South Carolina Ghost Stories by County: The Real Record

South Carolina’s ghost stories are older than the state and spread across all forty-six counties, but the ones that survive in print come down to a dozen or so. The oldest with a date attached is the Gray Man of Pawleys Island, said to have first appeared in 1822. The newest is the Lizard Man of Lee County, which dates to the summer of 1988 and a damaged car. Between them are lights on back roads, a burned church, a white dog, and bridges where a baby is said to cry.

I write from Dorchester County, which has its own entries at the bottom. Charleston calls itself the most haunted city in America. Most of what Charleston sells came from somewhere else first.

The Gray Man of Pawleys Island (Georgetown County)

The Gray Man walks the beach before a hurricane, and the people who see him say their houses are spared. Most tellings put his first appearance in 1822 and make him a young man riding from Charleston to his fiancée who went down with his horse in the pluff mud. The legend first reached print in Julian Stevenson Bolick’s Waccamaw Plantations in 1946. Sightings were reported before Hurricane Hugo in 1989 and again before Hurricane Florence in 2018. Pawleys Island is about seventy miles up the coast from Charleston on U.S. 17.

The Lizard Man of Scape Ore Swamp (Lee County)

On July 14, 1988, the Lee County sheriff’s office looked at a car that had been chewed and scratched overnight near Browntown, outside Bishopville. A seventeen-year-old named Christopher Davis said a creature about seven feet tall, green and wet, with three fingers and red eyes, had attacked his car about two weeks earlier, and that he got away when he braked and it rolled off. Sheriff Liston Truesdale said the boy’s story never changed. Skeptics have since noted that the details did. An airman who claimed to have shot the thing that August admitted he made it up. Bishopville sold T-shirts. The story was revived in 2008 and 2015, the only legend in the state with a sheriff’s report behind it.

The Summerville Light (Dorchester County)

A railroad man’s widow waits on what is now Sheep Island Road with a lantern, and the lantern is the light that people have reported there since at least the 1950s. Her husband was killed, in most versions beheaded, in a derailment, and she walked the tracks every night until she died. Visitors flashed their headlights and waited. Some saw a white or orange light come toward them and turn green. In 2025 a U.S. Geological Survey seismologist, Susan Hough, published a letter proposing that the lights line up with small quakes on the Summerville Fault, which runs under the town and probably produced the great earthquake of 1886. The road itself has been blocked, posted, and largely built over. The light has a page of its own on this site.

Old Sheldon Church Ruins (Beaufort County)

Prince William’s Parish Church was built between 1745 and 1753 near Yemassee, seventeen miles north of Beaufort. The British burned it in 1779, it was rebuilt in 1826, and Sherman’s army is said to have burned it again in 1865, though an 1866 letter says it was gutted for materials instead. What stands is brick columns and walls under live oaks, listed on the National Register in 1970, with a service held in the ruins every year since 1925. The ghost stories here are the usual ones for a roofless church, and the building does not need them.

The Land’s End Light (Beaufort County)

Land’s End Road runs about three miles across St. Helena Island, past the Chapel of Ease ruins toward the water. The light is described as a yellow or pale orange orb ten or twelve feet above the road, like a single headlight, that comes toward the car and grows larger and dimmer before it vanishes. One version makes it the lantern of a Confederate private named Frank Quigley, said to have been beheaded in an 1861 fight. Others say it is a man hanged on the island, or a man sold away from his wife, or the runaways hanged from the oaks that line the road. Skeptics say marsh gas. The locals point out there is no marsh at the spot.

The Hound of Goshen (Newberry and Union Counties)

Old Buncombe Road is an antebellum highway, and the stretch through Goshen, in the Sumter National Forest between Newberry and Union, is where a white dog has been reported since the 1850s. Ernest Shealy, curator of the Newberry Museum, tells it this way: a traveler passing through with his white hound was blamed for some trouble and hanged from a tree, the dog stayed under the tree howling until a neighbor shot it, and the dog came back. The first recorded sighting was by an enslaved man sent to fetch a doctor for the White family at Hardy Plantation; the dog ran beside him the whole way. Shealy also says parts of the story do not hold up if you stop and analyze them, which is the most honest thing anyone has said about a ghost in this state.

Crybaby Bridges (Union, Anderson, and Chesterfield Counties)

South Carolina has at least three bridges called Crybaby Bridge. The best known is the Tyger River Bridge on Sardis Road in Union County, a steel truss span near Rose Hill Plantation. The story there is a mother who lost a custody fight, threw her infant from the bridge, and jumped after. Visitors report crying from the river. There are others near Anderson and at Pageland in Chesterfield County, and the stories differ only in detail.

Dorchester County’s own

Besides the Summerville Light, this county has Old Dorchester, founded in the 1690s by New England Congregationalists on the Ashley River and abandoned by 1788, where the brick bell tower of St. George’s Church stands over its churchyard with no church and no bells. It is a state historic site, at 300 State Park Road in Summerville, open daily for three dollars. The county also sits on the Summerville Fault, which is the one geological fact that ties half the local stories together. Chairs move, doors swing, and the ground has an explanation it does not always share.

That is the thesis of the dispatches this site publishes from St. George: the stories Charleston tells started upriver. The county history and the county map lay it out. The Tower with No Bell is the one about Old Dorchester, and The Edisto Keeps Its Own is the one about the river.

South Carolina Ghost Stories, County by County