Actually, Theodosia haunts a stretch of beach between Cape Hatteras and Nags Head, North Carolina, on the beautiful Outer Banks. I've never seen her, but you can if you walk up the beach at Cape Hatteras toward Nags Head on an overcast day between Christmas and New Year. Just look for the childlike woman dressed in old fashioned clothes. If you see her, tell her she can stop looking for her portrait, because it was found and taken to New York many, many years ago. I believe it, don't you? If you have read Charles Harry Whedbee's "Legends of the Outer Banks and Tarheel Tidewater", it claims that pirates killed everyone on her ship but her. Other accounts say that the pirates killed everyone, stole all the valuables on ship, and somehow the portrait got to New York.

I read this in high school, this tragic tale of the ill-fated daughter of former vice- president Aaron Burr, and wife of Govenor Joseph Alston, Theodosia Burr Alston, who is said to haunt a beach in South Carolina. In 1812 Theodosia was on a ship that went down off the coast of North Carolina. The bodies of all the others lost at sea washed up, but hers was never found.

It never ceases to amaze me how well Anya Seton can take historical facts, and blend with them just enough drama to make them readable, but not innacurate.

You will not be able to put it down.