The Hermitage

Alice Belin Flagg died at fifteen in 1849 after her brother tore away the engagement ring she hid on a ribbon around her neck and sent her to boarding school, where she contracted malaria. Visitors leave rings on her headstone at All Saints Cemetery and walk thirteen circles at midnight, though historian Catherine Lewis discovered the famous grave may belong to a different Alice Flagg entirely.

The marble slab reads only "ALICE." No last name. No dates. Her brother wanted her forgotten.

Alice Belin Flagg was fifteen years old in 1849, the youngest child and only surviving daughter of the Flagg family of Murrells Inlet. She had brown eyes, auburn hair that hung to her waist, and the misfortune of falling in love with the wrong man. Her suitor was a turpentine dealer. Her brother, Dr. Allard Flagg, intercepted the man in the flower garden at The Hermitage and told him plainly: he was "not a professional man" and "beneath the notice of a Flagg."

Alice kept seeing him anyway. The turpentine dealer slipped an engagement ring on her finger. When Dr. Allard found out, he demanded she return it. Alice refused. She tied the ring to a ribbon and wore it around her neck, hidden beneath the collar of her dress. Allard's solution was to send her away to boarding school in Charleston, hoping distance would kill the romance.

It killed Alice instead. She contracted malarial fever at school, what people in the Lowcountry called "country fever," a common affliction for anyone exposed to the mosquitoes breeding in the boggy rice plantations. Dr. Allard raced to Charleston in his carriage and found her delirious, reaching for the ring at her neck. He brought her home to The Hermitage, but the journey through the Lowcountry was brutal. Alice died that first night back. While she lay in a coma, her brother pulled the ring from the ribbon and threw it into the creek.

They dressed her in her favorite white dress and buried her. The headstone at All Saints Waccamaw Episcopal Church Cemetery near Pawleys Island bears only her first name. No Flagg. No 1834-1849. Just ALICE, carved into a flat marble slab that sits low to the ground between ancient oaks draped in Spanish moss.

But here's where the story fractures. Historian Catherine Lewis discovered that the famous grave at All Saints may not contain the Alice of the legend at all. The marker likely memorializes "Little Alice Flagg," a young family member who died in the devastating hurricane of 1893, not the Alice who died of fever and heartbreak forty-four years earlier. Lewis found that Alice Belin Flagg was initially buried at The Hermitage, then relocated to Cedar Hill Cemetery at Belin Methodist Church in Murrells Inlet, roughly twenty miles from All Saints. The ghost story has been haunting the wrong grave.

It doesn't matter to the people who show up. Visitors walk thirteen circles counterclockwise around the All Saints marker at midnight, hoping to summon her spirit. They leave rings on the flat marble slab, small offerings for a girl who lost hers. The headstone is almost always decorated with cheap costume rings, hair ties, and occasionally something more expensive glinting in the Carolina sun. People have seen a figure in a white dress at both the cemetery and on the grounds of The Hermitage, clutching her chest where the ring once lay. The sightings have been going on for well over a century, and a new television series filming in Georgetown County in 2025 is built around the legend.

The Hermitage stands in Murrells Inlet today, a private residence on the marsh. The grounds where Dr. Allard told the turpentine dealer he wasn't good enough remain on the site. The creek where the ring was thrown runs on the property. And visitors who leave rings at All Saints are honoring a love story that the Flagg family spent 175 years trying to erase, starting with a headstone that wouldn't even give a dead girl her last name.