All Saints Cemetery

This historic cemetery near Pawleys Island is the final resting place of Alice Flagg, whose tragic love story has made her grave one of the most visited in South Carolina.

All Saints Cemetery on Pawleys Island is the final resting place of Alice Belin Flagg, whose tragic story is the most famous ghost legend on the South Carolina coast. Alice was born around 1833, the younger sister of Dr. Allard Belin Flagg, a prominent physician who lived at the Hermitage, the family's plantation house on Murrells Inlet. When Alice was sixteen years old, she fell in love with a young lumberman -- a man her wealthy, socially prominent family considered far beneath their station. Despite her family's objections, Alice and the man became secretly engaged, and he gave her a simple gold ring, which she wore on a ribbon hidden beneath her dress, pressed against her heart.

Dr. Flagg eventually discovered the engagement and was furious. He demanded that Alice give back the ring and sent her away to a boarding school in Charleston to separate her from the lumberman. While at school, Alice contracted malaria. She was brought home to the Hermitage in a delirium, calling out for her ring and clutching her chest where it had hung. As she lay dying, Dr. Flagg found the ring still hidden on its ribbon beneath her dress. He tore it from her neck and, according to every version of the legend, hurled it out into the marsh, where it was never recovered. Alice died at the Hermitage at the age of sixteen, still reaching for the ring that was no longer there. She was buried in All Saints Cemetery, where her grave is marked by a flat marble slab bearing only her first name -- ALICE -- with no dates, no surname, and no epitaph.

Her ghost has been seen at both the Hermitage and the cemetery ever since. At All Saints Cemetery, Alice appears in a flowing white dress, moving between the graves with one hand pressed to her chest, searching for the ring that was stolen from her as she died. Visitors who approach her tombstone and walk slowly around it a certain number of times report feeling a distinct tug on their own rings, as if unseen fingers are trying to pull the jewelry from their hands. Others have described feeling an overwhelming wave of sadness wash over them when standing at the grave -- a grief so intense and specific that it seems to emanate from the ground itself rather than from their own emotions.

Over the years, a tradition has developed in which visitors leave rings and other small pieces of jewelry on Alice's grave as gifts to ease her troubled spirit. The offerings appear and disappear with no clear explanation -- rings left in the morning may be gone by afternoon, and new ones appear overnight. Ghost tour groups regularly visit the cemetery after dark, and guides instruct visitors to walk backward around Alice's tombstone thirteen times while calling her name to summon her spirit. Some who have performed the ritual report seeing a white figure emerge from the shadows of the live oaks, while others say they have felt a cold breath on their neck or heard a soft female voice whispering.

All Saints Episcopal Church was established in the 1730s as a parish church for the Waccamaw Neck, and the cemetery contains the graves of many of the most prominent planting families of the Georgetown District. But it is Alice Flagg's simple, unmarked slab that draws the most visitors -- a teenager whose forbidden love, early death, and stolen ring have made her one of the most enduring and heartbreaking ghosts in the American South.