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    Haunted Plantations: Ghosts of Slavery and Legends of the Cotton Kingdoms
    Haunted Plantations: Ghosts of Slavery and Legends of the Cotton Kingdoms
    Haunted Plantations: Ghosts of Slavery and Legends of the Cotton Kingdoms
    Ebook132 pages1 hour

    Haunted Plantations: Ghosts of Slavery and Legends of the Cotton Kingdoms

    By Geordie Buxton

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    About this ebook

    Chilling stories of the antebellum era, ranging from Savannah, Georgia to the Carolina coast, with photos included.
     
    Members of a shackled West African tribe drag themselves off a slave ship while singing, drowning in a Georgia creek to avoid being sold. Mysterious letters from a long-ruined church near Mepkin Abbey solicit a man to join the faith. A French teacher disappears from a school after marking final exams in blood. An Egyptian mummy triggers a heart attack in a city museum.
     
    These stories and more are wrenched from the gravest parts of America’s past—real lives of people on plantations from Savannah to Charleston and the coast of the Carolinas. Richly illustrated with both historic and contemporary images, most deal with the hub of the East Coast slave trade, Charleston, South Carolina.
     
    Sifting through folklore, legends, and emotionally raw history, these stories relate encounters with the supernatural—and reminds us that what actually happened here doesn’t always need a ghost to be disquieting.
     
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateSep 26, 2007
    ISBN9781439614129
    Haunted Plantations: Ghosts of Slavery and Legends of the Cotton Kingdoms
    Author

    Geordie Buxton

    Local writer Geordie Buxton conducts ghost tours by boat in Charleston Harbor and on foot in the historic district. The coauthor of two previous books of local ghost stories, this is his first single collection.

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      Book preview

      Haunted Plantations - Geordie Buxton

      e9781439614129_i0002.jpg

      PART I

      Legends of the Cotton Kingdoms

      THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF WILLIAM HENRY DRAYTON

      There is a narrow staircase in the middle of the Drayton Hall plantation house that leads to an empty upstairs room where a ghost is said to reside. The spirit has never been seen, but it lives in the walls of this room in the Drayton family home. Custodians and historians have felt temperature changes upon entering the room and sensed an unseen presence next to them.

      According to renowned clairvoyant Elizabeth Baron, it is William Henry Drayton’s soul that lingers there. In his living years, family members locked him in this isolated room when he became rowdy during heated political meetings. Drayton Hall was a hotbed for intrigue during the years before the Revolutionary War, and Drayton was known to become intoxicated with both liquor and a manic patriotic fervor.

      William Henry Drayton was born in South Carolina in 1742. He was the son of John Drayton, the builder of the magnificent brick plantation house on the Ashley River, west of Charleston. William was the first Drayton son and was educated in England. He went on to political fame as a congressman and was a major force in the American independence movement. Like his father, he was greatly revered by Whigs on both sides of the Atlantic. He organized much of the planning for separation from the crown in the plantation house, and he considered those who were not part of the rebellion traitorous enemies.

      Drayton was reported to have died mysteriously in Philadelphia at the age of 37, in 1779. Given his passion for the revolutionary cause, it is likely that he was killed in a pistol duel. If true, the fact would have been hidden from his family to spare them the shame.

      After Drayton’s body was shipped back to Drayton Hall, the family inheritance was passed to his younger brother, John. The next year, the British seized Charlestown and the Drayton family and its patriotic allies were forced to tolerate British occupation for nearly three years. It could be that William Drayton’s violent death in the heat of passion—and the subsequent occupation of his homeland by his hated enemies—somehow caused him to return to the scene of so many of his emotional political battles. If so, he would be one of the most obvious candidates for ghostdom in the Lowcountry.

      Walking across the lush green lawns of Drayton Hall, it is easy to drift back to the 1770s, when men gathered there to voice their opinions on unjust taxes and high-handed royalty. This house is the only in Charleston to have survived both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, and there is a sense there of time suspended, of events from the past being somehow closer.

      e9781439614129_i0003.jpg

      William Henry Drayton was locked into an upstairs side room in Drayton Hall when his temper flared at family political meetings. The reason for his untimely death at age 37 in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War remains unknown.

      Some historians have claimed that William Drayton died prematurely because of a weakened immune system caused by overwork. The man was known to engage fervently in meeting after meeting to ensure the success of the family plantation and his political career. He traveled extensively to meet with other American revolutionaries. However, the age of 37 is the physical peak of most men’s lives, making it difficult to believe that Drayton’s energetic spirit and body would give way to sudden illness in his prime.

      In 2000, Elizabeth Baron was brought to Drayton Hall to determine if the hauntings many at Drayton Hall had experienced were real. The Charleston medium has worked with people from all walks of life around the world for nearly 30 years. She has given hundreds of readings throughout her career and delivered psychic messages to thousands through channeling the spirit of a 13th century nun, Saint Catherine of Siena.

      During an episode of Home and Garden Television’s America’s Most Haunted Houses series, Baron described the pain still lingering from the life of William Henry Drayton. She told a haunting story of sensing Drayton’s spirit and said she felt the strongest presence at a small back stairway leading to an upstairs room:

      I’ve tuned into a lot of ghosts, but I have never seen a place as haunted as this . . . there are a great many spirits that need to be freed . . . I believe he was a tormented soul. He was too much into the physical, so he started drinking and womanizing . . . there is a lot of suffering. Something lives up there. This William was put up here and wasn’t allowed to go to those big meetings anymore, until he was finally hauled off.

      Baron’s report from the other side makes Drayton’s death even more mysterious. Could it be that his hatred of British authority carried over into his personal life with his prominent father at the plantation house meetings? Was William Drayton’s patriotic stance as clear in these meetings as history has written it to be?

      Only William Drayton and perhaps his family and closest colleagues knew the true reason for his untimely death. His friends sent word that he had passed away suddenly of illness, but the real cause may have been a much darker secret. Whatever the reason for his death may have been, his spirit lingers in the darkness of the room at the top of the stairs in the old plantation house. According to Baron, William Drayton’s voice calls out from the walls: I am here because I want to be.

      EDISTO’S BRICK HOUSE BRIDE

      The ancient mansion sits like a burned tinderbox in the fields of the old Paul Hamilton Plantation on Edisto Island, South Carolina. The remains of the Brick House, which dates back to 1725, stand as a humble symbol of the Lowcountry’s plantation decadence, ruined by the passage of

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