Smuttynose Island

Smuttynose is a 27-acre island in the Isles of Shoals, six miles offshore, part of the town of Kittery, Maine. The Hontvets had built a fishing business there; Wagner had been their hired man and boarder until Anethe's arrival pushed him off the island, and he was six weeks behind on rent when he made the row — reportedly chasing a cache of $600 he believed was in the house.

Maren Hontvet's June 1873 testimony convicted him at Alfred. Wagner briefly escaped, was recaptured, and was hanged on June 25, 1875 — protesting to the end that Maren herself was the killer and her husband had bought the witnesses. Some listeners found even that persuasive; the Maine Supreme Judicial Court did not.

The crime produced literature almost immediately. Celia Thaxter, who knew the island households, wrote 'A Memorable Murder' for The Atlantic in 1875 — a contemporary account that fixed the murders in the canon of American crime writing. A century and a quarter later, Anita Shreve built her 1997 novel The Weight of Water around Maren's testimony, quoting it at length; the murder now exists in the record twice — once as fact, once as the fiction that keeps republishing it.

The ghost lore attached to the island is of the expected kind: the women reportedly seen, figures reported on the empty acres where the house stood. The reports travel with the Isles of Shoals tour circuit, which keeps the story in circulation every summer the boats run.

The Shoals' other famous address was next door: the Appledore Hotel, where Karen Christensen had been working as a maid, and Celia Thaxter's celebrated garden and salon. The Hontvet duplex stood alone on Smuttynose's 27 acres, which is why the women were unreachable that night and why Maren's escape meant a night among the rocks waiting for light. Wagner's own counter-accusation — that Maren killed the two women and her husband bought the witnesses — was aired from his cell while he awaited hanging, and it still surfaces in retellings. The file keeps it as what it is: a condemned man's claim, documented, and never proven.

The murder house is long gone; Smuttynose today holds a handful of cottages and a dock. What persists is a case file with an unusual feature — a stopped clock, a survivor's testimony, and a condemned man's counter-accusation that still finds believers. The island files its haunting reports the way it files everything else: under the women's names, and beside the question the gallows never quite settled. Ghost lore on the Shoals keeps to the outdoor pattern — figures reported on the island, the women seen where the house stood — circulated now mostly by the seasonal tour boats that make the crossing Wagner rowed alone.