In the beautiful plantation house on Core Point, the young daughter of its wealthy owner was very much in love with a young swain who lived and worked in Bath Town. He would sail his boat across the river to visit her, and they were often together with the full consent and approval of both families. The young couple seemed ideally suited to each other, and their courtship proceeded without any visible signs of disagreements or even the customary lovers' quarrels. It was a beautiful time for them both.

The twin stimuli of peer pressure and patriotism began to work on the young man, however, and he felt that he must enlist in the armed forces of his beloved land. So off he went to join the men who were so successfully defending Portsmouth Island by hit-and-run naval and amphibious tactics that were centuries ahead of their time. In shallow-draught galleys propelled by as many as twenty oars, the swift-moving and highly mobile force played havoc with the heavier and slower British warships and made life generally miserable for them. The invaders managed to get away with some small quantities of livestock, but they paid dearly for every steer they took.

There was a certain risk, though, and the young Bath resident was unlucky enough to take a British musket ball in the chest. He died a day later was buried in a hero's grave on Portsmouth Island.

Back home at Core Point, his young fiancee was prostrate with grief. Her whole world had come tumbling down around her ears. She, too had been caught up in the war fever, and as has so often been the case in wartime, she had loved not wisely but too well. She confided to her mother that she was in a family way and was mortally afraid of what attitude her father might take. And well she might have been.

The outraged gentleman berated her for disgracing his family and for brining to naught all his lifelong plans for her. No trace of sympathy or pity was evident in the old man. Completely immersed in self-pity and self-righteousness, he thought only about the wrong that had been done him and how he, in his old age, must now pay for another's mistakes.

The mother was torn between love and tenderness for her daughter and loyalty to her husband. In this environment, the young girl almost went out of her mind with remorse and shame.

The whole community took sides in the matter and indulged in a heated argument. Those were the days of rather strict moral codes, even if they were, even then, actually observed as often in the breach of them as in the observance.

The upshot of the whole affair was that the young lady, by the time she had her baby, was almost insane and was completely incapable of thinking coherently. A week after the baby was born, she deliberately smothered it to death and laid the tiny, lifeless body before her father.

She was tired for the murder, was convicted, and was sentenced to hang from the branch of a tree overlooking the river, they very same tree under which her baby had been buried. Why the court thought this to be appropriate we shall never know, but the death sentence was carried out, and she was buried alongside her child.

Down to this day, the residents of the area insist, the double tragedy is regularly brought back to mind on the occasion of each full moon. At midnight, so they say, you can hear the pitiful sobbing of a very young child and then, as if in reply, the sorrowful and fanatic cries of the mother as she tries in vain to get to her child and comfort it. The sobbing and crying lasts for about an hour each time and can unmistakably be identified as that of an infant and a woman.

Many people have heard it and continue to hear it. Several have even tried to walk to the source of the sound, but no one has ever come up with any idea or any suggestions as to how to quiet those ghosts and assuage that young mother's centuries-old grief for the awful things that she and her father did. Ask any of the older residents of the south side of the river. They know the story all too well.