THE STORY OF SCREAMING ISLAND

Nathan Eldredge was born to a Harwich fishing family around the year 1910. His father was lost at sea when the boy was quite young, and Nathan lived with his mother. he was an unmanageable kid, and cruel as well. He liked to torture cats, dogs, and other animals.

Then, when he was ten or eleven, his mother died also, and he was sent to live with relatives in town. But he got more and more out of control. Animals went missing; some were found maimed or cut up. The problem grew worse and worse.

In those days, there was nowhere on the Cape to sent a problem kid. Besides, Nathan was aware that he was a threat to the community. He had a little skiff that he that kept on the Harwich shore of Big Pleasant Bay and he'd already rowed several times out to Screaming Island, as full of seagulls then as it is now. So when he turned thirteen he came to his aunt and uncle and told them he wanted to live by himself, out on the island of seagulls. And because they were so fed up and disgusted with him, as was everyone else in town, they said, "Fine, go ahead and live out there."

So he did, digging a cave into the side of the island's lone hill. To this day, in fact, you can see an indention on the east side of the hill where Nathan's cave may have been located. For a year or two or three after he moved in, his aunt and uncle and other folks from Harwich would come visit, bringing provisions and so forth. But the visits tapered off. Nathan was left to himself, an island hermit, occasionally seen fishing from his little skiff or digging for clams out on the sandbar at low tide.

And so it went, for almost twenty years. Nathan became a scraggly-bearded object of local curiosity and fear. People who lived around the bay recalled, on quiet nights, hearing terrible sounds from across the water, sounds of creatures in agony. One time Dar (handyman Elmer Darling) told me he was out fishing just past the Narrows one early morning when he heard a seagull scream and saw Nathan carry something up the hill and attach it to the tripod that he used for cooking things, dangling them over a small fire.

The existence of Nathan Eldredge was of keen interest to all the camps around Pleasant Bay, Viking included. Whenever campers and counselors went sailing in the vicinity of Screaming Island, everyone would strain to catch a glimpse of Nathan. But the older he became, the less Nathan showed himself in the daytime. More and more, he confined his activities to the dark of the night.

In 1941, the last summer before the U.S. entered World War Two, there was a boy at Viking, eleven or twelve years old, who was also sort of a weird one—not very sociable, nor did he do well in his activities. He was fascinated with animals and birds, however, seagulls in particular. And his fascination wasn’t any too friendly. Among the campers he soon developed a reputation for liking to inflict harm upon living creatures: pulling wings and legs off of insects, dragging horseshoe crabs up on the beach and letting them die. That type of thing.

Now, Screaming Island was strictly off limits but this boy, having heard the story of Nathan Eldredge, decided that he just had to go out there and see for himself. The only way to do it was to sneak away in a boat at night—a sailboat, preferably. He wasn’t much of a sailor himself, though, so he enlisted the help of a younger kid, a kid who was pretty good with a boat and who happened to think that the older boy was cool, if strange. Together, they made plans to escape from camp, waiting for a night socked in fog so they could get away without being seen.

The foggy night finally arrived. After the campers and on-duty counselors were asleep, the older boy woke up the younger one. They tiptoed down to the beach, waded out to the nearest pram, and used their hands to paddle out to a sharpie, a boat whose absence would probably not soon be noticed the following morning. As silently as possible, they raised said, cast off, and headed around the point on an outgoing tide.

There wasn’t much wind. Mainly they drifted with the tide. The fog was pea soup; they had no idea whether or not they were going in the right direction. And progress was slow, so they may have dozed off for a while. But at long last the sharpie scraped ashore and, alert once more, they boys discerned the unmistakable outline of Screaming Island.

They raised the centerboard, shipped the rudder, pulled the boat up onto the beach, and started very cautiously to explore the island in the dark. As they groped along the base of the hill, they heard the crunch of feet on sand and saw a figure approaching. They dropped to the ground, camouflaged by beach grass. Nathan stomped right past them. Peering after him, they watched him grab a sleeping gull and wring its neck with a flick of his wrist. He then climbed up to the hillcrest, where he built a fire and began to roast the bird from his tripod.

Then, as the boys continued to watch, other gulls, wakened by the commotion, rose up by ones and twos into the foggy night, until there was a whole cloud of them circling the island’s central hill.* They started dive bombing Nathan, who swatted them away with a stick and kept stoking his fire. Eventually, however, unable to fend them off any longer, he staggered down the hill toward the safety of his cave—and stumbled over the two Viking kids cowering in the beach grass.

The younger boy was terrified, both of Nathan and of the gulls now attacking all three of them. In a hoarse whisper, the older kid told him to run back to the sharpie and take cover. But as the younger one began to fight his way to the beach, he could hear his friend say calmly to Nathan, “Take me to your cave. I want to see where you live.” And Nathan seemed to agree to this, because when the younger kid glanced over his shoulder one last time, the older kid and Nathan were scurrying off together, side by side.

The gulls went on attacked as the younger boy scrambled into the sharpie and wedged himself as far as possible under the tiny foredeck. Only his lower legs and feet were exposed, but this was bad enough, and he finally passed out from the pain and loss of blood. The incoming tide picked up the sharpie and floated it out into the middle of the bay. The next morning, when the boy was found by members of a frantic search party of counselors and campers, he was barely conscious. His feet and ankles had been pecked almost to a pulp. But he was alive to tell the tale.

The first thing he said was, “Where’s my friend? Is he okay?” Concentrating its forces, the search party combed every inch of Screaming Island. They located the burnt remains of the cooked seagull and came across a few discarded possessions in the cave but there was no sign either of the missing boy or of Nathan. Did the birds get them? That was one theory, but it fell apart when everyone realized that Nathan’s skiff was gone, too.

The search persisted, all over Pleasant Bay and beyond, but no lock. As a result, the camp nearly closed down. But because the kid was a known problem and his disappearance wasn’t really the camp’s fault, the matter was successfully hushed up. Besides, the country was on the brink of going to war and everybody’s focus was on that. And when the war started, the camp’s operation was strictly limited in any case. No one was allowed to visit the ocean beaches or other outlying areas, and a nightly blackout was imposed along the entire Cape Cod shoreline. The lighthouse at the tip of Monomoy ceased to function, and the nearby Coast Guard station was abandoned.

Although the event remained fresh in the minds of area residents and although over the course of the war Viking’s owners and other concerned folk kept an eye out for the missing pair, neither Nathan nor the Viking boy was ever seen again.

After the Allies’ victory in 1945, German U-boats were rounded up and their logs confiscated. One of the longs, belonging to a U-boat whose mission it was to spy and patrol along the New England coast, contained a 1944 entry of unusual interest. The sub had surfaced in the middle of the night off the southern end of Monomoy. Three of the crew went ashore to check out the Coast Guard station. From a distance, party obscured by intervening dunes, the building looked to be uninhabited. But when they crossed the dunes and got up close, the Germans saw a dim light issuing from a basement window. According to the log entry, there were two male figures inside, silhouetted against the light source. Fearing that these might be officers for a well-armed outfit concealed in the dunes, the Germans beat it, rowed back to their sub, and returned to patrolling the coast.

And that’s all we have. Dozens of questions remain, of course, questions that may never find answers. Most of all, we wonder: are Nathan and his friend still out there somewhere, alive and lurking.

-- Jack Grant