Mysterious Carter Jackson Monument

South Kingstown, Rhode Island

The murder of William Jackson by ship captain Thomas Carter would have been forgotten were it not for an eccentric and wealthy South Kingstown resident named Joseph Peace Hazard.

When Hazard was 82 years old he oversaw the erection of a monument to mark the spot where Jackson had been killed 138 years earlier, filling it with unusual details (For example, Carter's corpse was hung in a gibbet whose chains shrieked "during boisterous winds at night," terrifying the neighborhood). Why Hazard felt moved to erect the monument to two obscure, long-dead men is not mentioned on it, although Hazard was a devoted spiritualist, so perhaps he felt it necessary to placate the dead. Hazard himself died in 1892, so if the cycle holds true, a monument explaining his motives should appear in 2030.