Atalaya Castle

Archer Huntington built this thirty-room Moorish-style fortress on the South Carolina coast in the early 1930s as a winter home for his sculptor wife Anna, who had tuberculosis. Nobody died here and the Huntingtons had no unfinished business, but visitors and park rangers still hear sculpting tools working in Anna's empty studio.

Ranger Mike Walker, who leads the ghost tours at Atalaya, is the first to admit the place shouldn't be haunted. Nobody died here. The Huntingtons had no obvious unfinished business. The two main ingredients of a ghost story are missing entirely. Then he takes visitors into the maze of dark corridors and lets the castle make its own argument.

Archer Milton Huntington built Atalaya between 1931 and 1933 as a winter home for his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Anna had tuberculosis, and Archer chose this stretch of coast near Murrells Inlet hoping warm salt air would help. He was heir to the Central Pacific Railroad fortune, a scholar of Moroccan culture and art, and he designed the entire structure in his head without drawn plans. Local contractor William Thompson oversaw the work, employing up to 300 laborers from the surrounding community during the Depression. Archer insisted on local labor to provide wages where there were none. He also built the area's first paved road.

The result is a 200-by-200-foot Moorish-style compound with thirty rooms arranged along three walls around an open courtyard. Twenty-five fireplaces with copper hoods. A forty-foot water tower at the center, the watchtower that gives the castle its name: atalaya is Spanish for watchtower. Anna's sculpture studio opened onto a smaller enclosed courtyard with a twenty-five-foot skylight so she could work on monumental pieces. She created some of her most celebrated sculptures here, including works displayed across the highway at Brookgreen Gardens, which the Huntingtons established on over nine thousand acres of former plantation land they purchased in January 1930.

The ghost that visitors and park rangers describe most often is Anna herself. She appears in the labyrinth of corridors and vine-covered studios, particularly near the workspace where she spent decades sculpting. The sounds are specific: metal scraping against stone, the working rhythm of sculpting tools, coming from rooms that are empty when anyone goes to check. People feel sudden chills in the hallways and the weight of being watched from just behind a doorway. Objects shift position between visits.

The castle's second ghost comes from a story recorded by Nancy Rhyne in her collection of South Carolina Lowcountry folklore. A Depression-era laborer named Old Joe showed up for work, wrecked a truck on his first day, and got fired on the spot. He kept coming back anyway, splitting logs and tending the fireplaces until he earned a second chance. When he found a horse for Anna to use as a model for a sculpture and nursed the animal back to health, he won the Huntingtons' trust completely. On Christmas night, Archer put that trust to the test. He asked Joe to guard a heavy oak table in the master bathroom, piled high with gold coins of varying sizes, gleaming in the firelight. Joe watched over the fortune all night. He never learned where the gold came from or where it went the next morning. Locals say his ghost still patrols the grounds, faithfully guarding treasure that vanished long ago.

Grand Strand Paranormal Investigations has conducted multiple sessions at the castle, capturing electronic voice phenomena and electromagnetic fluctuations throughout the rooms. Their findings don't resolve the central paradox: no death, no trauma, no obvious reason for any of this.

Atalaya earned a spot on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984. The park hosts an annual sleepover in November with ghost stories by the campfire, nighttime beach walks, and after-dark tours of the corridors. Anna Huntington died in 1973 at ninety-seven years old, in Connecticut, hundreds of miles from the castle she loved. Her sculptures still stand across the highway. And somewhere in the maze of rooms she designed with her husband, metal scrapes against stone in an empty studio.