The Plank
Day 1: Caribbean
Day 2: Charleston
Day 3: Carolina Coast
Day 4: Beaufort
Day 5: Bath
Day 6: Ocracoke

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Could this be Blackbeard's head?

Folks around Ocracoke love to regale tourists with tales of how Blackbeard's body still spends dark, moonless nights swimming around Teach's Hole, looking for his severed head.

After nearly 280 years of searching, perhaps the famous pirate needs to paddle farther north. Toward Newport News, Va.

He just might find his skull up there.

"It's a rather strange story," says Greg Cina, an archives technician at The Mariners' Museum. "It seems like everybody you talk to has their own slant on (it)."

On Aug. 30, the museum will open a pirate exhibit that features, among other artifacts, a silver-plated skull reputed to be Blackbeard's.

While museum officials aren't purporting that the skull belonged to Blackbeard, it does have an interesting history, they say.

"I'm a die-hard romantic," says Cina, who located the artifact in a museum in Salem, Mass. "I want to believe (the story.)"

Blackbeard lost his head on Nov. 22, 1718. He died at the hands of Lt. Robert Maynard and other Royal Navy sailors. Maynard and his men captured and killed Blackbeard in a battle off Ocracoke Inlet. They cut off his head and tossed the body overboard.

The sailors hung Blackbeard's head on the bowsprit of their sloop and headed for Bath, where Blackbeard lived. In early January of 1719, they sailed to Williamsburg, Va., still displaying their gruesome trophy. By early February, they arrived in the Norfolk, Va., area.

Around the middle of the month, authorities in Hampton, Va., hanged several of Blackbeard's men. They stuck his head on a pole as a warning to potential pirates.

"That's the last we hear of it until this skull reappeared sometime during the (early) 20th century lined with silver," says David Moore, a Blackbeard expert at the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort. "Nobody really knows where all it went."

Some believe the skull wound up in a secret "bones society" at Yale University. Others say it turned up in a similar type group in England.

Others believe Blackbeard's friends stole the skull from atop the pole in Hampton and had it silver plated.

At any rate, so the story goes, the skull eventually made its way to North Carolina where it belonged to a wealthy, but unidentified, businessman, perhaps from Ocracoke. From there it belonged to a fraternity at William and Mary where the brothers used it as a drinking vessel. (At some point, the skull's lower jaw got lost.)

"There's more than one person who claims to have imbibed spirits from the skull over the past 280 years," Cina says.

During the late 1800, the skull supposedly became a conversation piece in a tavern in Alexandria, Va. Eventually, it passed through the hands of several private collectors. In 1949, the skull came into the possession of Edward Rowe Snow, who wrote about shipwrecks and pirates in New England. Snow's widow gave the skull to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass.

Officials there say they've never displayed the skull or had it measured or tested in any way.

"We don't claim it to be Blackbeard's," says Lyles Forbes, an assistant curator at Peabody Essex. "There's no proof one way or the other."