During the day, the hag appears to be a normal human female. After shedding its skin at night, however, it reveals itself to be a creature half vapor and half liquid. Relieved of its skin, the hag flits through the night, its form barely visible, glimmering in the wind as it hurries on its way to “ride” a victim. In its diaphanous form, it freely slips through even the tiniest of keyholes into the securest of homes to prey on the slumbering victim of its choice.
After gaining access to a dwelling, the hag visits night after night, creeping into the victim’s room to ride him or her. Unaware of the hag’s visits, the victim awakens unrefreshed and tired even after a full night’s sleep. Hags have been known to cause nightmares in men and convulsions in children. They have no preference in victims and are just as likely to prey on children and women as on the elderly and men.
The symptoms of being ridden by a hag are described in the archives of the South Carolina Historical Society: “From these assaults the victim wakes enervated, exhausted, dizzy, depressed, unconscious of any excess but actually suffering from a morbid condition.” Hags bring “dire consequences upon the victim’s body and mind.” Much has been recorded concerning these stealthy creatures who “divest themselves of human skins and flit through the night in a corporeal but fluid condition.”
Unaware that a hag has been wearing him out every night, the victim often wastes time seeking a medical reason for waking up tired each morning. Soon, most victims realize their fatigue has no medical basis and begin to suspect the unsettling truth.
Fortunately, the hag-ridden are only disturbed at night. Once an individual suspects he is the victim of a hag, he can devote his waking hours to keeping the creature out of his home.
The ways of deterring a hag are many and diverse but fall into three basic categories: barring the hag’s entry, confusing the hag, and catching the hag.
Barring a hag’s entry is said to be prudent even if one’s home has yet to be violated, since a hag may come along at any time. In order to bar entry, it is necessary to secure every opening the hag might go through. In their half-vapor, half-liquid state, hags are particularly fond of tiny entryways like keyholes and the spaces underneath doors, which are often overlooked by humans as means of entry.
If a hag slides underneath a door or slips through a keyhole, a handful of mustard seeds scattered on the floor will stop it immediately. The hag will be compelled to pick up every tiny seed before it continues through the home to seize its victim. In like manner, a broom propped upside down next to a door will compel a hag to count every straw before it proceeds through the house. A horseshoe hung above a door will ensure that, before it is free to seek its victim, the hag must tread every mile of roadway traveled by the horseshoe.
These methods of forcing a hag to gather, to count, or to traverse many miles are effective precautions, because a hag can only enter a home late at night and must exit before the first light of dawn. These time-consuming tasks will most likely occupy it until it must leave to retrieve its skin.
A shrewd hag, however, may learn to overcome these obstacles or may simply get faster at gathering mustard seeds, counting broom straws, or traversing a horseshoe’s miles. Or it may find an opening into a home that no one has thought to protect, thereby avoiding contact with the deterrents.
Since a hag may slip into a home regardless of any precautions taken to bar it, it is best to vigilantly guard innocent sleepers. To keep a hag away once the occupant of a bed has fallen asleep, the person should, upon climbing into bed, place an open Bible or prayer book under his head. After pulling up the covers and getting settled, the person should then lay a flannel skirt across the middle of the bed, positioning it carefully so it does not fall away during the night. In one instance, a flannel skirt slid off before dawn and the waiting hag seized the occupant of the bed.
In addition to these precautions, the person should hang a necklace of alligator teeth and a small piece of asafetida—a protective but highly odoriferous herb—around the neck.
In most cases, a person is free to rest without fear of a hag’s visit after taking these measures. But sometimes, the only way to be rid of a hag is to catch it and end its visits permanently. A captured hag must be prevented from returning to its skin before daylight. With no protective skin, it weakens considerably in the light of day and is able to ride a victim no more.
A small, open container of vinegar, spit, and onions hung on the inside of a doorknob has long been considered an excellent hag trap. As recorded in the archives of the South Carolina Historical Society, another time-honored—but more distasteful—way of catching a hag is as follows: “One may set traps with phials with wide open mouths half full of voided waters suspended immediately below the keyhole where the hag slips in.”
Should a hag elude these traps, it is up to the victim to wake up and catch it.
Since a hag always departs over the head of a bed, the headboard should be placed against the wall. When the hag is about to leave just before dawn, it will be trapped against the wall. The victim can then, upon waking, seize it.
If a victim wakes during the night and does not see or hear the hag but rather senses its presence, he should take a three-tine fork and thrust its points into the floor at the side of the bed. This will pin the vaporous hag to the floor, where it will remain until the fork is lifted.
Another method will work only for victims so exhausted from hag-ridden nights that they can fall asleep with a flour sifter on their face and a three-tine fork beneath it. Upon reaching a person who has protected himself thus, the hag is compelled to count every tiny hole in the wire-mesh basket before getting at its prey. During the time the hag is whispering to itself as it painstakingly counts the holes, the victim should be able to wake up—or so the theory goes. The victim should then snatch the flour sifter and the fork off his face and plunge the fork into the wire basket, pinning the hag so it cannot escape. Should the victim be so tired from his nightly ordeals as to not awaken, the fork should effectively pin the hag after it has finished counting and begun to creep through the wire mesh toward its prey.
If catching a hag proves impossible, then finding its skin is an alternative. After doffing its skin in preparation for a nighttime search for mischief, a hag must leave the skin unguarded as it flits about in its half-vapor, half-liquid form. It must then clothe itself in its skin before dawn. A skin that is discovered and treated with salt during the night will cause a hag untold agony when it slips it back on.
In one instance, a lovely woman with very fair, satiny skin was in fact a hag. Unbeknownst to anyone, she shed her skin late every night when her husband was asleep, flitted through the air in her ethereal form to the dwelling of one of her numerous victims, floated through some tiny opening into the home, and rode her poor, slumbering prey to exhaustion until just before dawn. Then she would steal away, fly back home, don her skin, and arrange herself under her bedcovers so her husband would have no inkling that his lovely, gentle wife had been tormenting innocent victims.
One night, however, the husband awakened ill. Expecting his spouse to rouse from sleep and soothe him, all he found was her satiny skin spread like a sheer skirt across the chair of her dressing table. Understanding at once the significance of this terrible find, he knew what he must do despite his illness.
Fetching a container of salt from the pantry, he liberally salted the delicate skin inside and out, then placed it across the chair in front of his wife’s dressing table, making sure to leave every fold just as she had arranged it. He then lay back down and waited for the hag’s return.
Flitting breathlessly through her open bedroom window in the light of the silvery three-quarter moon, the hag reached for her skin and slipped it on, then gazed at her moonlit form in the mirror of her dressing table. The skin glowed milky white and fit more smoothly than a glove.
Suddenly, she let out a cry of terrible pain. From her lovely, silky skin came the acute burning sensation of salt poured in an open woun
d. She longed to throw the skin off but did not dare, for her husband and tormentor had leaped out of bed and lit the bedside lamp at the instant she cried out.
Writhing in agony, the hag stumbled into the bathroom and turned on the taps, filling the claw-foot tub with cool water. She felt the tiniest relief as she slid in. But ultimately, nothing could ease the burning sensation under her tender skin, neither the purest of lotions nor the endless milk baths in which she soaked. The hag remained confined to her room indefinitely, tenderly treating her beautiful, painful skin.
In another case, a hag was slipping into a locked smokehouse filled with delicious hams, fish, sausages, and other expensive meats. Every night, she ate her greedy fill. Before long, she nearly depleted the stock of the smokehouse.
The owner checked the lock of the smokehouse many times and even sat up several nights, shotgun in hand, keeping watch for the culprit, while his smoked delicacies continued to disappear. After finding his precautions had no effect, he determined that the culprit was none other than a crafty, hungry hag and immediately set about finding her skin.
Having heard rumors that an old woman who lived nearby was a hag, the owner crept into her cabin late one night carrying a tin each of salt and pepper in his jacket pockets. He quickly saw the old woman’s empty bed and the skin hung behind the cabin door. Taking the skin down, he dosed it heavily inside and out with salt, then with pepper. Before slipping quietly outside, he hung the skin carefully back behind the door.
When the hag returned after eating her fill of delicious smoked meat, the first thing she did was reach behind the cabin door and slip on her skin. She had barely gotten it on when she cried out in anguish, “Skinny, skinny, why don’t you like me?” Wincing and crying, she tried the skin on again and again, to no avail. It was simply unbearable to wear. She had no choice but to wrap herself in her bedsheets and lie shivering on her bed.
Rarely glimpsed, spoken of in hushed tones, and foolishly believed by many to have faded into obscurity, the hags and plat-eyes of Georgetown County still lurk after dark and prey on the unsuspecting. Whether bedding down for a good night’s sleep or traveling a lonely plantation road after dark, low country residents and visitors are well advised to take care.
The Hanging Tree
_____________________Georgetown County was once a wilderness punctuated by settlements, a place where frontier justice prevailed. One custom from those days that died hard was lynching, a barbarous form of punishment practiced even into the twentieth century. Unjust, spontaneous, and brutal, lynching was always deadly—except for once, when something not quite human was hanged and did not die.
Many venerable trees predating the Revolutionary War grow in Georgetown County. Some of the oldest are live oaks, which do not shed their tiny leaves all at once but stay green year-round. Early Englishmen, searching the low country for trees with which to build the king’s ships, chose hard-as-rock live oaks for the vessels’ ribs. The oldest live oak in Georgetown’s historic district is estimated to be six to eight hundred years old. The circumference of its trunk is twenty-three feet. This revered oak, growing in the rear garden of a home built around 1760, was already a large tree when the port of Georgetown was conceived in the early 1700s. Its long, graceful limbs were spreading over the back gardens of neighboring homes when Georgetown was occupied by the British in the Revolutionary War, then by the Federals during the Civil War.
Another evergreen that grows to massive heights in the low country is the magnolia, whose huge, heavy, cream-colored blossoms exude an intoxicating scent during the late spring and early summer. Though the exotic magnolia is strong and long-lived, it is primarily an ornamental tree—although it sounds incongruous to refer to a tree that can reach such towering heights as an ornament. By contrast, the beautiful, fast-growing, fragrant pine has long been considered a necessity for the production of lumber and of turpentine, tar, and pitch, otherwise known as naval stores. From early colonial days, the tallest, straightest pines were destined to become mainmasts on the king’s ships.
The towering cypress has long been a staple of Georgetown architecture. While heart of pine was the requisite flooring for most plantation manors and townhouses before the Revolutionary War, cypress was the lumber of choice for exteriors. Cypress is nearly impervious to termites and highly resistant to the moisture that pervades Georgetown County. Much of the cypress lumber used for clapboard siding in early Georgetown homes is still intact over two centuries later.
One towering Georgetown County cypress proved useful during colonial days without ever being touched by a saw blade. Though the tree saw only intermittent use, its infamy grew over the course of the next two centuries. Even now, many decades since it was last put into action, this stately, beautiful cypress is known as “the Hanging Tree.”
During the Revolutionary War, while the British occupied the port and the surrounding countryside, two Patriot soldiers were foraging for food in the western end of what is now Georgetown County. A zealous Tory, or British sympathizer, came upon them and shot them dead. Enraged Patriots in the immediate area lost no time in executing the Tory by hanging him from a great, long, horizontal limb of a nearby cypress tree.
A natural gallows, the limb of this cypress saw increasing use over the years. The country community where the cypress grew was sixteen miles outside Georgetown, far from the township’s more ordered approach to justice. No one thought twice about where to take a criminal when an execution was in order.
It was Adam McDonald who took the old Indian path that ran beside the cypress and expanded it into a road. McDonald owned property seven miles deep and fourteen miles long in the vicinity of the Hanging Tree.
In a county of rice planters, the McDonalds were cattle barons. They cultivated some rice in their fertile fields along the Santee River but devoted their major interest to livestock. Among the eighteen hundred head of livestock on their plantation prior to the Civil War were at least a thousand cattle.
In the lean years after the war, the plantation lands adjacent to the Hanging Tree passed to other owners. Times had changed, but an occasional wrongdoer still met his fate at the tree in accordance with the unofficial “lynch law,” which bypassed arrest, judge, and jury. Although feelings were mixed about lynchings, they were generally accepted as a necessary evil and a deterrent to crime. The Georgetown Semi-Weekly Times heartily condoned, on its front page, lynching as punishment for what was delicately referred to as “the usual crime,” meaning rape. Murderers were generally arrested and given a fair trial. This was not the case with rapists. A man accused of this terrible crime was usually hanged quickly, with no arrest or preamble.
In the late 1800s, a stranger came into the tightly knit community of Lamberttown, which had grown up near the Hanging Tree. After only a short time in the area, this stranger perpetrated a crime—presumably a rape—so heinous that the law was not even notified. The locals felt that the best way to assure the safety of the rest of their womenfolk was to catch the stranger and hang him by the neck. This was the only way to be certain he would not escape to visit grief upon another victim, they agreed.
As soon as the stranger was caught, he was hauled by several strong men to the Hanging Tree. His head was placed in a rough noose at one end of a long rope. The other end was tossed high in the air over the heavy, well-worn limb of the old cypress tree. A horse-drawn farm wagon, hastily rolled under the great limb to serve as a platform, was held steady and the stranger forced to climb upon it. The determined men holding the other end of the rope took up the slack as the stranger mounted the wagon, making sure he was held upright and had no chance to slip or twist away. As soon as his footing was steady, the wagon moved away. The bitter crowd watched, expecting to see the stranger receive the cruel reward for his equally cruel crime—expecting to hear the final crunch of his bones. That sound never came.
Out of the sky—which moments before had been a cloudless blue dome—arose a massive thunderstorm, its violent wind whip
ping rain around the hanged man. As thunder boomed and lightning cracked ominously close to the crowd, the stranger worked furiously to loosen the noose. No sooner had he pulled it wide enough to squeeze his head out than he fell to the wet ground, jumped up, and dashed away. The stranger—who by all accounts should have been dead—was never seen or heard from again.
For years, the horrified witnesses pondered this event in their hearts. A properly hanged man had gotten down and run away before their very eyes. They wondered if perhaps he really had been dead and escaped nonetheless—if he was something inhuman that could not be killed by hanging. After all, he had perpetrated an inhuman crime.
The tree’s notoriety grew after this event, causing many a shiver as residents and travelers passed under—for there was no easy way to avoid it—the overhanging limb of the cypress.
When U.S. 17-A, or Saints Delight Road, was paved and widened, taking the place of the old road, it was constructed around the Hanging Tree, passing right under the limb where so many had been lynched.
Once, a traveler headed for Charleston on the new highway stopped to ask a Lamberttown resident about the legendary Hanging Tree. When the resident finished telling the history of the tree, the frightened man drove back to Andrews and went to Charleston via Georgetown, driving many miles out of his way to avoid passing under the lynching limb.
The great, old, moss-covered limb continued to cast its shadow over the lonely stretch of highway until an unusually high-bodied truck tore it away with a great, sudden cracking sound. This occurred several decades ago. Fortunate not to have wrecked his truck or been injured in the mishap, the driver was, it is said, arrested and put in jail for so defacing the Hanging Tree. Despite deep local resentment for the damage to the historic cypress, he was let off with a fine. Nothing, however, could replace the centuries-old limb where so much frontier justice had been meted out.
More Ghosts of Georgetown Page 9