Shark Attacks in Mississippi

A sound full of sharks and a record almost empty of bites

Mississippi's coast is short but it is prime shark habitat. The mainland shore from Bay St. Louis to Pascagoula faces not the open Gulf of Mexico but the Mississippi Sound, a broad, shallow lagoon sealed off by a chain of barrier islands, Cat, Ship, Horn and Petit Bois. The sound is warm from May to October, brackish from the rivers that drain into it, and turbid enough that a swimmer usually cannot see their own feet. Those are the conditions in which bull sharks thrive, and bull sharks are abundant here, pupping in the sound and running up the Pascagoula and Pearl rivers. Blacktips, Atlantic sharpnose, bonnetheads, finetooth and spinner sharks school along the beaches and around the island passes, and larger animals, tiger sharks and hammerheads, patrol the Gulf side of the islands.

Against that background the record is remarkably thin: 8 entries in 143 years. Part of the reason is that the mainland beach, the long man-made strand at Biloxi and Gulfport, is shallow and calm, with far less of the crashing surf and baitfish activity that put swimmers and small sharks together in Florida. Part of it is history: the coast was a fishing and shipping shore long before it was a bathing one, and the two nineteenth-century entries reflect that. The 1879 case is a man in the water with a life buoy at a river mouth after a pilot launch capsized, taken by a tiger shark; the 1886 case is a wader at Pass Christian with a 12-inch cut to the calf in the small hours of a July morning. The one modern death, at Bay St. Louis in July 1906, is a swimmer recorded as a college student whose partial remains were recovered from a shark by fishermen a week later.

After 1906 the file holds five entries in 116 years, and only two of them involve a person simply in the water: a leg bitten in August 1917 with no activity recorded, and a leg bitten at Mississippi City in July 1960 by a swimmer pulling a raft out to ride it back to shore. The other three are fishing incidents, a deckhand on a charter boat off Horn Island cut on the right hand by a 4-foot shark in July 1963, an angler at Cat Island with a minor leg laceration from a hooked blacktip in July 1995, and an angler at Horn Island with minor injuries from a 5-foot shark in October 2022. The last two decades of the twentieth century, when the casino boom brought millions of new visitors to the coast, added exactly one entry, and the twenty-first century so far has added one more.

Where on the Mississippi coast the entries happened

Seven of the eight Mississippi rows name a place, and the names split neatly between the mainland shore and the barrier islands. Horn Island is the only spot that repeats, with 2 fishing rows, in 1963 and 2022; Cat Island in Harrison County has 1; the mainland has Bay St. Louis in Hancock County, Pass Christian and Mississippi City with one each; the 1879 fatality is logged simply at a river mouth; and the 1917 leg bite carries no place at all.

• Horn IslandThe one repeated place in the file, and both rows are fishing. On 11 July 1963 a 24-year-old deckhand on the charter boat Silver Dollar was cut on the right hand by a 4-foot shark, a provoked case. On 27 October 2022 a man fishing at Horn Island received minor injuries from a shark reported at 5 feet, the state's only entry since 2000 and its newest. Horn Island is a boat-access island in the Gulf Islands National Seashore, which is why anglers rather than bathers are the people in its rows.
• Cat Island, Harrison CountyOne row: on 3 July 1995 a 32-year-old woman fishing at Cat Island suffered a minor laceration to the leg from a hooked blacktip shark, which the database marks as provoked. It is the only Mississippi entry that names a blacktip, and one of only two in the file with a species at all.
• Bay St. Louis, Hancock CountyThe state's last fatality. On 5 July 1906 a swimmer at Bay St. Louis, recorded as a St. Stanislaus College student, was killed; the species column holds only the note that fishermen recovered partial remains from a shark a week later. No entry has been logged at Bay St. Louis since.
• Pass ChristianThe oldest dated bite on the mainland shore: at two in the morning on 10 July 1886 a 45-year-old wading at Pass Christian received a 12-inch laceration to the right calf. The row is one of two pre-1900 entries and the only one in the Mississippi file with a time of day.
• Mississippi CityThe last swimmer bitten in the state. On 5 July 1960 a 17-year-old pulling a raft out to ride it back to shore at Mississippi City, now part of Gulfport, had a leg bitten. No species was recorded, and no bather has been logged anywhere in Mississippi in the 66 years since.
• A river mouth in 1879, and the row with no placeThe oldest entry, dated only 1879, is a man floating with a life buoy after a pilot launch capsized at a river mouth, killed by a tiger shark, the one tiger shark in the Mississippi file. The 19 August 1917 leg bite is the only row with neither a place nor an activity recorded, so it cannot be put on the map.

All eight Mississippi entries

The numbers, the chart and the table are generated from the SharkSider database, which combines the International Shark Attack File, the Global Shark Attack File and verified local reports and is updated every week. Six of the 8 entries are dated 1900 or later and feed the decade chart, which shows single entries in the 1900s, 1910s, 1990s and 2020s and two in the 1960s; the two older cases, from 1879 and 1886, appear in the collapsed decades at the foot of the table.

• Recorded incidents8 (6 since 1900)
• Fatal2
• Years covered1879–2022
• Since 20001 incidents, 0 fatal
• Most common activityFishing & boats
• Most identified sharkBlacktip shark

The most recent incidents

• 27 October 2022 · Horn Island, MississippiFishing — Minor injuriesShark: 5'shark · not fatal
• 3 July 1995 · Cat Island, Harrison County, MississippiFishing — Minor laceration to leg from a hooked shark provoked incidentShark: Blacktip shark · not fatal
• 11 July 1963 · Horn Island, MississippiFishing, on charter boat silver dollar — Cuts on right hand, provoked incidentShark: 1.2 m [4'] shark · not fatal
• 5 July 1960 · Mississippi City, MississippiPulling raft out to ride to shore — Leg bittenShark not identified · not fatal
• 19 August 1917 · MississippiActivity not stated — Leg bittenShark not identified · not fatal
• 5 July 1906 · Bay St. Louis, Hancock County, MississippiSwimming — FatalShark: Fishermen recovered partial remains from shark a week later · fatal

Every recorded incident

A few notes for reading the rows. The 1879 entry shows the year alone because the database holds no month or day for it, and it is not a bathing case but a maritime one: a capsized pilot launch at a river mouth and a man in the water with a life buoy. The Place column names an island, town or bay for every other row except 19 August 1917, which gives only the state. The 1906 fatal row is the state's only death of a swimmer, and the Shark column for it holds a note about the recovery of remains rather than a species. Two rows, 1963 and 1995, carry the words provoked incident because the shark was on a line or in the boat when it bit, and the 2022 row is also a fishing case although it is not marked provoked. Only two species are named in the whole file, a tiger shark in 1879 and a blacktip in 1995; everything else is unidentified or given only as a length. The activity summary splits three ways, with fishing and boats and swimming and wading tied at three entries each and two entries with no activity clear enough to classify.

The sharks in the Mississippi file and the ones in the water

Tiger shark. Named once, in the oldest and grimmest entry, the 1879 death of a man in the water after a pilot launch capsized. Tiger sharks are large Gulf animals that work the deeper water outside the barrier islands and the ship channels through them; a person adrift in open water for any length of time in that environment is in the one situation where the species is genuinely dangerous. No tiger shark has been implicated in a Mississippi entry since.

Blacktip shark. Named in the provoked leg laceration of July 1995, when an angler was cut by a hooked blacktip. Blacktips are among the most numerous sharks along the Mississippi beaches and islands in summer, fast fish of 4 to 6 feet that feed on mullet and menhaden in the shallows. They are responsible for a large share of the minor bites in Florida, and their near-absence from the Mississippi record says more about the calm, shallow beachfront than about the sharks.

Bull shark. Not named in any entry, yet the species most people associate with the Mississippi coast, and the one most likely to be behind the unidentified bathing bites of 1886, 1906, 1917 and 1960. Bull sharks are the dominant large shark in the Mississippi Sound, tolerate the brackish water of the river mouths and are common in exactly the murky, waist-deep water where those four people were bitten. The 4-foot and 5-foot sharks of 1963 and 2022 could be young bulls, blacktips or any of half a dozen coastal species.

The sharks in Mississippi guide lists every species found in the sound and the Gulf beyond the islands, including the hammerheads, sharpnose and bonnetheads that never appear in the incident file.

What eight entries say about staying safe in the Mississippi Sound

The record is short, but it is consistent, and the advice writes itself.

• Respect the shark on the line. Three of eight entries are fishing cases, and the two marked provoked are people cut by a shark they had hooked. On a charter boat, let the crew handle the fish; from a pier or the shore, cut the leader on anything you do not intend to keep and keep hands clear of the mouth.
• Treat July and August as shark season. Five of the seven dated-by-month entries fall in July and one in August. That is when the sound is warmest, when bull shark pups and blacktips are thickest along the beach, and when the most people are in the water.
• Avoid the water in darkness. The 1886 wader was bitten at two in the morning. Bull sharks feed most actively at night and at dusk, and in cloudy water they rely on senses that do not distinguish a leg from a mullet.
• Stay out of the passes and off rafts and floats far from shore. The 1960 entry was a swimmer pulling a raft out to ride it in, and the 1879 death was a man adrift in open water. The deeper, moving water between and outside the islands is where the larger species are.
• Do not swim near people fishing, cleaning fish or dumping bait, which on this coast means most piers and much of the shoreline in the evening.

Our guide to how to survive a shark attack explains what to do if a shark makes contact: get out of the water, control bleeding with direct pressure, and treat any shark wound, however small, as needing professional cleaning.

Mississippi in the Gulf and world picture

The International Shark Attack File confirms about 60 to 80 unprovoked bites worldwide in a typical year, with the United States contributing roughly half and Florida most of those. The northern Gulf states are quiet by comparison: Texas, with a coastline more than eight times longer than Mississippi's, has 84 entries and 7 fatal, while Mississippi has 8 and 2. Set against the Atlantic, Florida holds 1,199 entries, South Carolina 177, North Carolina 123 and Georgia 18. Mississippi's real distinction is not its low count but its low severity in the modern era: since 1906 every entry has been survived and most are described as minor. The bull sharks that give the sound its reputation have never been confirmed in a single Mississippi case. All the states are compared on the shark attacks in the USA page.

Neighbouring coasts and the sharks of Mississippi

The Mississippi Sound continues east into Alabama and the barrier islands into the Florida panhandle, whose statewide record is on the Florida page; to the west, the marshes and river mouths of Louisiana share the same bull shark nurseries. Further along the Gulf, Texas has the region's longest record. For the animals themselves see sharks in Mississippi, and for every country and state we track, the shark attacks hub.

Written and reviewed by

SharkSider Editorial Team

A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.

Published September 18, 2023 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · 8 records for Mississippi in the SharkSider attack database (2 fatal), updated weekly.