Old Burying Ground

A girl is buried here in a rum keg. A British officer stands upright in uniform. A yellow fever child rests in a glass-topped case.

At the back of Beaufort's Old Burying Ground, in a shaded plot under live oaks draped with Spanish moss, there's a small grave with a hand-painted sign that reads "Little Girl Buried in Rum Keg." Visitors leave toys on it. Plastic dolls, seashells, a few handwritten notes, coins. The grave has been getting offerings for at least fifty years, which is longer than most children get remembered.

The story says that a Beaufort merchant captain named Nathaniel Sloo took his young daughter to England in the mid-1700s. She died during the voyage home. He'd promised her mother he'd bring her back, so he bought a keg of rum from the ship's stores, put the girl inside to preserve her, and buried her in the keg when they reached Carolina. The legend is as well-known as any Beaufort story gets. The documentation is thin. Records show a Nathaniel Sloo owned a lot on Front Street in 1768, but he sold it quickly without building. Nobody's found archival confirmation of the wife, the daughter, or the voyage. Patricia Suggs of the Beaufort Historical Association has noted that the Fishtown Liars, a 1960s local storytelling group known to prefer a good tale over a true one, probably shaped the version we know.

But preservation in alcohol wasn't invented in Beaufort. Nancy Martin in Wilmington died at sea in 1857 and was brought home in a cask of rum. Jeanette Corbett in Maine was preserved the same way in 1873. The practice is real. The grave in Beaufort is real. Whatever the girl's actual name was, a child is in the ground there.

She's not the only strange occupant. Somewhere in the graveyard is a British naval officer who was buried standing up, in full uniform, so the story goes, so he could face his king in death. No stone marks him by name. Vienna Dill, a child who died of yellow fever, is interred in a glass-topped case, a 19th-century burial style that let mourners view the body without being exposed to the disease. Captain Otway Burns, a privateer from the War of 1812, is buried under one of the cannons from his ship, the Snap Dragon. The northeast corner holds a scatter of unmarked graves, likely dating from the 1711 Tuscarora War, when colonial records describe the coast as "depopulated by the late Indian War and Massacre."

Two hundred and change documented graves predate the Civil War. The cemetery has been in continuous use since the early 1700s. Beaufort is the third-oldest town in North Carolina, and this block is its memory, most of it too old for the average visitor to register on a first walk through.

The hauntings are low-key by ghost-tour standards. Visitors report cold spots in specific sections of the grounds, most often near the rum keg grave. The toys on that grave are rumored to move between visits, although that also happens to any outdoor memorial with tourist traffic and wind. A few accounts mention footsteps on the brick paths after the cemetery closes to visitors at dusk. Nothing dramatic. Nothing you'd put on a podcast.

What the Old Burying Ground has instead is atmosphere most cemeteries can't manufacture: three centuries of Atlantic coast history in a shaded block downtown, a standing soldier, a girl in a barrel, a child under glass, a privateer under a cannon. It's a quiet place that gets under your skin without trying.