That's The Spirit

With Halloween approaching, Lowcountry ghosts are stirring, from downtown Charleston to right here on Johns Island, where two sites have a long tradition of spectral sightings.

The Angel Oak seems especially attractive to spirited presences. As recently as 2008, a young married couple made a moonlight visit to the Oak, under which they'd been married some months earlier, and reported seeing glowing lights amid the ancient tree's branches. The spirits became threatening, turning into flaming, mask-like faces, when the husband tried to carve his initials on the tree with a penknife. It wasn't until the couple hastily retreated that the faces disappeared and the star-like lights that they'd seen earlier returned.

Fenwick Hall, before restoration

Another, more unfortunate, couple are said to haunt the grounds of Fenwick Hall, the Georgian-style plantation home along today's Maybank Highway, built in 1730 by John Fenwick and inherited and enlarged by his son Edward. Famous for his racehorses and his Johns Island Stud, Edward became enraged when his beautiful young daughter Ann eloped with a Fenwick groom, hardly the socially acceptable union Edward wanted for Ann. The couple was found hiding in a log cabin in the marshes surrounding the estate. It's said that Edward ordered the groom mounted backward on a horse with a noose around his neck, and then cruelly forced Ann to strike the horse on the haunches, thus hanging her lover. Both Ann and the groom are said to walk the grounds of the former plantation; more alarmingly, the groom is said to be headless.

Lavinia Fisher, Charleston's first serial killer

Downtown Charleston is, of course, infested with ghosts. The restless spirits of John and Lavinia Fischer, the city's first serial killers, were hanged at downtown's Old Jail, where they are said to appear on certain nights. The couple owned a tavern and inn in what is now North Charleston, where they reportedly offered particularly wealthy guests poison-laced tea before robbing them and disposing of their bodies in the basement.

Actor Junius Booth, still appearing in Charleston

The Dock Street Theater has its own pair of ghosts - a young prostitute who threw herself off the second floor balcony of the building during its time as a hotel in the early 19th-century, sometimes joined by the ghost of famed actor Junius Booth, who frequently trod the boards at the theater during national tours of his Shakespeare recitals. Even though Junius died on a riverboat in Louisville, Kentucky, it's said his fondness for the old theater and admiring Charlestonian audiences draws his spirit back to the Holy City.

The Cut

Captain Sams Inlet, 2016 ( Photo (c) Mary Ellen Fraser)

While replenishment operations are underway to help preserve our island's beaches, the near future may bring the more ambitious relocation of Captain Sams inlet at the northeastern tip of North Beach, usually a reliable spot for dolphin watching and for enjoying our lively populations of shorebirds. But it hasn't always been so welcoming, for this is a constantly shifting coastal geography shaped and re-shaped by wind and water at the confluence of the Atlantic Ocean and the Kiawah River. At many points in its history, there was no beach at all here.

Seabrook Island in 1949, pre-development. The inlet is at the far right, considerably to the north of its present location.

Captain Sams Inlet, dividing Seabrook and Kiawah islands, is a highly visible example of how our beaches and dunes are continually on the move, in some years migrating more than 300 feet. The inlet has shifted position scores of times in the past 150 years, at one point migrating as far to the southwest as present-day Boardwalk #1, with no walkable, dry-sand beach to the northeast as erosion carried sand away to the south.

Seabrook's original Beach Club threatened by beach erosion after Hurricane David. (courtesy SIPOA/Coastal Science & Engineering)

During Seabrook's early days of development as a planned coastal community, seawalls and stone revetments were only partially successful in preserving the beachfront, and most of those structures were destroyed during Hurricane David in 1979 - severely enough that construction on the original Beach Club had to be halted and the only usable beach was reduced to about two-thousand feet south of Boardwalk #1.

Relocation work at the inlet in 2015. (courtesy SIPOA)

The damage was severe enough to spur SIPOA, and the the towns of Seabrook and Kiawah islands, to adopt a major relocation of Captain Sams Inlet in 1983 as a way to slow erosion which had been taking sand away from Seabrook's shoreline. It was the first of three such relocations, with two more following in 1996 and in 2015, involving cutting a new inlet entry to the northeast and blocking the old one to the southwest.

The result since the first relocation has been the preservation of as much as fifty acres of additional beach and marsh on Seabrook, providing crucial habitat for shorebirds like the endangered piping plover and building up protective dunes and water-absorbing marshland against storm surges. The inlet's position and ecology is monitored on an annual basis. The next time you visit Captain Sams Inlet, remember that you're, very literally, walking on shifting sands.

Other Islanders

We share our island with many types of wildlife, but none more prevalent than the white-tailed deer population roaming our marshes and maritime forests. With few predators, the white-tails (Odocoileus virginianus) thrive here, to the point where periodic culls have to be undertaken to avoid overpopulation and over-competition for food.

White-tails are the official state animal of South Carolina (along with ten other states) and are abundant throughout the southeast - and, indeed, in most of the United States east of the Rockies. As winter approaches, their coats turn gray/brown but darken to a deep reddish brown during the spring and summer, when females give birth to up to three fawns during May and June. The youngsters' spotted coats help conceal

Waiting for Mom

them in dense foliage while their mother searches for food and grazes some distance away. A fawn should never be disturbed if you happen upon one. Most likely its mother will return to it after feeding, and will actually avoid her fawn if she detects a human smell on or around it.

Along with their flicking white tails, the impressive antlers of the males are another trademark of the species. Bucks begin growing their antlers at about one year of age, at first as small nubbins, and regrow them every year starting in late spring. Some observers use rack size as an indicator of age, but nutrition is a more important factor in antler growth. Young bucks in a nutritionally supportive environment such as here on the island can grow an array as impressive as any older male. Antlers are used defensively during mating season to keep other males away from a female, and in play-fighting by young males to establish dominance within the herd. Antlers are also used to create scrape marks on tree trunks as a signal of the buck's presence to other bucks and to females ready for breeding.

Making scents

White tails communicate with each other vocally through a variety of grunts and snorts as well as by scent-marking using seven scent glands located on the head, legs, feet and genitalia. The waxy substance secreted from between the hooves is especially pungent, detectable even by human noses, particularly when a deer senses danger and stamps its feet as a warning to others.

Our island supplies plentiful grasses, legumes and acorns that form the white tail's diet. With the four-chambered stomach typical of a ruminant, deer can consume rough, woody plants and even foods toxic to humans, such as poison ivy and certain types of mushrooms, with no ill effects. And, of course, they may stop by to snack on your landscaping. Enjoy their presence as one of the pleasures of island life.