Atalaya Castle

A Spanish-style winter home built in the 1930s inside Huntington Beach State Park for sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington and her husband. The castle-like structure has had a reputation for strange activity for decades.

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. Archer Milton Huntington, a wealthy philanthropist and heir to the Central Pacific Railroad fortune, built it between 1931 and 1933 as a winter home for his wife, the sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. Anna had tuberculosis, and Archer picked this coastal site hoping the warm salt air would help her condition. He insisted local laborers do all the construction to help the struggling Lowcountry economy during the Depression. What they built 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.

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

The most persistent ghost at Atalaya seems to be Anna herself. Visitors and park rangers say she still wanders the labyrinth-like corridors and vine-covered studios. People report sudden chills and the feeling of being watched, phantom footsteps in empty hallways, objects moving on their own, and the sound of metal scraping softly against stone -- as if someone were still working with sculpting tools deep inside the castle. The activity is strongest in and around Anna's former studio, where visitors feel her presence most intensely.

The castle's other ghost is tied to a local worker known as Old Joe, whose story was recorded by Nancy Rhyne in 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 got fired immediately. He kept showing up, 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 from the size of 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. Locals say Joe's ghost still patrols the grounds, faithfully guarding a treasure that vanished long ago.

Grand Strand Paranormal Investigations has conducted multiple sessions at Atalaya, capturing electronic voice phenomena and electromagnetic fluctuations throughout the castle. An Atalaya guide has pointed out that nobody is actually known to have died at the castle and the Huntingtons had no obvious unfinished business -- yet the maze of corridors, ornate iron grillwork, and vine-draped walls seem to generate their own atmosphere.

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