The Hermitage

Alice Flagg died of heartbreak in 1849 after her brother broke up her romance. Her ghost wanders the plantation in a white dress, still looking for her lost engagement ring.

The Hermitage plantation near Murrells Inlet was home to the wealthy Flagg family in the mid-1800s. Young Alice Flagg fell deeply in love with a turpentine merchant — a man her physician brother Dr. Allard Flagg considered beneath the family's station. When Dr. Flagg discovered Alice wearing the man's engagement ring on a chain around her neck, he tore it away and sent her back to boarding school in Charleston. Alice fell gravely ill with malaria and was brought home, but died in 1849 at just 16 years old, never recovering her ring. Her ghost, dressed in a flowing white gown, has been seen wandering the grounds of The Hermitage and nearby All Saints Cemetery, eternally searching for her lost ring. Visitors to her grave leave rings on her headstone, and those who walk around it 13 times counter-clockwise at midnight reportedly encounter her spirit.