Local Legends

This morning, Chuck Wendig over at Terrible Minds asked for his readers to share some of their local legends.  It’s been a hell of a day for me, so I’m just getting around to it now, just before midnight.  See, I really should be asleep now, or at least headed in that direction, but I have a weakness for local legends and things of that sort.  I’m the guy who’s lived in a place for years, but still signs up for the local ghost tours around Halloween because I want to hear the stories again.  When I lived near Charleston, South Carolina, I immersed myself in the history of the place.  I bought the best guide books and memorized them.  I’m not kidding.  Whenever any relatives came to visit, I was always asked to give a tour of the city.  I always wanted to get my guide’s license, but never had the time or money to make it happen.

When you live in a place, you get to know its geography.  You learn your away around the main roads.  You learn the shortcuts and the backroads.  Eventually, you meet the locals.  When I say locals, I don’t mean the people who work in the chain stores and restaurants out on the main strip.  I’m talking about the guys who bring lawn chairs into the hardware store that’s been open since 1957, even though the Home Improvement Mega-Warehouse out on the highway is cheaper and carries almost everything.  If you’re really lucky, you’ll eventually get to hear their stories.  If the highways and byways form the skeleton of a place and the people are the heart, the lore of a place is its soul.

When most people think of the Myrtle Beach area of South Carolina, also called the Grand Strand, they think of beaches and tourists, not old stories that have been here since before most of the condominiums and hotels were ever built.  But this place has more than its share of local legends.  Here are two of the best known:

photo credit: Darren G Miller, 1989

The Grey Man of Pawleys Island

Pawleys Island is a small, isolated island community a few miles south of Myrtle Beach.  It is home to many beautiful old houses that perch precariously just off the dunes, daring Atlantic hurricanes to knock them from their foundations.  Many hurricanes have passed through the area, and some of the houses have been destroyed.  Hurricane Hugo in 1989 even cut a channel across the island, taking the houses, the road, and everything with it.  Still, many of the grand old homes still stand and many of the residents claim that they have a supernatural guardian to warn them of approaching storms.  They call this guardian “The Grey Man.”

The origins of the Grey Man, like those of most local legends, are shrouded in mystery.  Most of them tell the story of a girl who lost her love in some unfortunate accident some time during the late 1700′s.  According to the legend, which has appeared on the television series Unsolved Mysteries, the Grey Man later appeared to the grieving young woman and warned her that a hurricane was approaching the island.  Residents have marked his warnings ever since.  When the police and rescue crews warn them to leave the island, they ignore their pleas.  When someone sees the Grey Man, they leave en masse.

The first recorded sighting of the Grey Man was in 1822, when a hurricane came ashore near Charleston, killing several hundred people.  In 1893, he was seen again by the Lachicotte family just before a hurricane that killed nearly 1,500 people along its path.  Not only did the Lachicotte’s flee and survive the storm, their home survived as well.  The next well-known sighting occurred in 1954, when he appeared to newlywed Bill Collins.  Bill and his new bride fled the island and survived the storm.  The house/inn they had been staying in was not among the many homes destroyed by Hurricane Hazel.  In 1989, the Grey Man appeared to Jack and Clara Moore.   You guessed it.  They left the island and avoided the destruction caused by Hurricane Hugo.  An interesting story appeared in the local newspaper several weeks after Hugo has passed through.  I believe I still have this clipping somewhere.  The story says that when the couple returned to their home, which was intact despite the massive damage and the new channel that cut through the island, they found one thing out of place.  It seems that the 1955 interview with Bill Collins that had appeared in the same newspaper was removed from its normal place in the Moore’s scrapbook and found lying in the middle of the living room floor.

photo credit: CR True, Wikimedia Commons, 2007

Alice Flagg of the Hermitage

Another community just south of Myrtle Beach (but north of Pawleys Island) is Murrells Inlet.  I currently live here.  In 1849, a young Dr. Allard Flagg moved to Murrells Inlet and invited his widowed mother, his brother and his young unmarried sister, Alice, to live with him in his house, called The Hermitage.  The Flaggs became one of the wealthiest, most prominent families in the area and Alice’s brother was appalled when his sister fell in love with a man much below their social strata.  Despite the protests of her family, Alice carried on a secret romance with the man and they were secretly engaged.  She often wore the ring on a ribbon, concealed beneath her clothing so that her family wouldn’t see it.  The Flagg family eventually sent Alice to a boarding school in Charleston to keep the lovers apart.

While in Charleston, Alice became gravely ill and her brothers brought her back from Charleston to the Hermitage to care for her.  Finally, as Alice was beginning to succumb to her illness, her brother, Dr. Allard Flagg, discovered the engagement ring and threw it into the marsh beside the house, likely blaming his sister’s illness and impending death on this ill-fated affair.  As she lay dying, Alice asked for her ring, but since it was now resting in the marsh, it could not be brought to her.

After Alice died, her body was buried in the Flagg family plot in the cemetery of All Saints Episcopal Church.  Her plot was marked with a plain marble slab engraved with only the word “Alice.”  Locals claim to have seen Alice wandering the marshland around the site of the Hermitage (the home was removed to a secret location about a dozen years ago because of the constant stream of visitors), supposedly looking for her ring.  When I was younger and had just moved here from New Jersey, kids used to go out to All Saints Cemetery at night and walk “widdershins” around Alice’s grave thirteen times while wearing a ring, chanting Alice’s name.  Reportedly, the ring would be tugged or even fly off the finger and land on her gravestone.  There is a path worn into the ground around her stone from all the foot traffic for so many years.  People leave rings there all the time for her, along with other gifts.  Every year around Halloween, the newspaper reminds people that Alice’s body was supposedly exhumed many years ago and moved to a secret location to prevent people from digging her up.

I have a personal experience with this legend.  Soon after I moved here from New Jersey, I went on a school trip to the Hermitage, which was then owned by a local author named Clarke Wilcox.  He told us a story about his father’s favorite rocking chair, which was in the living room of the house.  He said that some nights, the chair would start rocking by itself and he would smell his father’s cologne, and sometimes see a ghostly apparition in the chair.  This was in the early 1980′s, long before digital photography and photoshop.  My friend Alex though it was a neat story, so he took a picture of the rocking chair.  When he brought the photo to school a few days later (one-hour photo developing was still unheard of around here), he was bursting with conspiratorial excitement.  He took out the photo and showed it to us.  In the photo, there was clearly the misty outline of a person sitting in the chair.  Our teacher asked for a copy of the photo and got the story and photo into a local newspaper.

If you know anything more about these two stories, please feel free to share.  Do you know any other local legends?