Atalaya Castle

Located within Huntington Beach State Park, this Spanish-style winter home was built in the 1930s for sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington and her husband Archer. The castle-like structure has long been rumored to be haunted.

Atalaya Castle rises from the dunes of Huntington Beach State Park in Murrells Inlet, a sprawling thirty-room Moorish-style fortress that looks like it belongs on the Mediterranean coast rather than the South Carolina shore. The castle was built between 1931 and 1933 by Archer Milton Huntington, a wealthy philanthropist and heir to the Central Pacific Railroad fortune, as a winter home for his wife, the renowned sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Anna suffered from tuberculosis, and Archer chose this coastal site hoping the warm salt air would ease her condition. He insisted that the castle be constructed entirely by local laborers to help boost the struggling Lowcountry economy during the Great Depression. The result is a one-story, square-shaped structure with rooms along three walls surrounding a large open courtyard, anchored by a forty-foot water tower at its center -- the watchtower that gives the castle its name, from the Spanish atalaya meaning watchtower.

Anna used the castle's studios to create some of her most celebrated sculptures, including works that would be displayed at Brookgreen Gardens across the highway, which the Huntingtons had established on over nine thousand acres of former plantation land they purchased in January 1930. The property was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984 and together with Brookgreen Gardens forms a National Historic Landmark district.

The most persistent ghost at Atalaya is believed to be Anna Huntington herself, whose spirit visitors and park rangers say still wanders the labyrinth-like corridors and vine-covered studios of her beloved winter retreat. Visitors report sudden chills and the sensation of being watched, phantom footsteps echoing through empty hallways, objects moving on their own, and the sound of metal scraping softly against stone -- as if a sculptor were still at work somewhere deep within the castle. The activity is most intense in and around Anna's former studio, where some feel her presence is tethered to the art and the place she loved most.

The castle's other legendary spirit is connected to a local worker known as Old Joe, whose story was recorded by Nancy Rhyne in her book Tales of the South Carolina Lowcountry. Joe was a Depression-era laborer who wrecked a truck on his first day working for the Huntingtons and was fired on the spot. He persisted and earned a second chance splitting logs and maintaining fires in the castle's many fireplaces. When Joe found a horse for Anna to use as a model for her Don Quixote sculpture and nursed the animal back to health, he won the couple's trust. On Christmas night, Archer tested that trust by asking Joe to guard a heavy oak table in the master bathroom piled high with gold coins -- stacks varying in size from a watermelon seed to a silver dollar, gleaming in the firelight. Joe watched over the fortune all night, never learning where the gold came from or where it went. Local legend holds that Joe's ghost still patrols the castle grounds, faithfully guarding a treasure that vanished long ago.

Grand Strand Paranormal Investigations has conducted multiple sessions at Atalaya, capturing electronic voice phenomena they claim are responses from spirits attempting to communicate, along with unexplained electromagnetic fluctuations throughout the castle. Interestingly, an Atalaya guide has noted that no one is known to have died at the castle and that the Huntingtons had no obvious unfinished business -- yet the castle's maze of corridors, ornate iron grillwork, and vine-draped walls seem to generate their own supernatural atmosphere.

Today Interpretive Park Ranger Mike Walker leads ghost tours at Atalaya that are included with park admission, sharing tales passed down through generations on the Hammock Coast. The park also hosts an annual Atalaya Sleepover in November, complete with ghost stories by the campfire, nighttime beach walks, and tours of the castle after dark. Anna Huntington died in 1973 at the age of ninety-seven, but those who walk the corridors of her castle after sunset say she never truly left.