relatives and friends are on a ship that is beset by a terrible storm or tempest. The ship is destroyed; the passengers find themselves on a remote island; we know it as Bermuda. Miranda exclaims over this magical place, committing a phrase forever to our Western culture: “Oh, Brave New World.”

As with many documented occurrences in this triangle, Shakespeare’s Tempest involves a sudden fierce storm, lightning and the paranormal. Ariel, a rather mischievous romantic spirit, reveals to his master King Prospero that it was he who caused the storm and set the ship’s mast on fire. All ends well for the shipwrecked passengers in this most delightful of romantic comedies, but all has not ended so well for other travelers in the real world.

True, although thousands of commercial, military and private ships and planes daily traverse these hundreds of nautical miles and suffer no ill effects, some do. For the interested reader fascinated with what is also called the Devil’s Triangle, there is considerable evidence—some true, some dispelling rumors—of mysterious disappearances, a parallel universe and communication from unworldly beings. The fact remains: those people clearheaded enough to signal their location and their distress before they are gone forever report being trapped in sudden fog and seeming nothingness. A powerful magnetic field with no predictable behaviors is blamed for disabling the vessels and their passengers; where they go has yet to be discovered.

Lake Erie, too, keeps dark secrets. Of the five Great Lakes—Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie and Superior—mariners consider Lake Erie to be the most dangerous because it is the shallowest, with an average depth of 62 feet or 19 meters and 210 feet or 64 meters at its deepest. On a sunny day, sudden storms with violent waves have surprised and frightened both novice and experienced boaters who, if they reach land, report the terror they felt as they prayed for guidance to a safe harbor on shore. Only 241 miles long with a width ranging from 38 to 57 miles, Lake Erie touches New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and the Canadian province of Ontario. Several islands of considerable interest to tourists and vintners are located within these waters, but those islands are discussed in other chapters.

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