I grew up in coastal South Carolina - a little town called Georgetown - where ghosts are almost as ubiquitous as the tourists who flock to the beaches. Ghost stories were passed around among us children like so much candy, and there was always the (sort of) hope that one of us would actually see one. None of my schoolmates ever claimed to, although we all knew of people who had…

One family whom we all knew lived in a house reported to be haunted by three Revolutionary War soldiers, and had strange thumps and floating silverware. I babysat in that house as a teenager, but never saw or heard anything; frankly, I think any ghosts would have been scared off by the kids who lived there. Another haunted house was beside the graveyard of Prince George Winyah Episcopal Church, which was pre-Revolutionary War as well. My mother taught the girl who lived in the house and told me that the young lady reported that there were frequently footsteps on the stairs and such ghostly noises. Another friend of mine lived in an old rice plantation house that was haunted. His stepfather was said to have seen the ghost of a woman in colonial dress calming the children when they cried at night, but my friend never saw anything. My fourth grade teacher lived in a lovely old plantation house on the North Santee River that was supposed to be haunted. I never experienced anything there, but there is reported to be a ghost that haunts the grounds and chases people.

Some of the local ghosts were well known; the Grey Man was said to warn people who lived at the beach about impending hurricanes, and there was Alice of the Hermitage who still pined for her lost love and lost ring - her grave always had a path worn around it where people tried to see her ghost. I never saw them either, although one story of Alice looking for her ring was said to involve an acquaintance of mine. I didn’t ask her about it because I was afraid she’d say she never had anything to do with it, and even as a child I appreciated a good story.

Then there was a bit of urban legend told to me by a classmate - the story of the Plat-eye, a sort of monster who would visit people along one of the local rivers and if you didn’t have jelly donuts to feed him, he’d “get” you. Since we had a cabin on the river, this one really spooked me; but no matter how much I begged, Mom wouldn’t buy jelly donuts to take with us to keep me safe from the Plat-eye.

My parents had a strange experience on the river once, though. My father was an avid photographer and would take his camera out in the boat to take pictures of autumn foliage on the river banks - I still have boxfuls of the slides he took. In one of the pictures, there is a white shape on the river bank. It looks rather someone wearing a sheet standing on the riverbank except that when Dad snapped the photo, they didn’t see anything unusual. The image showed up when the slide was developed. They liked to scare me by saying, “Here’s the picture with the ghost in it!” whenever they showed the slide.

I thought I saw something when I was about four, in my own house, but since we were the only ones who had lived there, I don’t know. I was walking down the short hall from my room to the den, and passed by the door to the living room. The sofa was along the wall by the door, so I could see it in profile. I was surprised to see a man in a striped t-shirt sitting on the sofa in the dim living room, with his arm up along the back of the sofa. We rarely had visitors, especially ones I didn’t know. I proceeded another two steps to the den where I asked my mother, “Who’s the man in the living room?”

My mother grabbed me in a panic, saying, “What man?!” - no doubt thinking there was a burglar in the house. She carefully checked, and seeing no one there, told me I must have imagined it. Maybe, but I can still remember the sight of him to this day and my surprise at seeing him there. Our sofa was plain, with no print on it, so it couldn’t have been that. (He hadn’t scared me, but my mother’s reaction certainly had!) This was the same house where my father rang the phones after he died.

Later on when I was in high school, I began going out to the home of my history teacher who was also a friend of my family’s. (He was also the school librarian, and therefore my boss, since I was the library assistant.) He and his wife and daughter lived in an historic rice plantation house and I became a regular visitor during my last two years of high school. (He also told the story of the picture that I have posted on this site.) The house had changed hands several times through the years, and one of the former owners had been buried near the house and an addition had eventually been built over his grave. He had loved the house very much, and from the stories I was told, still stayed around the place. He was said to have caught a guest who was falling down the staircase, and floating lights were frequently seen in both the bedroom in which he died and the family room, which was in the addition built over his original gravesite. Some friends of the family who had been guests there declined a second invitation to stay the night and chose to stay in a motel instead - apparently the ghost was a little too friendly for them.

Only on one occasion did I have a ghostly experience out there. We had been talking about the ghost, and I went over to a chair to sit down. No sooner had I placed my posterior on the chair than the light on the table beside the chair went out! I hopped up very quickly and the light went back on. I found a different seat, joking about sitting on the ghost. It wasn’t much, but it was a little bit freaky!

For someone who grew up in a highly haunted area, I had a rather ghost-free childhood. Maybe that’s a good thing…

She Wolf (c)2007