Ep. 31 - The Curse of Palmyra Atoll

(Suggested by: Joanne Maio)

The Amityville Horror caused people to question whether a home could be possessed and cause a person to kill nearly their entire family, as Ronnie Defeo did in 1974. He killed his father and mother and four siblings. A family who moved in after the massacre, claimed to experience some intense haunting activity in the home that paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren judged to be demonic. Regardless of what one may personally believe about the case, the question of whether someone could be possessed or influenced into committing murder is real. This theory becomes more complicated when associated with an entire island. Is there a curse on the Palmyra Atoll and did it have anything to do with the murder of Muff and Mac Graham? 

Palmyra Atoll is a territory owned by the United States and is located around 1000 miles south of Hawaii. The tranquil island is beautiful with blue lagoons and white sand beaches. The island received its name in 1807 from Captain Sawle who was sailing the American ship Palmyra. For years, legends have swirled about the evil that seems to imbue the island and talk of a curse has been passed on for generations. To be fair, the atoll was formed from coral growing around the rim of an ancient sunken volcano and this made some nasty reefs that have caused several shipwrecks. So completely natural reasons to have that issue. But that doesn't explain ships disappearing without a trace. One story about a disappearing ship dates back to 1855. This was a whaling ship that ran aground on the atoll, but when rescuers went out, they could find no trace of the wreck or any survivors. And there are rumors that ghosts of dead sailors walk the island.

Feelings of dread have always accompanied people who visit the atoll. Palmyra Atoll became a staging area for the US Navy to run air raids against Japan during During World War II. Soldiers stationed there claimed to have feelings of impending doom and some even had panic attacks, committed suicide or got violent with their comrades.  A former Navy officer named Hal Horton was stationed at Palmyra from 1942 to 1944 and he reported, "Once one of our patrol planes went down near the island. We searched and searched but didn't find so much as a bolt or piece of metal. It was weird. Like they'd dropped off the edge of the earth. Another time, a plane took off from the runway, climbed to a couple hundred feet, and turned in the wrong direction. They were supposed to go north and they went south instead. It was broad daylight. We never could figure it out. There were two men aboard that plane. We never saw them again. We had some very bad luck on that island. Old salts in the Pacific called it the Palmyra curse. [The island] . . . is very small. You [could] fly over it at ten thousand feet and not see it if there [were] a few clouds in the sky. Once we heard a plane overhead trying to find us, but he crashed in the drink before he could find the runway. We didn't get to the poor guy fast enough. Sharks found him first."

After the war, the island was left uninhabited and continued to be owned by a private family. A yachtsman named Richard Taylor said of the atoll, "I had a foreboding feeling about the island. It was more than just the fact that it was a ghost-type island. It seemed to be an unfriendly place to be. I've been on a number of atolls, but Palmyra was different. I can't put my finger on specifically why, but it was not an island that I enjoyed being on. I think other people have had difficulties on that island." And that brings us to the murder that took place here in 1974. 

Eleanor “Muff” Graham and Malcolm “Mac” Graham were from San Diego disappeared on August 30th during a sailing trip from Hawaii to Palmyra. Muff and Mac were a wealthy middle-aged couple that had bought their dream sailboat, the Sea Wind, a two-masted 38 foot ketch. They loved to sail and made their home port a marina on Shelter Island in San Diego. This wasn't a real island, but rather a former sandbank that connected to San Diego by a narrow strip of land. People in the San Diego sailing community knew the couple well. In 1974, the Grahams decided to set sail from Hawaii and head to the Palmyra atoll where they planned to moor for awhile. There, they met ex-convict Buck Duane Walker and his girlfriend, Stephanie Stearns, who were sailing their boat The Iola. 

The two couples couldn't have been more different. Buck and Stephanie were hippies and the Grahams were conservative. But apparently, the couples had struck up a friendship since they were anchored in a lagoon near each other. At least, that is according to Stephanie. She claimed that Buck had told her that the Grahams had invited them over to the Sea Wind for dinner. Stephanie and Buck arrived at the Sea Wind at 6:30 pm on August 30, 1974 and found that the Grahams weren't there. Buck told Stephanie that Mac Graham had mentioned that they were going to go fishing and if they weren't back at the yacht when he and Stephanie arrived, they should just make themselves comfortable. The Grahams never showed and Buck and Stephanie went looking for them in the morning and found the Sea Wind's inflatable dinghy turned over and grounded and assumed the Grahams had drowned in an accident. And since they had been told to make themselves comfortable on the Sea Wind, why not just take it as their own?

Buck and Stephanie sailed back to Hawaii and they told authorities there that their boat had gotten stuck on a reef at Palmyra, so they sailed the abandoned Sea Wind back to Hawaii. Later, Stephanie admitted they stole the Sea Wind after they had scuttled the Iola. The Grahams were declared missing. Buck and Stephanie were arrested for stealing the Sea Wind, but there was no evidence to support the police's suspicions that the Grahams had been murdered, so the couple wasn't charged with anything else. The case went cold until 1981. South African sailors Sharon and Robert Jordan were visiting the atoll when they found some bleached human bones that seemed to have fallen out of an aluminum box. The skeleton was found near where the Grahams had possibly capsized and indeed, the bones turned out to belong to Muff Graham. But she didn't die from drowning. She had met a grisly fate. The skull revealed that she had been hit over the head and her face was burned with a welding torch. Her body was then dismembered and crammed into the aluminum box, which had apparently been weighed down and sunk into the lagoon. It then had floated up.

And this is the first bit of paranormal connected to this crime. It's as if Muff was seeking to be found based on the logistics of her discovery. Sharon Jordan just happened to be walking the beach at the atoll at just the right time. This was an isolated beach, rarely traversed by humans. The next tide would have been enough to wash the bones out to sea, never to be found. So Sharon found them at just the right time. It's what some would call a coincidence, but I don't believe in those. This was on purpose. Muff or something wanted those bones found. 

Bruce Henderson and Vincent Bugliosi, of Charlie Manson fame, wrote the 1991 book "And the Sea Will Tell" and in that they claim that Muff had a premonition about her death and she even sought advice from a spiritualist. Just a week before the Grahams left on their trip, the spiritualist warned Muff that something terrible was going to happen to her and Mac. Another strange thing happened with Muff's friend, Marie Jamieson. Muff came over to say good-bye to Marie and she brought her a gift of a porcelain figurine of the Virgin Mary. Marie reached out for the gift when Muff suddenly became overwhelmed with emotion and pointed at a huge crack in the figurine's forehead. She said, "Look at her...Look at what's happened to her. Don't you see? The hole in her head. I'm not coming back...Mac and I will never see you again." Muff then said goodbye and left and Marie felt as though it was Muff saying a final goodbye, not just a see you later. 

And then there was Tom Wolfe's interactions with the Grahams. He had been at Palmyra just a few days before the Grahams were murdered. During the week he was there, he got to know Muff and Mac and really liked them. He joined them on the Sea Wind for dinner before he left and Muff confided to him that she lived in fear of Buck Walker. Wolfe said he didn't care for Buck either and apparently Buck had brought pit bulls with him and one had bitten Wolfe. Muff gave Wolfe some letters to friends and families that she wanted him to mail and in one of those letters to a friend, Muff wrote, "I think this place is evil." Something else weird happened with Wolfe that I'll get into in just a moment.

Mac is believed to have been murdered and buried in a similar way as Muff, but his remains have never been located. Buck and Stephanie were charged with the murder of Muff Graham. Vincent Bugliosi actually represented Stephanie at her trial and he won her a controversial acquittal. Buck was tried and convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The testimony from a cellmate helped to seal his fate. Buck was paroled in 2007 suffering from terminal cancer and he later died. The motive for the crime was twofold. Buck had been fleeing a drug possession charge and his boat was a wreck that couldn't possibly get anywhere from the atoll. He had come here hoping to start a cannabis farm and failed miserably. On top of those issues, he and Stephanie had run out of food and the Sea Wind was fully stocked as the Grahams had planned to stay a year at the Palmyra Atoll. There had been other boats at the island, but they had all left, leaving just the Grahams and Buck and Stephanie. The Grahams were sitting ducks. 

Tom Wolfe was asked to testify in the criminal case since he knew both couples. The night before his testimony he was taking a walk on the beach along his home on Puget Sound. A storm had just passed through and he spotted a cylindrical object washed up on some rocks. This object turned out to be a cardboard mailing tube that had three copies of the Palmyra Island detail chart! Wolfe said, "Finding that damn chart was eerie [and] I'm not the superstitious type, but I'll admit, it really shook me. It was as if Palmyra, the island itself, had reached out and touched me from three thousand miles away." What are the chances that this would happen. Perhaps it wasn't as much the island reaching out as it might have been the spirits of Muff or Mac.

One could understand if Muff Graham's spirit was at unrest. She was murdered. Her husband's body has never been recovered. And as far as our research reveals, she hasn't been given a proper burial. A 2016 San Diego Union-Tribune article detailed that her remains were unclaimed and had been stored in an FBI locker for decades. A retired L.A. deputy public defender named Tom Bucy, found out in 2009 about Muff's bones when he read an article that the bones were being passed around in a law class during a lecture by an FBI agent. Bucy was putting forth the effort to get the bones transferred to San Diego and buried, but it didn't seem that he was having any success. I perused Find A Grave and found a record for her, but it claims that her remains reside with the FBI in Hawaii. Mac could be at unrest because he was never found and never got justice. 

A 1998 article from the Honolulu Star-Bulletin referred to Palmyra as "a postcard paradise with a dangerous heart." It clearly wasn't a safe place for Mac and Muff Graham. Is the atoll cursed? Does it lead people to do harmful things? Did Muff Graham know she was going to die? So many strange things connected to this island and to this crime. Is there something paranormal going on here? That is for you to decide!