Features

Editor’s note: This article tells the back story of the gold cross that’s on the Ocracoke United Methodist Church altar, about which Margaret MacKinnon...

Text and photos by Jeanne Brook Truth can be stranger than fiction. And history is sometimes more frightening than ghost stories. In a small island...

Text and photos by Connie Leinbach As soon as he leaves his Chesapeake, Virginia, driveway to head to his Ocracoke home, Ed Stewart takes off...

Editor's note: This story was first published in the May 2026 Ocracoke Observer issue. By Connie Leinbach It wasn’t the fabled Blackbeard’s treasure, but finding a...

By Peter Vankevich Island residents Karen Rhodes and Matt Janson present a photographic and narrative journey through the Ocracoke’s ecosystem in their 160-page coffee...

By Peter Vankevich There was, to riff off Stephen Sondheim, something familiar, something peculiar, something for everyone. That sums up how the Ocracoke Folk Festival 2026...

Summer heat is upon us and former Ocracoke Island veterinarian Dr. Laura Trent offers the following advice regarding dogs visiting Ocracoke. Beach hazards:Hot sand and...

By Kevin P. Duffus © 2026 History’s earliest map depicting and identifying Ocracoke Island, then called Wococon, is held in the collections of the National...

Text and photos by Jeanne Brook Between the Ocracoke United Methodist Church and the family graveyards on Howard Street lay a tangle of brush, vines...

A stilt walker, a typewriter poet and a wandering magician will bring some different energy to this year’s Ocrafolk Festival, June 5 to 7,...