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Beautiful Nell Cropsey Still Waits in Elizabeth City

Elizabeth City’s most famous ghost is the beautiful 19-year-old Nell Cropsey, who mysteriously disappeared from her home along the Pasquotank River in 1901. Nell had moved to Elizabeth City in 1898 with her family from Brooklyn, New York. She was reported to be very attractive and had a long line of male suitors in town openly desiring to court her. During this time, she was dating Jim Wilcox, the son of the local county sheriff. For months Nell had been waiting for Jim to ask her to marry him, but he appeared to being making no move toward asking for her hand. In an attempt to provoke Jim into popping the question, Nell began flirting with other men in order to make Jim jealous.

One evening Jim stopped by to see Nell at the Cropsey family home. Nell’s sister reported that Nell and Jim began arguing about Nell spending time with another man. As the argument grew more heated, Jim asked Nell to step outside of the house onto the front porch, where they continued arguing into the late evening. Before heading off to bed, the sister went to check on them on the front porch, only to find no sight of Nell or Jim. A few moments later, a neighbor came running up to the house shouting that someone had been in the backyard trying to steal the Cropsey’s family pig.

The hunt began for Nell. Police searched the city and throughout the county for a month, and even dragged the river behind the Cropsey home to look for her body, all to no avail. During this time, her father received a strange letter postmarked Utica, New York, which said that Nell had seen a man trying to steal the family’s pig and that when she had tried to stop him, he had hit her on the head with a stick and carried her off in a rowboat. The letter also marked an area in the river where Nell’s body would be found.