More Ghosts of Georgetown

by Elizabeth Robertson Huntsinger

  Records show that in the mid-nineteenth century, Bolem House came into the hands of David and Sarah Sperry of Charleston, who sold it to Edward T. Henning in 1874. The house then belonged to Simons E. Lucas of North Carolina, then to William T. Upgrove of Georgetown, then to O. B. Skinner, then to Confederate veteran Gilbert Johnson, who died here in 1925. Following Johnson’s death, his sister-in-law sold Bolem House to T. Cordes Lucas of South Santee. Leta Cribb moved in with her family some years later and has been here ever since.

  But what of the years prior to the mid-1800s? The house was obviously constructed when Prince Street was much narrower. The sidewalk had to be built around the home’s double piazzas, making it the only house in Georgetown with piazzas literally at the sidewalk.

  The mystery began to be unraveled during the early 1970s, when Leta’s husband, Howard, did major gardening excavation behind the house and unearthed artifacts from the home’s early days. In addition to finding a long-buried cistern, used by early owners to keep perishables cool and fresh, he unearthed an unusually large cache of old bottles. Howard had discovered evidence of an eighteenth-century tavern!

  His discoveries inspired him to undertake extensive research about the origin of the house. In the archives of the Charleston Library Society, he uncovered previously unrealized facts in microfilm issues of the South Carolina Gazette. Notices in the Gazette in 1734 and 1735 announced meetings at the establishment of Thomas Bolem, during which lot owners in the township could take up property discrepancies with the town trustees.

  Better yet was a 1737 legal notice concerning the estate of the recently deceased owner: “All persons indebted to the estate of Thomas Bolem … are hereby desired to pay their respective debts to Sussannah Bolem, Executrix or the Reverend John Fordyce, Executor of the said estate within a month’s time, to whom those that have any demands may apply for payment. The house where the said Bolem deceased, lately kept Tavern in Georgetown being well accustom’d and provided with all conveniences, is to be LETT and two lots in George Town to be SOLD.”

  The tavern’s location—the Gazette described it as being “500 feet from the George Town River [now the Sampit River] on Princes Street”—made it a popular spot with the thirsty sailors from the many ships that tied up at the wharves.

  The sailors found Thomas Bolem’s tavern to be a home away from home, where they could wind down from their rigorous shipboard duties. In fact, at least one of them was so fond of the place that he was drawn back more than two and a half centuries later to enjoy some age-old Christmas cheer.

  The ghostly opening and closing of firmly latched doors has long been taken for granted in Bolem House. Having lived there since 1938, Leta simply accepts it.

  Christmas 1993, however, brought the house’s quiet ghost briefly into focus. One of the guests at Leta’s tree trimming told his son afterwards of encountering an old-fashioned man at Bolem House, a man who, it turned out, had not been visible to anyone else.

  The son related the story thus: “Daddy was helping Leta decorate the Christmas tree and went into the kitchen for something and encountered a very old man in an old-time sailor’s outfit, and he appeared to have no teeth. The man wandered around the kitchen, then into a hallway, never saying anything and looking somewhat displaced. On mentioning the guest to my mother, Leta, and the few other guests, no one had seen him, nor was Leta expecting any other guests. She did later, however, say that the house is haunted.”

  So it was that one of Thomas Bolem’s customers returned to his old stomping ground. Habitually heard but seen only this once, the ghost of the eighteenth-century sailor is apparently a soft touch for holiday cheer and the remembrance of Christmases past.

  The Rice Museum

  _____________________A favorite subject of local and visiting artists, the picturesque bell and clock tower under which the Rice Museum resides is the landmark most often associated with Georgetown. This Greek Revival structure, believed to have been copied from the town hall and clock building in Keswick, England, was formerly a slave market.

  Although the portion of the museum containing detailed dioramas of rice and indigo production is underneath the Town Clock in the Old Market Building, the Rice Museum consists of both this structure and the antebellum Kaminski Building next door.

  A feeling of the past prevails at these two venerable structures. Those gifted with the ability to sense the presence of ghosts, however, may experience a more ethereal awareness.

  The first town market was built on what is now the site of the Old Market Building in 1788. This wooden market was badly damaged by a hurricane in 1822. In 1841, as a severe fire was decimating the Front Street businesses between Queen and Screven Streets, the storm-damaged market was torn down as a firebreak. It was reconstructed of brick in 1842. Three years later, the celebrated bell and clock tower was added. In fact, most Georgetonians refer to the Old Market Building as the “Town Clock.”

  Union ships landed on the riverfront behind the Town Clock when they began patrolling the Georgetown waterfront. Near the close of the Civil War, the Old Market Building was where surrender papers were signed by the town council and turned over to Federal officers, as Union-occupied Georgetown yielded to the victorious North. The end of slavery in Georgetown was thus finalized where slaves were once sold. This abrupt end to the practice of slavery heralded the beginning of the end of the Georgetown rice culture.

  Until recent decades, this historic structure housed Georgetown’s town hall on its second story and the police department on its ground floor.

  On the southeastern side of the Old Market Building stands the Kaminski Building. Built in 1842, the same year as the Old Market Building, it replaced a two-story warehouse destroyed in the fire of 1841. By the late 1850s, the Kaminski Building was Stephen W. Rouquie’s hardware and dry-goods emporium. During Rouquie’s ownership, a cast-iron front designed by New York architect Daniel Badger was built into the facade.

  Near the close of the Civil War, Rouquie allowed Thomas Daggett, the Confederate captain of coastal defenses from Little River to Georgetown, to use the upper story of his store to build a mine. This mine was used by Captain Daggett to destroy the Harvest Moon, the only Union flagship sunk during the war.

  In 1869, Rouquie sold the building to Heiman Kaminski, an amiable, ambitious thirty-year-old Confederate veteran who had been renting the structure and operating a store there for two years. In 1878, Kaminski renovated the building with major architectural work that included the addition of a third floor, a three-story light well, a skylight, a spacious rear section, and Italianate detailing on the facade.

  At the northwestern side of the Rice Museum lies the immaculately tended garden of the Lowcountry Herb Society. All of the medicinal and culinary herbs grown here are indigenous to the area or have, like indigo, been cultivated here since colonial times. The propagation of herbs creates an atmosphere befitting the museum above, where a cornucopia of artifacts depicts a heritage based on the cultivation of fertile soil.

  In 1970, the city of Georgetown sold the Old Market Building to the Georgetown Historical Society. That May, the society unveiled the Rice Museum as part of the celebration of South Carolina’s tricentennial.

  Ever since then, the Old Market Building has housed the museum’s extensive collection of rice- and indigo-cultivation artifacts. Dioramas detail the process of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rice propagation, from sowing to harvest to shipping. The dioramas also tell about the slave labor that made it possible for the Georgetown-area coast to yield nearly half the nation’s rice during the 1840s.

  The Kaminski Building houses the Rice Museum Annex and the museum’s Prevost Art Gallery. Located on the lower floor, the Prevost Art Gallery hosts an ever-changing display of original works by low country artists. In the forward area of the gallery is a shop where myriad local treasures—including books, baskets, pottery, and jewelry—are sold. Beautifully produced by the Rice Museum’s director, James Fitch, the documentary f
ilms shown in the gallery focus on important but often overlooked aspects of Georgetown’s history.

  The upper story of the Rice Museum Annex houses the Browns Ferry Vessel, believed to be the oldest colonial merchant vessel in the Western Hemisphere. Sunk in the Black River near Browns Ferry in the 1740s, it was lowered into the museum’s third story by crane in June 1992, after extensive stabilization and salvage work had been done. The museum’s roof was temporarily removed to facilitate placement of the vessel.

  With so much having taken place here over the past two centuries, it is no wonder that Sarah Johnson, who works in the Rice Museum, is often aware of the presence of a ghostly overseer watching her as she works, as if to check the quality of her performance.

  It is also not surprising that ghostly footsteps are heard upstairs over the Prevost Art Gallery in the Kaminski Building. Eileen Weaver, who works in the gallery, occasionally hears the unmistakable gait of an individual with a peg leg moving across the floor above her to the Front Street window. James Fitch has also heard the ghostly footsteps.

  Because of the value of the Browns Ferry Vessel, preserved upstairs, anyone going above the first floor of the building is carefully monitored. The museum staff therefore knows when no one—no one human, at least—is up there. Only when the second and third floors are empty are the footsteps heard.

  Weaver has had other ghostly experiences in the museum as well. Blessed since childhood with the rare ability to see and hear ghosts, she could no doubt fill a volume with the ghostly appearances she has witnessed.

  Several times, she has been surprised by the figure of a lady from another century in the gallery. On each occasion, she has seen the lady pacing back and forth in front of a plantation sideboard built in 1845 and donated to the museum in 1985. Described by Weaver as an old black woman wearing a black dress with a ruffled collar, the lady is very possessive of the sideboard. Her motions seem to silently say, “It’s mine, it’s mine,” before she simply evaporates.

  The sideboard is extremely difficult to open. When necessary, James Fitch opens it by using force, prying the doors loose with a key. Yet sometimes, the doors are simply flung open during museum hours when no one is anywhere near the sideboard.

  Whoever the lady is, she does not have to force the doors, but simply opens them with no prying—as she has perhaps been doing for a century and a half. But why is this mysterious, ghostly lady so attached to the sideboard?

  Weaver, who has researched some of the ghosts she has seen, believes this lady is the ghost of a slave from the plantation where the sideboard was built—a house slave, in fact, who had a great personal interest in the sideboard. “You know, the slaves built so much of the furniture at these plantations,” Weaver said. “And it is a historic fact that they almost always put a secret compartment in each piece they built.”

  Whether a secret compartment was found and removed long ago or still lies untouched deep inside the labyrinth of the sideboard is known only by the ethereal lady who lingers possessively at the relic’s doors and opens them with an ease no one else can duplicate.

  Keith House

  _____________________While the lineage of many houses in Georgetown’s historic district can be traced back to the deed of the first owner, the line of title for some homes does not begin there. In a number of cases, the record of original ownership was apparently lost or not documented at all until the house was subsequently sold or included in the estate of a later owner.

  Such is the case with Keith House, which has no record of deed or documented historic mention until 1855, when it was sold by Paul Trapier Keith and John Alexander Keith. The years before the Keiths sold the house are, and probably always will be, a mystery.

  Whoever constructed this elegant, two-story, hip-roofed home dated it with four-panel doors, plaster ceiling medallions in one of the downstairs formal rooms, and six-over-six sash windows with narrow muntins, all indicative of construction around 1825. Great care was also taken in the placement of the dentil molding adorning the cornice and mantel of another formal room downstairs.

  Keith House has been home to numerous families since its construction. One woman fondly remembers her girlhood in the spacious old home. Her father bought and remodeled it, adding a large rear section where his children could entertain their friends.

  The legend of Keith House stands out vividly in this woman’s memory, for it is a story not easily forgotten. Although the legend is an integral part of the Georgetown tradition, the passing of time has obscured the name of the long-ago lady of the house, an antebellum gentlewoman with an eerie style of clairvoyance. Time, however, cannot dim the spine-tingling nature of the story.

  Before the Civil War, Keith House was the home of an extraordinarily lovely young belle. Later in her life, after she had grown into a handsome elderly woman, she was plagued by painful arthritis in her hands and became overly self-conscious about their gnarled condition. Long a widow, she had worn only black clothing since her beloved husband’s passing. Now, she took to wearing black mittens at all times, so no one could see her misshapen fingers.

  More important, the lady began making astounding and eerily accurate predictions of unexpected deaths among family and friends. Her clairvoyance earned the unwavering awe of household servants, who believed she was a witch.

  After the lady’s death, her reputation for macabre prediction only gained momentum. She would, servants whispered, materialize from the small room under the stairwell and, dressed in her customary black clothing and black mittens, appear to family members preceding a death among them. Household servants began avoiding the room under the stairwell. After a fateful glimpse of the ghostly, black-draped figure, more than one of them was left to agonize over whose mortal hours were growing short. Family members, too, dreaded the appearance of their clairvoyant kinswoman.

  In life, her predictions of impending death had been both accurate and timely; she had often named both the unfortunate individual and the hour of his or her demise. After her death, the lady’s ghostly, voiceless, ephemeral manifestation was always a harbinger of death. Only now, the identity of the person soon to die was a mystery, leaving the household wondering which among them it would be.

  The lady who became a ghostly portent of doom has not been seen in many years. This may be only because no relative of hers has lived in her old home since the years immediately following her death, when she would come forth from beneath the stairs to issue uncanny messages of fate.

  Hags and Plat-Eyes

  _____________________Though most Georgetown hauntings involve ghosts, which are not harmful and are not to be feared, there are shadowy beings that must be stringently avoided. Often mentioned in the same breath, hags and plat-eyes are not so much like each other as they are different from ghosts.

  Ghosts are not baneful and tend to predictably repeat the same actions over and over, occasionally with benevolence but usually with complete indifference to human activities. Hags and plat-eyes are quite the opposite. They are malevolent, sometimes unpredictable creatures that relish interaction with people.

  In Georgetown’s historic district, it is not uncommon to see the ceilings of the verandas of old houses painted robin’s-egg blue. The owners of many houses with double piazzas paint each piazza ceiling this shade as well. The effect is striking, because the ceilings are the lone blue adornment on these structures, not matching the principal or trim colors. There is no reason for the blue ceilings except that they are a time-honored means of warding off hags and plat-eyes. For the same reason, many cottages in the Georgetown County countryside are trimmed in bright blue or are painted blue in their entirety.

  The tradition of using blue paint as protection is only one part of the extensive lore that has grown up around hags and plat-eyes. The list of strange and inventive means that people have devised for guarding against them is long indeed.

  The plat-eye has long been feared for its aggressiveness. Never without mischievous intentions, it haun
ts lonely places such as swamps, low-lying areas, and old rice fields, preying on travelers and passersby who chance to cross its path. The plat-eye has front teeth but no back teeth and has long been associated with the time of the new moon.

  Described in the John Bennett Papers—housed in the archives of the South Carolina Historical Society—as the “projected spirit of malevolent humanity,” the plat-eye rarely leaves the swirling mist in which it lurks except to chase an intended victim. “The mist which it rises from,” reads the archives’ description, “is usually a steaming rice field.” Many people who lived on Prospect Hill Plantation from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century were recorded as being “deathly afraid” of plat-eyes.

  In its natural form, the plat-eye has one large eye, round and white like a plate, from which it takes its name. This creature possesses broad powers of transformation. It usually takes the form of a small, fiery-eyed dog that grows larger with every passing second, but it has also been known to appear as a horse or some other creature. In one case, a murdered husband leaped out of his coffin in the shape of a frog, shifted into his human form, and went back into the coffin.

  Plat-eyes are to be avoided at all costs. Contact can usually be averted by keeping clear of swampy, low-lying areas and abandoned rice fields at night.

  Hags, however, are not so easily eluded. Rather than keeping to outlying swampy areas, they seek out the homes of unsuspecting humans.