All Saints Church Cemetery

All Saints Episcopal Church on Pawleys Island has posted a sign reading "The Holy Ghost is the only ghost we welcome here," but ghost tourists keep coming for Alice Flagg's grave in the churchyard. The church has stood since 1739, burned twice, and rebuilt each time.

There's a hand-painted sign at the gate of All Saints Church on Pawleys Island. It reads: "The Holy Ghost is the only ghost we welcome here." The congregation has been fighting a losing battle against ghost tourists for decades.

The church's problem is Alice Flagg. Her grave sits in the churchyard, a flat marble slab bearing only her first name, and every weekend groups of strangers show up at night to walk backward around it thirteen times. They leave rings on the stone. They call her name into the live oaks. The church would prefer they didn't.

All Saints Episcopal has occupied this site since 1739, when Waccamaw Neck plantation families needed a place to worship without risking the boat trip to the original parish church. The current sanctuary is the fourth building to serve the congregation. The first wooden chapel burned sometime in the late 1700s. A replacement went up. A brick Greek Revival sanctuary followed in 1843 and stood for over seventy years before fire destroyed it in 1915. The congregation rebuilt in 1917, designing a Classical Revival structure that echoed the proportions of the building they'd lost, only slightly smaller. The rectory next door dates to 1822 and remains one of the best-preserved Carolina I-Houses in Georgetown County.

The churchyard grew up alongside the congregation, starting in the 1820s. It holds the graves of the most powerful planter families of antebellum Georgetown County, families whose rice plantations along the Waccamaw River made this one of the wealthiest parishes in the American South. By 1810, enslaved people made up nearly ninety percent of the parish population, and that labor built everything here: the church, the plantations, the fortunes that funded the gravestone art spanning from about 1820 to 1900.

But nobody wanders the churchyard to admire stonework. They come for Alice, a teenager who died of malaria in 1849 after her brother, Dr. Allard Belin Flagg, ripped away the secret engagement ring she wore on a ribbon beneath her dress and threw it into the marsh. Her ghost is seen in a white dress, one hand on her chest, drifting between the graves. Visitors who stand near her marker describe a sudden, specific sadness, and those wearing rings feel a tug on their fingers.

The whole complex earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991, recognized for the sanctuary, cemetery, rectory, and a small chapel. The listing focuses on architecture and historical significance. It does not mention ghosts.

The church has tried to set boundaries. The sign at the gate. Closing hours. But the story of Alice Flagg is older than any rule the vestry can post, and the ghost tours keep coming. On a good night, you can stand in the churchyard and hear a tour guide in one direction telling the legend of the ring and the rector in the other direction wishing they'd all just go home.