BUXTON – World War II was hell, and those who remember it are few. However, some local folks still recall the horror of corpses washing ashore, deafening firebombs in the sea, mangled ship parts and sticky oil a-muck on the beach — and the paranoia of bad men stealing wartime secrets in Outer Bankers’ backyards.

In the early 1940s, Outer Bankers went to bed worrying if German spies might come ashore in the dark of night from their submarines, or U-boats, hidden behind the waves. Today, we can find no WWII espionage reports from the National Archives or FBI focusing on North Carolina, although there is a local story of an apparent German spy in Buxton that authorities eventually captured.

Carol White Dillon, 89, of Buxton recollects it was 1940 when the man with the German accent came to visit the parents of a childhood friend, before the U.S. entered the war.

Dillon’s personage was the feature of the famous Nell Wise Wechter novel, “Taffy of Torpedo Junction,” a part-fiction, part-true account of a spirited red-haired teenager named Taffy Willis, who was growing up with her beloved “Gramp” at the heart of the “Battle of Torpedo Junction” off the Outer Banks.

The Mysterious Visitor

“I don’t remember what he looked like, and there was nothing unusual about his dress,” Dillon said. “I don’t know when or how he arrived.”

Dillon said there was speculation he was let off a U-boat, and rowed ashore in a rubber raft. “The Coast Guard boys would talk, and they mentioned finding rafts in the dunes. We assumed men were coming ashore from the German subs,” she said, but conceded, “I really don’t know how he got here.”

Dillon said that, back then, access to Hatteras was only by ferry, and the best way to travel over land was by walking, horseback or riding on the Midgett Bus Line. Driving and getting stuck in the sand wasn’t a good option. “So, he may have come on the bus,” she said.

“He didn’t work. He was just visiting. He stayed with the Melhouses on Buxton Back Road. The house is still there. I played with their son, Ralph. Germans were infiltrating everywhere,” Dillon said.

She said the man’s name was Hans Haas, and he came into the post office, where her mother, Maude White, was postmistress. He wanted to mail heavy parcels in wooden boxes. They were maybe 2 and a half feet by 2 feet, and he would insure them. “Mother asked him two or three times what was in there, and he said, ‘books’.

“I told mother, that man’s lying to you, because there was no place to buy books on the island, and he wasn’t a native who could have collected so many books, and she became suspicious. I think she was already suspicious.”

Dillon said her only interaction with the man was that day in the post office. She and her mother never spoke of the incident with the Melhouses or anybody else. Her mother wanted to keep it to themselves.

“I don’t remember where he was mailing the packages or if he received mail,” Dillon said, “but mother did not mail the boxes. She called the FBI.”

Maude White was also a volunteer “coastal observer” for the U.S. Navy, and had a relative at the Coast Guard station on the island, and may have used the telephone there, she said.

Dillon said the FBI undertook the arduous trip to Buxton and discovered the boxes were filled with maps of all the little canals and waterways and water depths from Maine to Florida.

“I don’t think they confronted him here. But they secretly followed him back to New York and arrested him there. He was a German spy and was caught, and my mother was the one responsible for his capture.

“I don’t think the FBI told her specifically what happened to him, but they said they caught a ring of spies when they followed him to New York.”

Maude White received a commendation from the Navy’s District Intelligence Office for her patriotic service.

FBI and other U.S. records make no mention of a Hans Haas, which Dillon presumes was a false name.

The largest espionage case in the U.S. that ended in convictions was the Duquesne Spy Ring in New York. A total of 33 members of a German espionage network were convicted in 1941 after a lengthy FBI investigation. If indeed “Haas” was associated with the Duquesne Spy Ring in New York and was part of the ring of spies captured there, his fate was a long prison term.

However, there may be no connection between Haas and that operation, because it took place a year before Dillon’s encounter, if her memory is true, and descriptions of the spies’ work do not match Haas’s endeavors. Dillon viewed photos of the 33 spies, but they did not trigger her memory of what he looked like. It was, after all, almost 80 years ago.

Whatever happened to the German spy of the Outer Banks, Dillon offered that she did not think he lived a full life.

This story first appeared on The Outer Banks Voice.

Jamestown Virginia is the site of the first permanent English colony in the New World. Or is it?

Recent findings and statements by the Outer Banks-based Croatoan Archaeological Society could give that honor to Hatteras Island and the State of North Carolina. Other regional archaeologists have diverse opinions.

On April 10, the society publicly concluded there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence that at least some of the 1587 Raleigh colonists assimilated with the Algonkian Native American Croatoan people of Hatteras Island.

The society said its findings strengthen the case for something of exceptional importance for American history.

The group claims that the colonists were never lost but were abandoned by Mother England and lived out their lives with Manteo’s tribe on Croatoan, Manteo’s home. Furthermore, the society contends, the offspring of the mixed-race community have continued to live locally and are still here.

The society’s co-founder Scott Dawson argues that this does change American history. Other contemporaries think there is no definitive evidence, or have a differing view on the definition of permanence.

“If the colony did indeed assimilate at Croatoan as our findings indicate, then yes they are the first permanent English settlement in America and a much nicer story than the constant wars at Jamestown,” Dawson said.

In addition to artifacts, the society has uncovered over the past seven years, Dawson and his society co-founder and wife, Maggie, cite historical records, early history books, newspaper clippings and documented visits to Hatteras by English explorers to support their contentions.

Scott Dawson points to visits in 1701 by South Carolina colonist John Lawson, whom he said visited Hatteras and spoke with members of the mixed-race colony, as well as the evangelist Rev. John Irmstone, whom he said reported the community to his superiors in 1710.

Dawson added that the phrase “Lost Colony,” was created in conjunction with the longest running outdoor drama in the nation of the same name, which takes place annually on Roanoke Island.

“Essentially, the colony was not lost until the 1930s, when the play came along and told a good story to sell tickets. Understandable, as a mystery sells more tickets,” he said, contending that the colony’s whereabouts was never a mystery at all.

Dawson also holds up a 1759 land grant when the colonial governor of North Carolina gave the Hatteras Indians 200 acres.

“The heads of household are listed and they are common island names such as Farrow, Hooper and Brooks,” he said.

“The historical ramifications for American history are huge,” Maggie Dawson said.

Charles Ewen is President of the Society for Historical Archaeology, a professor of anthropology and director of the archaeological laboratory at East Carolina University. Ewen said he could not say if the Governor White colony is the true first permanent colony.

“It appears the colonists had contact with the Hatteras Indians,” he said, “but is that where they went? Still no definitive evidence.”

The First Colony Foundation, for FCF, is another archaeological organization that has long explored Roanoke Island for Elizabethan-era presence, and more recently a parcel 50 miles west of the Outer Banks on the western edge of the Albemarle Sound.

FCF archaeologists were also involved in discovering the expanded Jamestown community in Virginia. FCF announced a few months ago they believed they had found 16th-century English artifacts connected with domestic living at the Albemarle site.

The FCF said then that it was possible some of the Raleigh colonists may have gone inland. FCF is still studying its findings and has not made a definitive statement about them, yet, including from which Raleigh expedition the artifacts may have come.

As for which colony can claim the title of “first permanent,” FCF President Phil Evans said: “The concept of whether a colony is permanent seems to depend on perspective. For the 1587 colonists who spent the remainder of their lives on this side of the Atlantic, it would have seemed permanent.

“But it seems ‘permanence’ is not viewed from that perspective. It is viewed instead from the perspective of the metropolis (as the ancients would say) or the colonizing ‘mother country’.

“As England was either unable or unwilling to maintain its connection with the group of English people here in America, the colony was thereby discontinued. Those English still here without contact with their mother country might best be seen as survivors rather than colonists.

“Not until Jamestown was settled in 1607 was a continuous English colony created in North American. This seems to be the measure of permanence that history requires.

“But we should not confuse permanence with importance.”

He noted that the French voyages and colonizing efforts of Cartier and Roberval in the 1530s and 1540s are of immense importance to the history of Canada and North America, even though no permanent colony was established.

“I don’t think any scenarios are off the table,” Ewan said. “It is possible that many died from sickness, and the survivors tried to sail back to England in the pinnace that was left behind — unsuccessfully.

“There is so little actual data, that there are many plausible possibilities of their fate, including all that you have mentioned.”

Dawson concluded, “Did they go to Croatoan? Absolutely. Did they thrive, try to return to England and drown; linger a few years and die off? That is the real mystery of the abandoned colony of Croatoan, not the lost colony of Roanoke.”

MANTEO — Artifacts uncovered recently at a western Albemarle archaeological site suggest that settlers may have lived in the area around the time the Lost Colony disappeared.

In a report to donors, the First Colony Foundation reported that in only a few months, researchers have found more Elizabethan artifacts related to domestic activities than they have on Roanoke Island since the earliest English settlers vanished four centuries ago.

Foundation President Phil Evans called the findings an “extraordinary discovery.”

“At the site at western Albemarle, we have found evidence of the sorts of ceramics that would be most likely found in food preparation,” Evans wrote in an e-mail. “Where people cook, eat, and do so long enough to break some of their kitchen wares, we believe they may also be dwelling.”

Most of the artifacts from Fort Raleigh on Roanole Island are related to trade or a science center excavated in past decades — beads and copper aglets, as well as crucibles, bricks and tiles for a metallurgist’s furnace.

While the finds at the site on the western side of the Albemarle Sound may offer clues to where members of the Lost Colony ended up, they could be evidence of something else.

“We are encouraged to report that excavation at that site has revealed both Algonkian and English artifacts, including several noteworthy finds unlikely to have come from any source other than the Raleigh colonists,” Evans said.

He added, however, that “they could have come from the activities of any one of the colonial efforts between 1584 and 1590, or on an outside chance from some source presently undocumented.

“While what we have found is not large in numbers, we feel it is of high diagnostic value.”

Called Site X, the dig is located where the Chowan and Roanoke Rivers meet in the western Albemarle Sound. It is in the area of an intriguing “breadcrumb” recently discovered on Raleigh Colonist John White’s map of the area, which he painted in the mid-1580s

The breadcrumb is a paper patch affixed over the area on the map.

When researchers at the British Museum undertook imaging and spectroscopic tests of the map a couple of years ago, they noted a four-pointed, star-shaped symbol with a cross in it, near the rivers, under the patch.

The symbol resembles a fort. But Evans has now disclosed, “We have no evidence of a fort. Whatever the site is, there is no evidence of a fort. A fort at this specific site does not seem likely. What is it? We don’t yet know.”

Evans said that John White fully expected at least some of the colonists would move farther inland at some point. But after White returned to England for supplies, then came back to America, a storm prevented him from exploring. He returned to Europe without a trace of his family and friends.

Evans said the foundation’s brief and limited survey of the surrounding area may also reveal an associated Algonkian village “almost adjacent to it.”

“There are high hopes that more good news will come in 2015,” he said. He said the foundation will make an official and more detailed announcement in the coming weeks.

He also said that archaeological excavation is only one early component of the study. In addition, the foundation must process and catalog artifacts, analyze samples and chart stratigraphy. “Specialists must extract conclusions from complex data and reconcile discoveries to their historical context.

“This is all very costly and important work, and it would not be possible without the loyal support of our generous donors.” He appealed to the general public to consider an investment in “this important next phase of our efforts to discover the discoverers.

“Our findings will write this missing chapter in American history,” he said concluded.

The First Colony Foundation is a non-profit organization made up solely of volunteers. It receives funds for research through donations and grants. Anyone wishing to help fund First Colony Foundation research may send a tax-deductible gift to 1501 Cole Mill Rd., Durham, 27705.