The Cora Tree

On a quiet stretch of Snug Harbor Drive in Frisco stands a live oak carved with a single word: CORA. It's one of Hatteras Island's odder roadside stories — part ghost tale, part real historical mystery, and worth a slow, curious look rather than a quick drive-by.

The Legend

Local folklore ties the tree to a woman named Cora, said to have lived apart from the rest of the village in the early 1700s and accused by her neighbors of witchcraft. As the story goes, she and her child were bound to the tree to be burned — until lightning split the sky, smoke swallowed the scene, and Cora vanished without a trace. The carved name is what's left of the story today.

A Possible Lost Colony Link

What makes the tree more than a ghost story is the carving itself. The letters CORA are cut at roughly the same height up the trunk as the "CRO" carved into a tree on Roanoke Island and the word CROATOAN carved into a post found by search parties in 1590 — the last trace left by the vanished Roanoke colonists. Some Lost Colony researchers see that resemblance as more than coincidence, tying the Cora Tree into the long-running theory that some of the colonists ended up living among the Native people of Hatteras Island.

Visiting

The tree sits along Snug Harbor Drive in Frisco, easy to miss unless you're looking for it. There's no ticket and no staff — just an old oak and a story that's been passed down and argued over for generations.