Shackle Island, the Ghost Slaves of Patty Cannon - near Phillips Landing, Delaware

Notorious ferry boat master Martha "Patty" Cannon did more than transport people across the Naticoke River at Woodland Ferry in Delaware.  She and her band of hooligans captured, sold, and transported freed slaves back to plantations in the South.  One of the most notorious places she would keep her captured slave out of the public eye, was a secluded island on the Naticoke that became known as "Shackle Island".  For centuries, the island itself has been a ghost.  No one seemed to know where it was located, until recently.

Some have discovered ruins of a moss covered boat and believe that this marks the spot of the lost Shackle Island where the notorious slave smuggler Patty Cannon hid some of her victims.

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The Ghost of Patty Cannon - Woodland Ferry, Delaware

In the late 1700s at a place known as Woodland Ferry, located in Colonial Delaware, a woman by the name of Martha "Patty" Cannon ran a ferry that transported folks across the Nanticoke River.  Patty lived just north in the nearby town of Johnson's Corners.  Patty was not an ordinary woman, on many levels.  She was large and burly in appearance and stood over 6 feet tall.  Some say that she could best any man in a fight.  What was really scary about Patty Cannon though, was that she was just as nasty on the inside as she appeared on the outside and was a very murderous woman.

The skull of Patty Cannon is all that is left as a reminder of her brutal legacy.  It is kept in a hat box in a library office.

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