Kenneth Grahme, from "The Wind in the Willows"

Charles Kuralt,

"On the Road" traveler and author

The world knows little about the Pascagoula River and its tales of UFOs, pirate treasure, outlaws, changeling animals, Indian mounds and the river that sings. These stories, if more widely recognized, would add depth to attempts to save America's most pristine river.

"We took this river for granted when we were growing up - the animals, the stories, the plants, the water," said Lynn McCoy, who with his brother now runs McCoy's River & Marsh Tours. "The river is second nature to us, and we didn't realize how unique it is."

This mixture of fact and fiction cannot be found in one book or one research file. Like the river basin itself, the tales are spread out. Both ancient and new. Believable and unbelievable. Horrifying and hilarious.

"We believed there were Nazi submarines out there in the river, and we would go out and imagine we were shooting Nazi subs off the bridges," said Jay Higginbotham, 65, author and retired Mobile archivist who spent his youth in Pascagoula, the city at the river's south end.

"We sunk about 13 subs during World War II, and now that I'm older I realize there is some basis in our game because it was the war. We'd also go looking for stuff that we heard the pirate Jean Lafitte had buried. Never did find anything.

"The river is a perfect place for a young person's imagination."

Adult imaginations, too.

The oldest legends are explanations of why the river makes a singing sound, and those relate to the Pascagoula Indian tribe. From earlier times also come explanations of why the opossum's tail is hairless, why Spanish moss drips from trees and why treasure-hunter holes mysteriously appear along the river basin.

The best known modern story was born on Oct. 11, 1973. On that day, headlines flashed across the country that an unidentified flying object snatched two shipyard workers fishing south of the East Pascagoula River Bridge. Charles Hickson, 45, and Calvin Parker, 19, claimed they were whisked into a spacecraft and examined by an eyelike machine.

The snatching happened about 8 p.m., and they were too frightened to tell anyone until 11 p.m., when they contacted the sheriff's department. Their demeanor and a lie detector test convinced deputies they were telling the truth, and the story touched off a flurry of UFO sightings across the U.S.

Parker, who suffered mentally from the ordeal, lives in Louisiana and seldom talks about the incident, but Hickson published a book and has appeared on national talk shows. Now living in Gautier, Hickson occasionally talks publicly about that day and other memories brought out by hypnosis.

Those strange singing sounds

The Pascagoula UFO adds to the mystique of a river that captured man's imagination before written records. An earlier example is the Singing River legend and the many versions that explain why the tribe "disappeared."

In modern times the most repeated one has the Pascagoulas walking into the river, singing, rather than become enslaved by the warlike Biloxi tribe.

Singing River today is a nickname for a section of the southern end of the split river. Many believe it to be the East Pascagoula, but others claim they have heard the river's mysterious music on the West Pascagoula, or even farther up.

West-side believers were unhappy in 1987 when state legislators designated the section near the U.S. 90 east river bridge to be "henceforth known as The Singing River." Long-time disagreements over location, however, can't squelch the legend. The Chronicle-Star offered this in 1925:

"If you hear the mysterious music of the Pascagoula, you must imagine the wide extends of salt marshes that divide the East and the West Pascagoula rivers; you must see these marshes shimmering in the light of the moon just risen over the dark mass of pine forests that marks the shores of the river; you must see the stars and pines and oaks reflected in the clear waters."

So what causes the noise that some imagine is singing? A 1930s Works Progress Administration report suggested geological fissures that allow escaping gases in the water and marsh grasses. Fish, particularly drum, have been blamed, as have winds whipping on the river bank.

"I've heard it myself," said Liz Ford, chairwoman of the City of Pascagoula Preservation Committee. "As a child I heard it sing and didn't realize that I would not hear it forever."

A young Ford heard the music on the section of the river "from the porch of the Denny's on Front Street to where the grain elevator was erected." The only problem is that the elevator drowned out the noise. Now, neither the Denny's nor the grain elevator exists.

"I honestly don't know if people are hearing it today," said Ford, "but we certainly still hear the legend. We love our legends here, like the one about Longfellow. There's no evidence he ever came to Pascagoula, but you'll hear it."

The story goes that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow stayed at the old estate on Pascagoula Bay called Bellevue, later renamed The Longfellow House. The 19th century poet supposedly explored the river and waterfront.

"We think the legend started because of his poem, 'The Building of A Ship,' in which one line says, 'From Pascagoula's sunny bay,'

" said Ford.

The folk tales add a sense of place; the river's ambiance sets the scene. One ancient oak was draped in Spanish moss, and generations heard the tale of how a Pascagoula princess climbed the tree, vowing not to come down until her lover returned. He never did, and her hair grew long and gray.

When the French arrived in 1699, they met what remained of the Biloxi and Pascagoula tribes, who lived in a village on the Pascagoula. The French named the river after the Pascagoulas, translated "Bread People," and they named their first capital after the Biloxis, translated "First People."

From the Biloxis, the French heard stories of the Most Ancients, animals with magical changeling powers used to explain animal eccentricities. One of the tales tells why the possum's tail is hairless because, once, it was bushier than the squirrel's.

Tricked by a possum

The story involves the Ancient of Possums who killed a pesky wolf and went down the trail singing of his misdeed. When the Ancient of Wolves heard his words, the Wolf People captured him. Tricky possum claimed the only way he could be killed was to be hit with a stick from a particular tree, so off they went for the stick, leaving him with a one-eyed guard.

Possum disappeared into a hole and when the Wolf People returned with the proper stick, he used disguises to fool them. One last time he disappeared into the hole but when his bushy tail stuck out the wolves pulled at it, stripping off the hair.

The Biloxis had similar legends for other animals found in the basin, from turkeys and red-tailed hawks to the now extinct ivory-billed woodpeckers.

American Indians held sway on the river basin for thousands of years. About 8500 B.C., aboriginal inhabitants were thought to have first come to the Mississippi Coast.

Read Stowe, a Lucedale archaeologist, says evidence can be seen in stone tools and other artifacts. He also believes the region had mastodons, or giant elephants, though the skeletons haven't been found. Bison, jaguars, ground sloths, giant tortoises, mountain lions, passenger pigeons, even Caribbean seals are thought to have roamed the basin.

"Mississippi is not an enlightened area when it comes to archaeology," said Stowe. "Many of the sites on the Coast and in the basin have been leveled by development. When you think about it, humans from the beginning would build on the best sites, the safest sites, closest to food. The next group coming along would build on top of that, and the cycle was repeated. People destroyed earlier settlements, not intentionally but it happened."

Some Indian mounds and shell middens remain, but most are gone or plundered.

"These Indians were hunter-gatherers and people who lived on the edge, so when modern people destroy mounds looking for valuables, they won't find any," said Stowe. "Hidden Indian treasures are just myth."

The basin tribes were first whacked by the Spanish conquerors, or conquistadors, who killed them and introduced European diseases for which they had no immunity. Tribes were decimated by the time the kinder French arrived, more interested in trade than conquering.

Settlers continue digging folklore

When the French lost the territory, many remaining coastal Indians headed west with them to Louisiana, or to Texas, but that didn't signal an end to life on the river. Settlers realized how valuable the basin was for lumber and food, and outlaws realized its hideout potential. That last fact has led to mysterious holes, even in modern times.

Whether the famous Louisiana pirate Lafitte of Jay Higginbotham's young imagination traversed the Pascagoula is unproven, but enough known bad men did roam the basin.

A character named Sterling Dupree lived on the Pascagoula in the early 1800s, but was he patriot or bandit? When the Spanish flag flew he took it upon himself to attack the Spanish fort at Pascagoula and next attacked longtime residents to steal slaves and valuables.

A more modern villain was Kinnie Wagner, who made his way to Merrill on the Pascagoula to kill the sheriff of Greene County. He killed so many lawmen that folks in that part call him the Clyde Barrow of Mississippi. His basin hideouts eventually yielded him up and he died in prison in 1958.

But no criminal can steal the thunder of James Copeland, whose mixture of truth and myth is a movie waiting to be made. Copeland, born near Pascagoula in 1823, roamed the basin as a child, stole from farmers and at age 13 burned down the Jackson County Courthouse in Americus to destroy pig-stealing evidence against him.

Copeland hooked up with the famous Wages Gang but eventually formed one of his own and pillaged a six-state area, some believe burying goods in his basin haunts. His published memoirs and other stories claim as much; rumors and mysterious holes attest to believers.

"Some treasure hunters from Pascagoula found a barrel of gold in the '70s in the swamp. I don't know who did it, but it is common knowledge," said Johnny May. The manager of Gautier's public works is a treasure hunter fascinated by the basin's history and potential finds from the colonial and Civil War eras and its outlaw days.

"I've talked to three or four old-timers who said they've seen a vault made of brick and concrete in the Pascagoula swamp. They were fishing or hunting and tried to go back but never found it - like it disappears."

Copeland's memoirs mention the Black Creek area but when May went there 25 years ago to dig, the ground already looked "like a mortar field" from all the treasure-hunting holes.

And the murderous, thieving Copeland? The outlaw was hanged at Old Augusta in Perry County, a stone's throw from the vast, life-giving waterway that, as a boy, had intrigued him and generations of others.