In Brief
The Georgetown Lighthouse keeps the oldest light in South Carolina and a ghost sailors are glad to meet: a drowned little girl said to come aboard on Winyah Bay before a hurricane, warning the men off the water that killed her.
The Full Story
Before a hurricane comes up on Winyah Bay, off the Georgetown Lighthouse in South Carolina, the sailors say a little girl climbs aboard. They are glad to see her. She is a warning, not a fright — a drowned child who turns up on deck when the water is about to turn, and the men who see her head for port.
They call her Annie, though that name came up through the retellings and no record keeps it. She was the keeper's daughter. He was a widower raising her alone at the light on North Island, a barrier island at the mouth of the bay, about 14 miles from town and reachable only by boat. It was the trip home that killed her — a supply run to the mainland, and a storm that came up fast and swamped the boat.
How she drowned depends on who tells it. In one telling the keeper lashed her to his back and swam for shore, then collapsed on the sand and fell asleep from exhaustion, and woke to find she had drowned against him while he slept. In another she was swept into the water and he went in after her and could not reach her in time. Either way she never came out of the bay, and her father came apart. He "began neglecting his duties, wandering around calling for his daughter, and falling to his knees in grief," one account has it, and he died in the lighthouse not long after.
The rest is folklore, carried in the ghost-lore books and nowhere else. No keeper is named in any log, and nothing marks the grave of a girl called Annie, if there was a girl at all. What the record does hold is the tower: the oldest lighthouse in South Carolina, first lit in 1800, its brick tower raised to 87 feet after the Civil War, still standing on its empty island. Others say they have heard footsteps climbing the stairs when the tower is empty, though no one will guess whose.
The part that stays with you is the mercy in it. Most drowned children in these stories come back angry. This one came back to work. The sailors watch for her the way you would watch a barometer — a small figure on the deck before the wind turns, a girl who never got off the water making sure the next man does.
