Caleb slowly stood and readied himself for flight or defense. He held his breath, then recoiled in shock as a lantern emanating a bright glow—with a familiar form holding it—came around the corner of the landing. Illuminated in the flickering glow was the long-dead master of the house! He looked straight at Caleb and continued past him silently.
Caleb was horrified. There was no mistaking that face—he had seen it in life many, many times. All those eerie rumors of the manor house’s ghostly lights were true, he realized, yet he had not believed them. He had come alone to this deserted place and met a haint face to face.
He walked swiftly down the stairs and out of the house, taking care to shut the door behind him. Steeling himself to walk—for haints were known to chase those who fled—Caleb made sure he was out of sight of the abandoned house before he broke into a run. He then made his way back to his home plantation and turned himself in.
No one else ventured into the abandoned house for several years, although boat passengers on the Waccamaw continued to report seeing mysterious lights.
Many years later, the house burned to the foundation. No lights were ever reported after that, even by Belle Baruch and her guests at Bellefield House, constructed on the same site.
Hemingway House
_____________________Eighteen miles inland from Georgetown lies the town of Andrews, established during the late Victorian era.
Like many Southern coastal towns, Andrews came to life around its railroad. The Georgetown and Western Railroad emerged in the western section of the county due to the area’s rich pine forests. The lucrative trade in lumber and turpentine persuaded a number of people to settle what is now the western part of Andrews around 1880. The busy village was at that time called Harpers, after Edwin Harper, the owner of many local businesses.
The eastern end of what is now Andrews was laid out around 1900 by Captain Walter Henry Andrews, who called his settlement Rosemary. In addition to selling lots for businesses and homes, Andrews and the Rosemary Land Association donated land for churches and schools.
In 1909, Harpers and Rosemary decided to join and applied for incorporation. The new town formed by their merger was named Andrews in honor of Captain Andrews. An early mayor of the town, Captain Andrews was instrumental in bringing the Seaboard Railroad—which ran from Hamlet, North Carolina, to Savannah, Georgia—through Andrews. The town grew as train traffic increased. Many railroad workers and their families moved in.
Some of the oldest homes in town are beautifully maintained examples of the Victorian architecture in vogue all over America at the time Andrews was begun. One of these turn-of-the-century gems has more of a Victorian essence than even authentic period architecture can bring, for one of its former owners—a true Victorian lady—has never left.
Hemingway House, built about a hundred years ago, is fronted by a charming garden, above which rises a wide veranda with Ionic columns. This graceful home was built by the Heinemans, a Georgetown family that came to Andrews with the railroad.
The Heinemans did not live in the house long before it was bought by Basil Hemingway and her husband, William. Raising her two sons and two daughters and tending her exquisite flower garden, Basil might have lived to a contented old age had not a tragedy taken place: one of her young sons was killed in an automobile accident.
After this sad event, Basil’s time on earth was not long. She died peacefully in her bedroom in her beloved home, the victim, it was said, of a broken heart. She had gone to be with her son. Sadly missed by friends and family, Basil was memorialized with a beautiful window bearing her name upstairs in the sanctuary of a nearby church.
The present-day Hemingways living in Basil’s lovely old home are her descendants. They have long known the story of Basil, her love for her family, and her carefully tended flower garden, but they never guessed that her kindly spirit might be near until just a few years ago, when their young son was approaching the age of the child Basil mourned so long ago.
Basil’s presence first became apparent when Elaine, the lady who helps clean the house, asked Kathy Hemingway, “Do you ever feel like someone is watching you?” When Kathy asked Elaine to elaborate, she explained that while cleaning the bathtub, she had turned around and seen a shadow, although no one was there. In fact, no one was anywhere nearby.
Kathy knew exactly what Elaine was talking about, because the same thing had been happening to her. “I had felt the same thing,” she said. “It was very noticeable. I would be in the laundry room and see someone go by and step out to tell them something, and no one was in the house. After that, it became very evident. Right after that, I heard someone call my name, then call my name again. I came out and looked, only to find that I was here by myself.”
Upon hearing of her mother’s experience, young Katy Hemingway said she had heard her name called, too. Like her mother, she had found that no one else was in the house.
Kathy’s husband’s office is located on one side of the laundry room. Like countless doors on old wooden houses, the door to this office cannot be opened or shut without making a very distinct sound. The sound it makes when opening is markedly different from the closing sound. Soon after the first mysterious events, Kathy heard the sound of the office door opening, although no one could possibly have been in the office.
All this activity was centered in the hallway that opens out from the bathroom, the laundry room, and the office. It was in the same vicinity that Kathy and Katy looked up from watching television one night and saw a distinct shadow, although no one was anywhere near.
What is the significance of this area? The hall opens into the spacious, sunlit room that was once Basil’s bedroom—the room where she died. Now the cheerful den of the Hemingway family, the room where Basil’s spirit departed her earthly body has been graced by her presence once more.
Kathy believes her youngest child and only son, Ned, is the reason Basil has returned. “Ned is the only Hemingway grandson,” she explained. “Basil’s son died, so she is going to take care of mine. She is a very kind and gentle woman. Usually, spirits come back to right a wrong. Hers came back to protect.”
Soon after Basil was established as an ethereal fixture in the household, Kathy was speaking with someone at church who was dubious about the spirit’s presence. In light of the spirit’s benevolent nature, it was suggested that Basil was an angel, to which the doubtful party replied that angels were already in heaven.
“All of a sudden, we had a very bad storm,” Kathy said. “We went upstairs in the sanctuary and one window had blown open, and it was Basil’s. I had never seen one of those windows open before.”
A welcome presence in the Hemingway household, Basil has never been disruptive or frightening. “She’s very calm. Nothing is ever moved around,” Kathy said. “I believe she just wants to make sure everything is okay.”
Basil Hemingway, who departed life in the early years of this century, will always belong to quiet, Victorian Andrews. Along with the gracefully turreted, gabled, and gingerbread-trimmed houses of that era, she is a cherished gem of a bygone age.
Lucas Bay
_____________________Of the many apparitions associated with the War Between the States, perhaps the most elusive is the Lucas Bay light. Seen with eerie clarity as far back as many of Lucas Bay’s oldest residents can remember, the light has long been a source of mystery.
During the Civil War, many Georgetonians feared that General William T. Sherman’s troops would burn their city. As early as 1862, Federal gunboats began patrolling the harbor, causing much distress in the town and the surrounding countryside.
Union troops, having found out who the major planters and most avid advocates of secession were, soon discovered the location of the plantation homes belonging to these individuals and began harassing them there. Many planters moved their families and slaves inland, renting or buying farms for the duration of the war in Clarendon County, in Camden, or near Columbia or Spartanburg.
Local officials, fearing the destruction of town and county documents, made hasty plans to move the Georgetown County records to the interior of South Carolina for safekeeping. Inland towns, they felt, were less apt to feel the wrath of Union troops than was Georgetown, a key Southern port.
On April 22, 1862, probate judge Eleazer Waterman was ordered by a local committee to pack up all his records so they could be sent to the town of Chesterfield. When Chesterfield was reduced to ashes by Federal troops, so were most of Georgetown County’s records prior to the war. Moving the records, it turned out, was a well-intentioned mistake.
While the removal of the county records to Chesterfield is Georgetown County’s best-known error of judgement in the face of the Northern invasion, other well-intentioned plans had more tragic consequences. Such was the case in Lucas Bay.
As the Civil War closed and General Sherman’s troops began their fifty-mile-wide swath of burning and destruction, word arrived in Georgetown that Atlanta was in ruins. It stood to reason that Georgetown, a closely guarded seaport surrounded by the homes of many secessionists, slave owners, and planters, would be included in the devastation.
Lucas Bay—located twenty-five miles northwest of Georgetown just across the Great Pee Dee River, which flows across the county line—was considered in grave danger. The tiny community lay beside the booming river town of Bucksport, whose shipping and milling facilities would surely be targets. The people of Lucas Bay prepared for a fiery Federal onslaught.
Many homesteads and plantations were occupied only by women, as the men were still in the Confederate military. As the news that General Sherman was marching from Georgia into South Carolina filled hearts with dread, many women sewed precious jewelry and other small valuables into their corsets and skirt hems. They hid larger heirlooms in mattresses or secretly, hurriedly buried them deep in the woods.
Late one afternoon, hoping to keep her infant child safe from Sherman’s troops while helping her family defend its home, a desperate Lucas Bay mother hid the slumbering baby under a nearby bridge that led over a canal that fed a rice field.
As darkness began to fall, a violent storm erupted with crackling lightning and earth-shaking thunder rivaling the fierceness of Sherman’s men. Realizing that the rice field was already flooded and that the rain would raise the canal to the bottom of the bridge in no time, the young mother slipped away and raced to rescue her child. Reaching the scene, she held her lantern high to see across the canal to where she had hidden the child. Upon glimpsing her baby, she caught her breath in both relief and fear: the infant was as she had left it, but the swollen canal was lapping just below where it was nestled.
Nearly blinded by driving rain and sharp pellets of hail, she ran across the bridge, too fearful for her child to care about the slippery wood beneath her feet. As she reached the other side and made to dash underneath the bridge to where the child lay, she lost her footing and fell, striking her head on one of the timbers supporting the bridge. Knocked unconscious, she fell headlong into the canal and was swept away, soon followed by her infant child.
As the years went by and the tragedy of the young mother and her baby slipped into the past, a mysterious light began to appear near where the unfortunate pair died.
According to Lucas Bay residents who have seen it, the phenomenon begins on the bridge on unpaved Lucas Bay Road. It first appears as a tiny, moving red glow similar to someone walking in the dark smoking a cigarette. The light—generally thought to be that of the young mother’s lantern—steadily increases in size as it gets closer, then disappears.
One resident took her children to look for the light about nine o’clock one evening. It appeared near the bridge, tiny and bright, then gradually increased in size as it neared the car where she and her children sat, only to disappear in front of the vehicle. The light was so vivid and frightening that the family never went looking for it again.
Another resident and his brother were walking along Lucas Bay Road in the darkness when they saw the light floating above the treetops, coming slowly toward them. The two men hastily made a bet as to which one of them could stand in the road longer as the light approached. Though they were determined to hold their ground, so eerie was the slow-moving light as it came nearer that neither man won the bet—they fled simultaneously!
Older residents who have known of the light their entire lives recall that sightings were more frequent in the days before regular automobile traffic. Walking through Lucas Bay at dusk without the distraction of other lights, residents frequently observed the mysterious phenomenon. Rainy nights just before or just after dark, Lucas Bay residents agree, have always been the most likely times to see the eerie light, which is sometimes accompanied by the sound of a child’s wailing.
As with most ghostly occurrences, the Lucas Bay light is seen by some individuals but not others. Some longtime residents have grown so used to seeing the phantom light that they take it for granted. Other older residents have never seen it.
Long a Lucas Bay tradition, the light has been a source of fearful delight to many a child growing up in the community. One resident recalled that on Thanksgiving night, horse-drawn wagons would collect local children to go and look for the light.
Another resident, now long dead, took the phenomenon very seriously, but for a different reason from anyone else. He believed that the light, which he saw regularly, showed the burial spot of a treasure. He claimed it was the ghost of a woman who had lived on the other side of Lucas Bay. Prior to her death, she had dressed all in black and had been feared as a witch. This treasure-hunting resident dug and searched in the vicinity where he saw the light, believing it would lead him to the treasure the witch woman had buried before she died. What he finally found was an empty hole he was sure had contained the treasure, which someone else had gotten to first. After this, he never saw the light again. In his view, the light no longer had a reason to appear, since the treasure had been found.
According to local people, the Lucas Bay light has not been seen in ten or fifteen years. The area it once frequented is traversed by two to three miles of unpaved road lined by forest. Sun-dappled and pristine by day, it is downright eerie at night. Not so much as a single dwelling is to be seen anywhere along this stretch of road. Even today, the Lucas Bay bridge is decidedly spooky, particularly on dark, rainy evenings.
Will the long-dead Lucas Bay mother return again someday for her child, lantern in hand?
Bucksville and Bucksport
_____________________When Captain Henry Buck founded Bucksville on the banks of the Waccamaw River in 1825, he planned for it to become a thriving community based on lumbering and shipping. His dream soon became a vibrant, lucrative reality.
What Buck did not consider, however, was a long-ago, thousand-mile curse that, according to some, came back to haunt his thriving community and cause its demise.
Beginning in the early 1700s, lumber left Georgetown Harbor destined for distant ports. But it was not a large part of Georgetown’s export trade until Captain Henry Buck constructed three lumbermills on the upper Waccamaw River. Soon, lumber became one of the town’s greatest export commodities.
In the days before steam-powered maritime transport, sailing ships were a principal means of trade. The Northern shipyards where most American vessels were built needed great supplies of lumber to construct these graceful vessels. Captain Henry Buck was determined to supply that need.
When Buck settled on the Waccamaw River, he built a lovely home and constructed a lumbermill beside it. Milling and shipping lumber and shingles cut from the low country forests was so lucrative that he soon built a second Bucksville mill several miles downstream. A third lumbermill, referred to as “the lower mill,” was opened downriver from the first two and christened Bucksport, after the town of the same name in Maine.
As these steam-powered sawmills prospered, the town of Bucksville grew. Ships destined for New England, New York, and the West Indies left Bucksville loaded with lumber.
On their way south to Bucksville and Bucksport in winter, New England ships used ice for ballast. As these ships off-loaded ballast before taking on their cargo of South Carolina lumber, Captain Henry Buck began selling the ice—a rare commodity on the Waccamaw—from one of the first icehouses in the area.
But ice was just a minor portion of Buck’s trade. During a two-year period just prior to 1840, fifty-two ships sailed out of Bucksville. The Winyah Observer of November 8, 1845, noted that one sloop, one schooner, and nine brigs were loading lumber at Bucksville. By January 1848, as many as twenty-eight ships at a time were loading there.
The men who came to work in the mills brought families. Soon, Bucksville had schools, churches, hotels, and a post office. At the onset of the Civil War, the town had a population of seven hundred. As the Confederate cannonballs flew toward Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor, a number of Northern captains engaged in commerce at Bucksville hastily untied their dock lines and sailed north to avoid being caught in the conflict.
After the war, the Bucksville lumber industry did not suffer the hardships of the weak Reconstruction economy, but remained prosperous. A constant stream of three-masted vessels came in off the Atlantic to sail over the sand bar into Georgetown Harbor and make their way up the Waccamaw River to load lumber from Bucksville’s three-quarter-mile-long dock. Ports around the world were recipients of the four million feet of cypress shingles and the six million feet of lumber milled and shipped out of Bucksville each year.
After the death of Captain Henry Buck, his son W. L. Buck became responsible for running the mills. In keeping with family tradition, he began a foray into shipbuilding in 1874.
More Ghosts of Georgetown Page 6