Plantation Life Demographics

It's easy to romanticize the lives of the privileged few living inside a plantation's Big House, but the vast, vast majority of people who lived, worked, and died on a plantation never even crossed the threshold of the Big House door. On some Lowcountry sea islands, slaves outnumbered slaveowners by 1000 to 1.

Trying to understand life on a pre-War plantation by focusing on its owners is like trying to understand the reality of life in Folsom Prison by studying the daily life of its Administrative Staff.

The Ghost Of Alice Flagg

One favorite South Carolina legend says that 15-year-old Alice Flagg, buried at All Saints Episcopal Church, Pawleys Island, haunts the area, still looking for an engagement ring her brother hurled into the salt marsh to show his disapproval of her lumberjack beau. Why Alice still wants the engagement ring when her fiancé is long dead is a mystery--apparently ghosts have limited access to the obituaries. And, for that matter, limited access to each other--otherwise, why doesn't she hook up with the lumberjack's spirit now, instead of looking for the ring?

Anyway, not only do some insist that Alice is still among us, but they suggest that she haunts on an on-call basis: to make Alice appear, walk backwards around her grave (marked simply, ALICE) thirteen times and call her name twice. Others recommend starting at the letter "A" on her stone and walking clockwise six times and then counter-clockwise six times.

It is also common for visitors to leave a ring on the huge granite slab atop her grave. Most of these rings are plastic, and groundskeepers remove them lest the local birds choke to death on them. A lovesick ghost teenager is one thing, but nobody wants choking ghost seagulls fluttering around.