Throughout the whole poem, Mary Robinson uses words with apostrophes. There is at least one in each stanza, and most stanzas have more than that. As a reader, my eyes were attracted to these words. The words in which Robinson uses the apostrophes are verbs, and they bring attention to them. Those words are significant because they are part of the descriptions. For example, the white foam in line 2 was "scatter'd"; lofty Barks were "shatter'd"; Sea Birds "hover'd"; the wave resistless "roll'd"; the green billows "play'd", and so on... There are just so many words like that within the poem and they especially emphasize the lines in the poems in which they are used. It's like they are haunting the reader, just like the ghost is haunting the fisherman. I also noticed that most of the time, Mary Robinson is using words with apostrophes when writing about nature (birds, waves, billows, etc). The apostrophe replaces certain letters, so it looks like letters are missing. Similarly, this is connected to nature because this beach she writes about is "lonely" and "deserted" so something is missing there too. The video below is basically a reading of the poem, but I think it does a good job of setting the spooky, supernatural mood.
The Haunted Beach
It's a good observation of a typographic fact of the poem to note the spelling of "ed" words wit "'d" instead. But I think it's done more to signal the rhythm than the mood. In older poetry you might be expected to pronounce "rolled" or "played" with two syllables each--"roll-ed" and "play-ed." So Robinson is telling you to pronounce these with one. It' a little hard to see how these words are any more "haunting" than any others, once you realize this kind of spelling was common in older poetry. But, again, it's good to pay attention to such things!
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