public

Heavily Investigated

Out in the middle of the Ohio River, cut off from the shore and everything that passes for ordinary, Blennerhassett Island holds its secrets close. Visitors and campers have reported catching Margaret's ghost drifting across the grounds — often with a book in hand, dressed in white, said to be mourning a lost child and a life the river swallowed whole. Beneath that grief runs something older: Native American spirits are swear-to-God seen moving through the tree line, vanishing before anyone can be sure of what they saw. The whole island, locals insist, never quite emptied out.

In 1798, Irish aristocrats Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett built what was called the most beautiful mansion west of the Appalachians on this 300-acre Ohio River island — sterling silver fixtures, Parisian china, a two-acre garden. Then Aaron Burr arrived. In 1805–06, the estate became alleged headquarters for Burr's conspiracy to carve out a new nation from U.S. territory. The mansion burned in 1811; the family scattered into poverty. Today a reconstructed mansion stands in its place, and Margaret herself is buried behind it — which the historical record notes with, one imagines, a certain inevitability.