Latest / The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales / Unwelcomed Ghosts | All Saints' Church Cemetery, Pawleys Island SC

Transcript

Unwelcomed Ghosts | All Saints' Church Cemetery, Pawleys Island SC · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Good morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: Today we're unlatching the gate into All Saints Church Cemetery, a romantic gothic acre where notorious ghosts are said to wander in Polly's Island, South Carolina.
0:28
Kristin: Under canopies of moss, the grounds lie shrouded, a stage prepared for mourning and southern charm.
0:35
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:38
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:40
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:41
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:44
Kristin: When autumn arrives, many head north in search of crispare and golden leaves.
0:50
Kristin: But for those seeking romance touched by horror with a gothic twist, Fallen, South Carolina offers something different.
0:58
Kristin: The ghosts are said to haunt these grounds year round, yet in autumn their presence feels most profound.
1:04
Kristin: As the air cools and the shadows lengthen across the landscape, the Lou Country takes on a mood both alluring and unsettling.
1:12
Kristin: Summer's warmth still lingers by day, but evenings bring a hush.
1:16
Kristin: As though the past has drawn closer, in the shifting season of autumn the veil feels the thinnest, and the restless begin to stir.
1:25
Kristin: That stirring seems to gather on Polly's Island, within the gates of All Saints Cemetery.
1:31
Kristin: For such a small berrier island just 25 miles south of Myrtle Beach, it sees its fair share of visitors each year, yet few wander beyond its sands of its beaches, into the stillness of its graveyards, and they should.
1:46
Kristin: A recurring theme this season has been opening the gates to the world's most beautiful cemeteries.
1:52
Kristin: But I suspect all saints may claim a place near the top unexpectedly for most.
1:57
Kristin: Its grounds feel as though they were lifted from a film set, steeped in southern antebellum charm with horror waiting just beyond the frame.
2:05
Kristin: Even the chapel feels uncanny, a modest building that seems scripted for a scene, and that it all converges in a single chilling detail.
2:14
Kristin: A hand-painted sign that reads, The Holy Ghost is the only ghost we welcome here.
2:20
Kristin: It looks like something staged for the screen, yet is hauntingly real.
2:24
Kristin: If the graveyard wasn't enough, the barrier island itself carries the air of a horror film.
2:29
Kristin: Midnight Mass reimagines beneath moss laden oaks.
2:33
Kristin: But before we descend into the notorious hauntings of these grounds, we first must trace their history.
2:39
Kristin: Like many southern towns, the surface shimmers with charm, mastrate trees, weathered gates, stories that seem most idyllic, yet lean closer and that vineyard cracks.
2:51
Kristin: Beneath it lies a darker, more tangled past, stitched with sorrow as much as grace.
2:57
Kristin: The past carries us back to 1739, when the congregation of all saints first gathered in worship.
3:04
Kristin: Nearly three centuries have since drifted by, yet the echoes of those early voices still linger among the stones.
3:11
Kristin: The old church that endures today rose in 1917 from the ashes of its predecessor, consumed by fire just two years before.
3:21
Kristin: Its walls are bound with bricks salvaged from the Waverley Plantation Rice Mill, while Rodiron Gates, gifts from Dr.
3:28
Kristin: and Mrs.
3:29
Kristin: Henry Norris of Philadelphia, unfurl like black lace.
3:33
Kristin: Even the marble baptismal font weeps, offered in memory of their lost child Charles.
3:39
Kristin: In the adjoining ground, the names of old Carolina families carved themselves into stone, Alston, Flag, La Bruce, La Chicotte, Ward, Weston.
3:50
Kristin: Many monuments were shaped by the White Brothers of Charleston, stone covers whose chisel turned grief into permanence.
3:58
Kristin: The Old Saints Parish, Wacama, holds a central place in the history of Georgetown County.
4:03
Kristin: Created in 1767 from Prince George Wyna Parish, its beginnings were marked by both hardship and persistence.
4:12
Kristin: A chapel of ease had first been built on Polly's Island around 1736, for the Wacama River made reaching the parish church by water perilous.
4:22
Kristin: In 1767, the House of Commons Assembly established an All Saints Parish and granted it two representatives, though King George III disallowed it just three years later.
4:34
Kristin: Only after South Carolina declared independence in 1778 was the parish restored.
4:40
Kristin: Since 1737, a parish church has stood on this soil.
4:45
Kristin: The 1843 brick sanctuary, cast in the Greek Revival style, was devoured by a fire in 1915.
4:52
Kristin: From its ashes rose the smaller 1917 church that still endures to this day.
4:58
Kristin: In 1991, the old church was drawn into the National Register of Historic Places, even as the present sanctuary was raised nearby in 1988.
5:08
Kristin: The church was consecrated in the 1820s, its cemetery becoming the resting ground of Georgetown County's most storied sons and daughters.
5:17
Kristin: Her faith and grief have long been bound together, and the earth still exhales the weight of centuries past.
5:23
Kristin: We begin with Thomas George Polly, a man whose life bridged the fragile beginnings of this place, and who the island is named after.
5:31
Kristin: Justice of the Peace, thrice elected to South Carolina's assembly, he carried both authority and the burden in a colony still defining itself.
5:40
Kristin: Yet Polly's truest legacy lies beneath our very feet.
5:44
Kristin: Through the land gifted by his family, fifty acres were set aside for an Anglican church, the seat of all saints itself.
5:51
Kristin: With the soil for its foundation and sacrifice for its mortar, this sacred place was born.
5:57
Kristin: Polly's gift was not only of land but of permanence.
6:01
Kristin: From those early days of founding, we now move into the revolutionary era, where we find a boy who became a statesman, Benjamin Huger.
6:09
Kristin: Imagine him at just eight years old, standing wide-eyed on the shore of North Island, as two weary Frenchmen, the Marquis de la Fette and Baron de Caleb, stepped onto American soil for the very first time.
6:22
Kristin: His family's home gave them shelter, and history itself passed through its door.
6:27
Kristin: Huger would go into a man of distinction, serving in both the South Carolina House and the United States Congress, his life forever entangled with a young republic's fragile promise.
6:39
Kristin: In 1819, when President James Monroe journeyed south, it was Huger who hosted him at the Prospect Hill Plantation.
6:47
Kristin: From a child of the Revolution to host of presidents, his life traced the arc of a nation finding its footing.
6:54
Kristin: But the revolution's triumph gave way to an antebellum world steeped in privilege and shadow.
7:00
Kristin: Nearby was Plowden C.J.
7:02
Kristin: Weston, born into staggering wealth, yet bound by duty, as a boy he studied under the Reverend Galini and the Shadow of All Saints before sailing to England to complete his education.
7:13
Kristin: Returning with the polish of an old world learning, he inherited vast holdings, Hagley, True Blue, Wicaw, Waterford, names that whisperable prosperity and bondage.
7:26
Kristin: One of the richest men in the South, Weston opposed succession, but followed Carolina's call when the war came, pleading himself to the Confederacy.
7:35
Kristin: Illness seized him in service, yet even as his body failed, he was elected to lieutenant governor, dying in Columbia before his term was complete.
7:44
Kristin: In Weston we see the paradox of his age: wealth without immunity, power without escape.
7:51
Kristin: The sentries turned and all Saints welcomed a different type of figure.
7:55
Kristin: One who fought in disguise rather than on the fields, and whose battlefield later became the page.
8:01
Kristin: James Dickey served as a fighter pilot in World War II.
8:04
Kristin: His youth spent against a fury of Japan's rising sun.
8:08
Kristin: When the guns quieted, his voice found thunder in verse.
8:12
Kristin: A teacher, a poet, the nation's consultant in letters, he read before Congress and at the president's inauguration.
8:20
Kristin: Yet it was his novel, Deliverance, that burnt his name into American memory.
8:25
Kristin: It sailed of wilderness and terror-haunting readers long after the final line.
8:31
Kristin: His grave lies within the serene grounds, though his words continue to ripple outward, unsettling as a stone dropped in water.
8:39
Kristin: And finally we come to a man who steered not through verse, but through politics and storm.
8:45
Kristin: Governor Carol Campbell Jr.
8:47
Kristin: rose to the chambers of the state house to the Governor's Mansion, twice elected to lead South Carolina through prosperity and peril.
8:56
Kristin: He brought industry to its soil, coaxing BMW to build in Greenville County, reshaping the state's future.
9:03
Kristin: But perhaps he is remembered most for the tempest, Hurricane Hugo, that battered the coast in 1989.
9:10
Kristin: In its way Campbell studied hand-guided recovery, earning the respect of all those who looked at him in desperation.
9:17
Kristin: Yet even for a governor, even for a man lauded in life, the end is still the same.
9:23
Kristin: Beneath stone and earth, he rests alongside poets, planters, patriots, and pioneers.
9:29
Kristin: The coast of South Carolina is beautiful, yes, but beauty here has always worn a veil.
9:35
Kristin: Beyond the tide, smooth sands and moss-straped oaks, shadows stir.
9:40
Kristin: Out upon the beach where the horizon dissolves into gray, a cloaked figure wanders.
9:45
Kristin: They call him the gray man.
9:47
Kristin: No one knows his name, only his sorrow.
9:50
Kristin: Once he was the son of a wealthy rice planter, set abroad for education, a future mapped before him, but on his ride home to his beloved, fate claimed him.
10:00
Kristin: His horse fell, and the young man never reached her door.
10:04
Kristin: Shattered by sorrow, she saw him again in her dreams, cloaked in spectral gray, a phantom rising from grief and sea mist.
10:12
Kristin: His voice whispered of a storm that would tear the coast apart.
10:16
Kristin: Desperate, she begged her family to flee and they did.
10:19
Kristin: When the hurricane roared ashore, ruin swept across the island, yet their home endured, standing alone amid the wreckage of their neighbors' dwellings.
10:28
Kristin: Since then, by day or by dusk, the gray man walks the barrier island, appearing before every great tempest as both omen and protector.
10:37
Kristin: The tale goes that if he shows himself to you, it's a warning to flee.
10:41
Kristin: Those who heed him and abandon the island return to find their home spared, standing untouched while ruin surrounds them.
10:49
Kristin: Inland, beneath the shadowed oaks of All Saints Churchyard, lingers perhaps Polly's island's most famous ghost.
10:57
Kristin: A single word marks her grave, Alice.
11:00
Kristin: Alice was only seventeen, a girl whose heart dared to defy her brother's ambition.
11:05
Kristin: Riding one day along the beach, Alice met a young lumberman.
11:09
Kristin: He wasn't of her family's world though.
11:11
Kristin: He gathered sap from the pines, turning it into pitch and rosin for the shipyards.
11:16
Kristin: He had very little money, but a very earnest heart.
11:19
Kristin: In time the two fell in love, and in secret he had asked for her hand in marriage.
11:24
Kristin: With what little he could afford, he offered her a simple gold ring.
11:29
Kristin: Alice treasured it, wearing it close to her heart on a chain, hiding it from her brother.
11:34
Kristin: But Dr.
11:35
Kristin: Alled Flag had other plans.
11:37
Kristin: He envisioned his sister in fine gowns, mistress of a grand estate, and married into wealth that could uphold the flag name.
11:45
Kristin: When he discovered the ring, his fury was swift.
11:48
Kristin: He tore it off from her neck and hurled it into the marsh without a word of mercy.
11:53
Kristin: The shock and grief were more than Alice could withstand.
11:56
Kristin: Soon after she fell ill with yellow fever, as the fever raged, she tossed in her bed, clutching her bare throat where the ring had once rested.
12:05
Kristin: Her last words weren't for heaven, nor for her brother's forgiveness, but for the love she had lost.
12:11
Kristin: I want my ring.
12:13
Kristin: Now those who circle her grave sometimes feel a tug on their old bands of gold, as though Alice herself is still reaching through the soil, searching for what was taken.
12:23
Kristin: At night she's said to drift through her brother's home, the Hermitage, a pale bride wandering without end.
12:30
Kristin: Visitors often leave flowers, rings, and other gifts to help ease her troubled soul.
12:35
Kristin: But Alice's ghost, it seems, will never rest.
12:38
Kristin: Here on Polly's Island, ghosts are not confined to a story.
12:42
Kristin: They walk the shore and stir beneath the moss throughout the long night.
12:46
Kristin: Storms may rise, oaks may bend, but the legends endure, carried on salt air and whispered like warnings from the grave.
12:54
Kristin: The cemetery, igmatic and alluring, has a beauty that can captivate even the most callous of souls.
13:01
Kristin: It's a place that Grim believes is worth visiting in the fall, or in truth, any time of year.
13:06
Kristin: And when the Sultan Wind drifts once more through the mossy oaks, the stories slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
13:15
Kristin: And yet they're never silent for long.
13:18
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into All Saints Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
13:26
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn.
13:28
Kristin: Yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.