Overview
The Tar River winds past Tarboro in eastern North Carolina, and along its banks lives one of the state's oldest pieces of folklore: the Banshee of the Tar. The tale, set during the Revolutionary War, tells of a miller named David Warner, loyal to the patriot cause, who was seized at his mill by British soldiers and drowned in the river; as he died, the story goes, he called down a banshee's curse, and the soldiers themselves were said to have been haunted by her wail before their own deaths. Ever since, the legend holds, a keening cry drifts along the Tar on certain nights, especially in late summer, with tellers describing a veiled or mist-like female shape over the water. It is folklore with no documented event securely behind it, printed in collections of North Carolina ghost stories for over a century. The river is public and its banks are ordinary town and farmland; the record should present the banshee strictly as legend, told for its history rather than as fact.