👻 HAUNTED PLACE · EXP. Nº9475 ACTIVE

Bermuda

Name: Bermuda
Address: BM

Bermuda is a location reputed to be haunted in BM. Its reputation comes from reported apparitions, unexplained phenomena and eyewitness accounts gathered over time.

Where is Bermuda?

Location: BM
Type: Island
Coordinates: 32.32, -64.74
Testimonies: 0
Last updated: 2026-08-31

LOCATION

Why is Bermuda said to be haunted?

Bermuda was called the Isle of Devils before anyone lived there. Spanish charts carried the name by 1544 — Sebastian Cabot's world map labels the archipelago ysla de demonios — and sailors gave it a wide berth for a century, not because of anything they had seen ashore but because the reef sat exactly where the treasure fleets turned east for the Azores. In July 1609 the Sea Venture, flagship of a relief convoy bound for Jamestown, was driven onto those reefs by a hurricane. Every one of the roughly 150 people aboard got ashore, spent nine months there, built two small ships out of Bermuda cedar and sailed on. Two of them wrote it down, and their accounts are the reason we know what the islands sounded like at night: a burrow-nesting seabird that fed only in darkness and made, in William Strachey's words, a strange hollow and harsh howling. The colonists ate it to apparent extinction within a generation. It was found again, alive, in 1951.

Bermuda, Bermuda — Image: Version 1: Made by Caleb Moore from the Open Clip Art website and uploaded by Nightstallion Version 2: Made by Nameneko from version 1 of File:Flag of Bermuda.svg and version 2 of File:Coat of arms of · Public domain

What is the history of Bermuda?

Bermuda was called the Isle of Devils before anyone lived there. That is the striking thing about it: the fear came first, and it was fear of an empty place. The islands appear on Sebastian Cabot's world map of 1544 as ysla de demonios, a label John Henry Lefroy noted with some care in 1877 while assembling the colony's earliest documents. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, who was carried past them in 1515 and could not land, left the first description we have: a small island, not very high, with a ridge down the middle, "a vast quantity of land and sea birds", lying in thirty-three degrees and "always covered with clouds". He gives the name as Bermuda, after Juan Bermúdez, the captain who found it, and La Garza after his ship. He says nothing about devils. What Lefroy points out is that the evil reputation is itself evidence the place was well known: Spanish treasure fleets running the Florida channel followed the Gulf Stream up to latitude 33 before turning east for the Azores, and Bermuda sat exactly there, a reef fence in the dark with no lighthouse and no anchorage. Then, on 2 June 1609 — a Friday, as William Strachey remembered it, and the calendar agrees — a fleet of "seven good Ships, and two Pinnaces" left Plymouth Sound for Jamestown, carrying the relief the Virginia colony was starving for. The flagship Sea Venture held Sir Thomas Gates, the incoming governor, Admiral Sir George Somers, and about 150 people. The convoy held together until 23 July, when a hurricane took it apart. What follows in Strachey's letter is one of the great pieces of English prose about being at sea and expecting to die. Jourdain, on the same deck, is plainer and in some ways worse: the water rose above the ballast until the men "stood vp to the middles" bailing with buckets and kettles and "continually pumped for three dayes and three nights together, without any intermission; and yet the water seemed rather to encrease, then to diminish". Somers sat on the poop through all of it — "three dayes and three nights together, without meales meat, and little or no sleepe" — steering to keep her upright, and it was Somers who sighted land. On 28 July 1609 they were driven onto the eastern reefs. Silvester Jourdain, who was aboard, gives the date flatly: "Vpon the eight and twentieth day of July 1609 (after the extremity of the storme was something qualified) we fell vpon the shore at the Barmudas." The ship wedged between rocks and did not break up at once. Every soul aboard got ashore. It is, so far as the record goes, the luckiest wreck in the Atlantic. What they found contradicted everything they had been told. Jourdain wrote that the islands had been "neuer inhabited by any Christian or Heathen people, but euer esteemed, and reputed, a most prodigious and inchanted place, affoording nothing but gusts, stormes, and foule weather; which made euery Nauigator and Mariner to auoide them, as Scylla and Charibdis; or as they would shun the Diuell himselfe" — and then found it "the richest, healthfullest, and pleasing land" he had ever set foot on. Strachey put the same reversal more formally: he hoped "to deliver the world from a foule and generall errour", the belief that the islands "can be no habitation for Men, but rather given over to Devils and wicked Spirits". They stayed nine months and a few days. They ate wild hogs left by earlier wrecks — Somers himself took thirty-two at one time and brought them in by boat — along with turtles, palmetto tops and, in winter, a burrowing seabird they could pick up by hand. Two children were born and baptised on the island, a boy named Bermudas and a girl named Bermuda. There was also a marriage, and there were two mutinies. On 13 March a gentleman named Henry Paine, caught stealing tools and then abusing the captain of the watch, was condemned to hang; he asked, as a gentleman, to be shot instead, and Strachey records the sentence carried out "towards the euening he had his desire, the Sunne and his life setting together." Out of Bermuda cedar and the salvaged ironwork of the Sea Venture they built two small ships, Deliverance and Patience, sailed on 10 May 1610 and reached Jamestown on 23 May to find the colony in its Starving Time. Strachey dated his long letter home 15 July 1610. Somers turned back to Bermuda for food and died there on 9 November 1610. The monument later raised over the spot carries an epitaph that puts his death in 1611 and ends: "He here bequeathed his entrailes and his heart." Lefroy, printing it, added a correction that says a great deal about how records go wrong: the year is false, and "the exigencies of rhyme have much to answer for".

Timeline: the documented record of Bermuda

1515 Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo passes the islands without landing and leaves the earliest surviving description: low, ridged, "always covered with clouds", with a vast quantity of land and sea birds. He records the name Bermuda, after the captain Juan Bermúdez, and mentions no devils.
1544 Sebastian Cabot's world map labels the islands ysla de demonios. It is the earliest dated attestation of the "Isle of Devils" name that Lefroy could point to, and it precedes any recorded landing.
2 June 1609 A fleet of "seven good Ships, and two Pinnaces" sails from Plymouth for Jamestown. Strachey remembers the day as a Friday, which the calendar confirms. The flagship Sea Venture carries Sir Thomas Gates, Sir George Somers and about 150 people.
28 July 1609 After four days of hurricane and continuous pumping, the Sea Venture is driven onto the eastern reefs and wedges between rocks without breaking up. Everyone aboard reaches shore. Jourdain, who was there, gives the date in his own words.
13 March 1610 Henry Paine, a gentleman among the castaways, is condemned for striking the captain of the watch and stealing tools. He asks to be shot rather than hanged and, in Strachey's phrase, "towards the euening he had his desire, the Sunne and his life setting together."
10 May 1610 After nine months ashore the castaways sail in Deliverance and Patience, built from Bermuda cedar and the salvaged ironwork of the wreck. They reach Jamestown on 23 May and find the colony starving.
15 July 1610 Strachey dates his long letter to an unnamed "Excellent Lady". It circulates in manuscript and is not printed until Samuel Purchas includes it in Purchas His Pilgrimes in 1625.
9 November 1610 Sir George Somers dies in Bermuda, having returned for supplies. His monument's epitaph — "He here bequeathed his entrailes and his heart" — dates the death to 1611; Lefroy corrects it, blaming "the exigencies of rhyme".
1 November 1611 The Revels Account records a play called The Tempest performed before the King at Whitehall on Hallowmas night. No contemporary source links it to Bermuda.
1616 At Governor Daniel Tucker's second assize a proclamation is passed "against the spoile of Cahowes, but it came too late, for they were most destroyed before". The bird is written off, and stays written off for some three centuries.
1808 Edmond Malone publishes An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakspeare's Tempest were derived, the first argument that the Bermuda wreck lies behind the play — made about two centuries after the fact.
1877 John Henry Lefroy prints the colony's founding documents and records his doubts about the Shakespeare link: the play "does not contain a single plain allusion, and very few phrases, which, taken apart from their context, have a local colour".
1951 Robert Cushman Murphy and Louis S. Mowbray, curator of the Bermuda Government Aquarium, find eighteen surviving nesting pairs of cahow on rocky islets in Castle Harbour. With them is a fifteen-year-old Bermudian, David B. Wingate. They publish the find in The Auk that July.
1966 David Wingate becomes Bermuda's first conservation officer and begins the restoration of Nonsuch Island, clearing it of introduced species so that the cahow has somewhere to breed that is not a bare rock.
March 2012 The Bermuda Department of Conservation Services announces that the cahow population has passed 101 nesting pairs "for the first time since the 1600s", up from eighteen at the 1951 rediscovery.

Is there a rational explanation for Bermuda?

Two famous claims hang on this story, and neither survives contact with the documents in the shape it is usually told. The first is that the cries of a bird gave Bermuda its devils. The bird is real and so is the noise. Strachey describes a web-footed fowl the size of a plover which "all the Summer wee saw not, and in the darkest nights of November and December (for in the night they onely feed) they would come forth, but not flye farre from home, and hovering in the ayre, and over the Sea, made a strange hollow and harsh howling". It nested in burrows "like Conyes in a Warren"; his men learned to catch it by standing on the rocks at night "hollowing, laughing, and making the strangest out-cry that possibly they could", whereupon the birds flew in and settled on their arms and heads, "answering the noyse themselves". For its blindness by day "and for their cry and whooting, wee called the Sea Owle". The margin of the printed text glosses the local name directly: "They call it of the cry which it maketh a Cohow." A later Bermuda relation printed by Purchas repeats it: "The Cohow is so termed of his voice; a night Bird all day hid in the Rockes." So the etymology of cahow from the bird's call is documented in the seventeenth century and is not in dispute. The causal step is. Neither Strachey nor Jourdain says the birds caused the islands' reputation. Strachey attributes the name to the weather and the reefs — "such tempests, thunders, and other fearefull objects are seene and heard about them, that they be called commonly, The Devils Ilands". Oviedo, the earliest visitor on record, mentions the birds in abundance and no devils at all. And the label ysla de demonios is already on a map in 1544, sixty-five years before an Englishman spent a night ashore to hear anything. The birds-explain-the-name reading is elegant, and it may well be right — nocturnal moaning from an uninhabited reef would frighten anyone — but the earliest source I have been able to fix for it is twentieth-century, not sixteenth. It is a modern inference presented as a Tudor fact. Written honestly it reads: sailors avoided Bermuda because ships died on it, and among the things they would have heard there, had they been unlucky enough to be wrecked, were the cahows. The second claim is that this wreck produced The Tempest. Strachey's letter is dated 15 July 1610 and circulated in manuscript long before Purchas printed it in 1625; the Revels Account records a play called The Tempest performed before the King at Whitehall on Hallowmas night, 1 November 1611. The connection, however, was not drawn by anyone at the time. It was argued by Edmond Malone in 1808, in a pamphlet whose title says what it was for: An Account of the Incidents from which the Title and Part of the Story of Shakspeare's Tempest were derived; and its true Date ascertained. That is roughly two centuries after the events. Lefroy, no debunker by temperament, was already uneasy in 1877: the question "can scarcely be passed over", he wrote, but "that the play does not contain a single plain allusion, and very few phrases, which, taken apart from their context, have a local colour, is very apparent" — and he noted that Shakespeare's "still-vexed Bermoothes" is mentioned as somewhere else, not as Prospero's island. A third correction is smaller but worth making, because the popular version has quietly edited it. The cahow was hunted to apparent extinction within a generation of settlement — John Smith's history records that at Governor Daniel Tucker's second assize a proclamation was passed "against the spoile of Cahowes, but it came too late, for they were most destroyed before" — and the bird was written off for some three hundred years. Its rediscovery in 1951 is usually told as David Wingate's story. Wingate, who did devote his life to the bird and became Bermuda's first conservation officer in 1966, was fifteen at the time and was there; the find was published as Murphy, R. C. and L. S. Mowbray, "New light on the Cahow, Pterodroma cahow", in The Auk for July 1951. Robert Cushman Murphy was an American ornithologist; Louis S. Mowbray was curator of the Bermuda Government Aquarium. They found eighteen surviving nesting pairs on rocky islets in Castle Harbour. Bermuda's own Department of Conservation Services, announcing in March 2012 that the population had passed 101 nesting pairs "for the first time since the 1600s", dated the recovery from that 1951 count of eighteen. That is the ghost story with a solution attached, and the solution is better than the ghost.

Can you visit Bermuda?

Start with the wreck, because the museum has it. Everything recovered from the Sea Venture is held by the National Museum of Bermuda at 1 The Keep, Sandys MA 01 (+1 441 234-1333), which states plainly that "all of the records and artifacts from the excavation are held at the Museum". They are shown in Shipwreck Island: Sunken Clues to Bermuda's Past, in the Queen's Exhibition Hall — more than 1,500 objects including cannon, olive jars, silver coins and shipbuilding tools. As read in August 2026 the museum opens 9:00-17:00 in summer, 10:00-17:00 in winter and 9:30-17:00 at weekends and on holidays, last admission 16:00, closed 25 December; adults $20, over-65s $18, resident students under 16 free. The site is contradictory about whether all under-16s are free, so ask. Commissioner's House is wheelchair accessible via the Ground Floor entrance through the Defence Exhibit, with a lift in the ground-floor hallway; there is disabled parking outside the gates and, by prior arrangement, vehicle access up the hill. The wreck itself was found by Edmund Downing in 1958, recovered under Allan "Smokey" Wingood between 1978 and 1981, and excavated to completion in 1982 by the Sea Venture Trust under the archaeologist Jon Adams. Do not plan a dive on it. Bermuda's Historic Wrecks Act 2001 protects everything older than fifty years, splits wrecks into "open" and "restricted" — marked underwater with green or red buoys — and makes interfering with any wreck or artefact without a licence punishable by a $25,000 fine or a year in prison. The Custodian of Historic Wrecks publishes a list of two dozen open wrecks that divers may visit. The Sea Venture is not on it. The town the castaways' colony became, St George's, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000 as the Historic Town of St George and Related Fortifications, Bermuda, under criterion (iv), as "the oldest English town in the New World". In it, Somers Garden is where Sir George Somers' heart and entrails are said to lie; the St George's Foundation says only that his nephew buried them "somewhere on the grounds", and no official page I could reach describes a plaque or marker, so expect a garden rather than a monument. The Bermuda National Trust, incorporated by its own Act of Parliament in 1969, runs the Globe Museum on King's Square at 32 Duke of York Street, in a building of 1700; Verdmont has guided tours Monday to Saturday at 11:00 and 13:00, and Tucker House is closed for conservation. The Trust publishes no admission prices and no museum hours on its website — check before travelling. And the cahow: you cannot go and see it. Nonsuch Island is closed to public access, and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources warns that "anyone landing on the island without permission will be subject to prosecution". The whole Castle Harbour Islands Nature Reserve is strictly controlled. Departmental tours are prioritised for school and educational groups, none run in January, February, July or August, and the only public route is the Bermuda Zoological Society's Nonsuch tour ([email protected], +1 441 505 0042); no price is published. What is open to everyone is the live CahowCam, three cameras inside a man-made nesting burrow, at nonsuchisland.com — note that Cornell's Bird Cams stopped hosting it in October 2024, so old links are dead. Cooper's Island Nature Reserve on St David's, reopened to the public in 2011, has free trails, shallow beaches and a wildlife observation tower built on a former NASA radar base and opened on 16 May 2013; no official page publishes its hours.

Sources consulted

Reviewed by V. Serrano on 2026-08-11 · How we verify our content