Canada's Mysterious Maritimes.

Phantom Ship
At Nova Scotia's Mahone Bay, I investigated the twin riddles of the Teazer Light and the Oak Island "Money Pit." (The latter, one of the world's greatest unsolved mysteries, will be treated in a later column.)
The Teazer Light is an example of "ghost lights" or "luminous phenomena" (see Corliss 1995), in this case the reputed appearance of a phantom ship in flames. On June 26, 1813, the Young Teazer, a privateer's vessel, was cornered in the bay by British warships. Realizing they were doomed to capture and hanging, the pirates' commander had the ship set ablaze, whereupon--at least according to legend--all perished (Blackman 1998). Soon after, however, came eyewitness reports that the craft had returned as a fiery spectral ship. It has almost always been observed on foggy nights, according to marina operator (and private investigator) Jim Harvey (1999), especially when such nights occur "within three days of a full moon" (Colombo 1988, 32).
In the late evening of July 1 (approximately three days after the full moon) I began a vigil for the Teazer Light, lasting from about 11:00 P.M. until 1:00 A.M. Unfortunately the phantom ship did not appear, although that was not surprising given that one of the last reported sightings was in 1935 (Colombo 1988). I wondered if the diminishing of apparition reports might be due, at least in part, to encroaching civilization, with its accompanying increase in light pollution (from homes, marinas, etc.) obscuring the phenomenon.
In researching the Teazer Light I came across the revealing account of a local man who had seen the fiery ship with some friends. They shook their heads in wonderment, then went indoors for about fifteen minutes. When they came out again, ". . . [T]here, in exactly the same place, the moon was coming up. It was at the full, and they knew its location by its relation to Tancook Island." The man appreciated the sequence of events: "It struck him then that there must have been a bank of fog in front of the moon as it first came over the horizon that caused it to appear like a ship on fire, and he now thinks this is what the Mahone Bay people have been seeing all these years. If the fog had not cleared away that night he would always have thought, like all the other people, that he had seen the Teazer" (Creighton 1957).