South Carolina’s most famous ghost is something of an enigma.
Unlike most tales of the undead, the Gray Man is known as a benevolent spirit. People who say they’ve encountered the friendly ghost report seeing him before catastrophic storms. The Gray Man is said to either warn people to evacuate the area or protect the houses of those who see him.
“I think people actually see something,” said Sherman Carmichael, author of 12 books about South Carolina lore and legends. “I ain’t going to say it’s a ghost, but I think they’re seeing something, because so many people see this figure out there walking, and you ain’t sure whether it’s a ghost of a dead person or an image out of the past or something.”
Through the years, the Gray Man’s been featured in many books and television shows. Perhaps the apparition’s biggest break to date was a feature on the NBC show Unsolved Mysteries in the 1990s.
“Everybody knows about the Gray Man. You can’t pick up a book here on local lore and legends, I don’t think, that wouldn’t include a story on the Gray Man,” said Georgetown County public information officer Jackie Broach.
Despite his fame through the years, the Gray Man’s story varies depending on the storyteller. According to the Georgetown Museum , some people believe Pawleys Island is protected by its namesake, Percival Pawley.
Enoch Arden is another popular name for the ghost. In this version of the tale, a man in the early 19th Century proposed to a childhood friend before embarking on a sea voyage. After three years, with no letters or sign of Arden, the woman married the couple’s other childhood friend. When Arden eventually did return on the day of the wedding, he threw himself into the ocean in despair. The newlywed couple followed suit, drowning themselves in the Waccamaw River.
Others say the Gray Man is the ghost of a nameless sailor who washed ashore on Pawleys Island and passed away soon after being found.
“Nobody can quite seem to agree on who the Gray Man was,” said Broach, who’s also heard versions of the legend where the Gray Man is the ghost of the English pirate Edward Teach, better known as Blackbeard.
Local haunted history buff Elizabeth Huntsinger leads the Ghosts of Georgetown lantern tours and has written three books about ghosts, mysteries and legends in the Georgetown area. Huntsinger shared another Gray Man story of lost love on a Weather Channel program called Haunted Hurricane Island.
As the story goes, in 1822 a young woman was awaiting the return of her fiancé to Pawleys Island after two years at sea. Desperate to return to his love, the man reached the Port of Georgetown and decided to take a shortcut through the marsh.
Some accounts say he sank in the pluff mud, while others say his horse tripped. Either way, the man never made it back to his fiancé — alive, anyway. In her grief, the woman took to walking the beach.
“One incredibly windy day when the waves were crashing, she saw him right in front of her, and he was wearing the cape that she had made him prior to his leaving to go overseas a couple of years earlier for his education,” Huntsinger said. “She knew it was him, and she didn’t even hesitate to go forward, even though she knew he perished, and he disappeared right in front of her.”
Concerned for her mental health, the woman’s parents took her to Charleston to get medical help. When they returned, they saw that a storm had devastated the island but their home remained intact.
This version of the story provides the best basis for accounts of a benevolent ghost protecting homes from storms, but Huntsinger favors another origin for the Gray Man, one with some historical record.
Originally from England, former South Carolina Lt. Governor Plowden Weston was a wealthy plantation owner and Confederate captain in the Civil War. Weston and his wife lived at Hagley Plantation in Georgetown County but had a summer home built to split their time on Pawleys Island. Now called the Pelican Inn, the house remains on Pawleys Island to this day.
“When the civil war started, he organized a company of local men and the outfit had made the uniforms, which was very unusual at the beginning of the war because there were only federal uniforms,” Huntsinger said. “Now this whole company had gray, and he also outfitted them with infield rifles sent from Britain.”
Weston never saw the end of the war. He fell sick with tuberculosis and, although he was elected lieutenant governor and taken out of combat, Weston died in office in 1864.
“He is said to be the Gray Man who still watches over Pawleys Island and appears in a long gray coat like most Civil War soldiers in the Confederacy would have had,” Huntsinger said.
It’s impossible to prove — or disprove — any of the historical sightings, but if indeed the Gray Man was spotted before 1864, it would rule out the ghost of Plowden Weston.
Each version of the legend invokes different historical and geographical qualities of the Palmetto State. From pirates and the Civil War to pluff mud and storms, the folklore of the Gray Man is steeped in South Carolina culture.
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