Alice Flagg

Alice Flagg is probably the best-known ghost of the South Carolina Lowcountry, and her story is told along the Waccamaw Neck in Georgetown County. In the usual telling, Alice was a young daughter of a planter family from Wachesaw Plantation. After her father, Dr. Ebenezer Flagg, died in 1838, her older brother, Dr. Allard Belin Flagg, took over the family’s property, including a house on the marsh at Murrells Inlet called the Hermitage, and acted as the head of the household.

The legend says Alice fell in love with a man her family thought beneath her and secretly accepted his ring. Her brother sent her to school in Charleston; she kept the ring hidden on a ribbon around her neck. When she fell ill and was brought home, a fever, usually described as malaria, was already taking hold. Her brother is said to have found the ring and thrown it into the creek or marsh. Alice died, the story goes, calling for it. Versions disagree on her age (15 or 16 is common), on whether she was laid out in a white gown, and on whether she was buried first at the Hermitage.

Where she lies is the weak point. A plain marker reading only “Alice” stands in the churchyard of All Saints Waccamaw Episcopal Church near Pawleys Island, and visitors have long treated it as her grave. A 2022 column in the Myrtle Beach area press, drawing on the late local historian Catherine Lewis’s article in the Independent Republic Quarterly, reports that the church’s records do not support this: Lewis thought the stone commemorates a different Alice Flagg, a child who died in the great hurricane of 1893, and that the real Alice was reinterred at Cedar Hill Cemetery at the Belin Methodist Church in Murrells Inlet. South Carolina Public Radio likewise calls the old identification of the All Saints stone “debunked.”

The ghost story grew around the unsolved ending. People say Alice returns to look for her ring and appears in a white gown; visitors report a touch on the hand or a feeling of being watched. A popular ritual says that anyone who walks backwards around the marker 13 times will see her. SCETV’s folklore feature records a first-person account from the 1960s at All Saints, and the Hermitage family’s own tradition that the porch ceiling was painted “haint blue.” None of this is documented; the tellers are storytellers, not investigators. Treat the churchyard as a working burial ground and visit only by day.

Reported apparition of a young woman in white searching for a lost ring; a touch on the hand or feeling of presence at the marker; a backwards-walking ritual said to summon her.

The marker called “Alice” at All Saints Waccamaw churchyard near Pawleys Island, and the Hermitage at Murrells Inlet (private).

Alice is a staple of Myrtle Beach and Georgetown ghost tours, Nancy Rhyne’s book Alice Flagg: The Ghost of the Hermitage (2004), and SCETV’s Ghosts and Legends and South of Spooky programs.