Laura Erickson’s For the Birds

This is Laura Erickson with a Duluth Shipping News exclusive. The strange happenings onboard the Great Lakes commercial cargo ship, the SS Titmouse, may at long last have been solved thanks to a fifth grade girl. For generations, ghostly rumors have swirled about the Titmouse, the oldest commercial vessel still operating on the Great Lakes, built in the 1870s during Lake Superior’s logging boom. Yesterday, the ship’s cook, Lampy Passamaquoddy, brought his 11-year-old daughter, Nora, on board to celebrate Take Your Child to Work Day. During a crew meeting, he left his daughter alone in the galley where so many of the alleged odd events have been reported. Nora is here with me this morning on the deck of the Titmouse. Nora, tell me about the strange things that have been going on in the galley.

NORA: Mostly it’s about the crew’s coffee. Every morning during breakfast, two people’s cups suddenly start jiggling around with coffee splattering everywhere. This happens even when the lake is completely calm.

LAURA: Any other weird things?

NORA: Well, whenever anyone makes a peanut butter sandwich, mysterious tiny holes appear, as if out of nowhere. And anytime my dad—he’s the ship’s cook—sets out a bowl of granola, little pieces fly out of the bowl and zip all around the room.

LAURA: Have you ever witnessed any of this?

NORA: I actually saw the Chickadee Ghost Pirates. It’s a lucky thing my homework was to record people my dad works with. I had my tape recorder with.

NORA’S RECORDING:

NORA: Who are you?

CHUCK-ADEE: We be the Chickadee Ghost Pirates, matey.

NORA: What are you doing on the ship?

DEE-DEE: Well, it all started in 1880, don’t you know, when we built our nest in a beautiful birch up by Castle Danger? I laid nine eggs, nine perfect little eggs, and then the galdarn loggers came.

CHUCK-ADEE: Aye, the dirty stinking loggers came.

DEE-DEE: Now, Chuck, remember, we decided they really were no different from beavers, just on a larger scale, don’t you know?

CHUCK-ADEE: They started sawing our tree. I screamed to Dee to get out of there fast, but arrr, she twern’t about to leave her eggs.

DEE-DEE: My eggs? Oh, for sad, my beautiful eggs.

CHUCK-ADEE: They be our eggs. That be our tree. We could always build another nest and lay more eggs, but no. Dee’s maternal hormones kicked in and she wouldn’t come out.

DEE-DEE: Well, you know, you could have flown away too, Chuck.

CHUCK-ADEE: Arrrr, and let you get all the glory?

NORA: Now you sound like the bickering Chickadee Ghost Pirates.

DEE-DEE: We were killed when the tree crashed to the ground. I can’t remember what happened next, but suddenly there we were again, watching as our tree was being dragged to Lake Superior. One of the loggers said it was a waste of time to do all this for a bloody birch when all they really wanted was pines. I’m afraid that riled me up a wee bit, don’t you know?

CHUCK-ADEE: Arrrr, that’s when Dee got the idea to start haunting them.

DEE-DEE: Well, sure, maybe haunting them was my idea to start with, but you’re the one who picked out their nose and ear hairs while they were sleeping, don’t you know?

CHUCK-ADEE: Ha ha ha! Aye, matey, but you’re the one who got the ship’s cat to chase you while everyone was asleep. It was a thing of beauty, the way you could lure that cat to leap on their faces.

DEE-DEE: Anyways, once we reached the lake, they strapped our birch onto a huge raft with at least a thousand other logs. Then a tugboat came and pulled the whole thing through the lake over to a sawmill in Duluth. Our tree, our beautiful tree, and my eggs, sawed into boards.

CHUCK-ADEE: Arrr, when the boards were finally loaded onto the SS Titmouse, we flew aboard too and took over the ship. For a while, it felt great to inflict pain on the crew, but acting out vengeful impulses isn’t healthy for a chickadee.

DEE-DEE: We knew in our souls that chickadees, even chickadee ghost pirates, aren’t supposed to hate. And it wasn’t like anything we did could bring our eggs back, so we eased up on the hijinks, don’t you know?

CHUCK-ADEE: The crew never realized we were in charge.

DEE-DEE: Ooh, remember the night the Edmund Fitzgerald went down? We could feel how fast that barometric pressure was falling and we knew we had to get to harbor fast.

CHUCK-ADEE: It was so clever how you dipped your beak in the ink to change the readings on the ship’s log. I don’t think the captain even noticed. You just adjusted the route and headed straight to shore.

NORA: Why do you spatter coffee every morning?

DEE-DEE: Well, you know, we’ve always liked taking a bath in the morning. As ghosts, we can’t feel any difference between water and other liquids hot or cold, but coffee smells so good.

CHUCK-ADEE: Arrr, that was one thing that surprised us about being ghosts. When we were alive, we had a pretty lousy sense of smell. Not anymore.

NORA: How come you’re showing yourselves to me when you never showed yourselves to anyone else? Is it because I’m young and pure and in touch with cosmic forces?

CHUCK-ADEE: Hardly, matey. We were just waiting for someone with a tape recorder.

LAURA: So there you have it, the true story of Lake Superior’s Chickadee ghost pirates. Now I have on the phone with me Duluth’s mayor, Don Ness. Mayor Ness, how is your administration planning to deal with this situation?

MAYOR DON NESS: Laura, tales of the Chickadee ghost pirates haunting Lake Superior vessels have plagued the Twin Ports for over a century, but not one of those stories has ever been substantiated. Ow! Ooh, excuse me. Something weird is going on with my nose hairs.

LAURA: Thanks, Mayor Ness. For the Duluth Shipping News, I’m Laura Erickson. Today’s segment featured Nora Bartell, Seamus Johnson, and Lisa Johnson. The part of Duluth Mayor Don Ness was played by Duluth Mayor Don Ness.