As you drive down Long Beach Boulevard on LBI in early spring you see signs of suburbia coming to life. It’s hard to imagine this place as ever being described as deserted or isolated and remote, but in the 1800s it was just that. This was the period of the “Lure of Long Beach,” when stories of pirates and shipwrecks were as much fiction as fact. Some of these stories seem so bizarre that they deserve some investigation.
In March 1884, the short-lived Long Beach News ran an interview with William A.
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