In Brief
At the Old Sheldon Church Ruins in South Carolina, couples pose for wedding portraits between the roofless columns. But the most-reported figure there is a woman in brown who stands over an infant's grave, and passing near it floods visitors with sorrow.
The Full Story
The Old Sheldon Church Ruins sit in the woods between Beaufort and Yemassee, South Carolina — a roofless brick shell with columns still standing and live oaks leaning over the graves. The figure people report most often in the churchyard wears a plain brown, Pilgrim-style dress, and she stands over the small grave of an infant. Walk near that little tombstone, accounts say, and a weight of sorrow settles over you that goes past ordinary sadness and lifts only when you step back.
The ruins are one of the Lowcountry's most-photographed places. Couples line up to shoot wedding portraits inside the walls, posing between the columns and framing shots through the empty window arches while Spanish moss hangs off the oaks. The wedding blogs skip the mourning woman.
Nobody agrees on who she was. Some accounts hand her a name; most leave her unnamed — a woman who materializes in front of the child's grave, and, some say, can be heard crying at night for the infant.
The church went up as Prince William's Parish in the 1740s, named for the Bull family's ancestral home in England. William Bull, who helped Oglethorpe lay out the streets of Savannah in 1733, is buried inside the walls, said to lie beneath where the pulpit once stood. The British burned the building in 1779. It was rebuilt once, in 1826. Then, during Sherman's march in 1865, it was destroyed a second time: burned outright, or, by one 1866 letter, only gutted and later stripped by locals for materials. Either way it was never rebuilt, and it has stood open to the sky for more than 150 years.
One photographer, Jason Barnette, set up in the dark before sunset to shoot the columns. Each time his shutter clicked, a soft second click answered about a second later. When he counted down aloud before triggering the shot, the answering click came nearly a full minute late instead, and the tree frogs around him went quiet.
Every spring, since 1925, clergy drive out from Beaufort to hold a memorial service under the open roof. The rest of the year the couples come for the columns and the light through the window arches. But the churchyard's most-reported presence was never a bride. She's a mother, standing over a child's grave, and the people who wander too close to it come away carrying a grief that was never theirs.
