Lore 237: Lofty Tales

This is the story of the one.

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It wasn't the sort of trouble that you'd expect from an unhappy tenant and his cranky landlord, but the way it all went down, well, it's the perfect sort of story that lore fans love.

William Kent was a loan shark from Norfolk, England, whose wife passed away in 1758.

A year later, he found love again, but this time with his dead wife's sister.

And since church law prevented marriage between a widower and close family like that, they did the next best thing.

They moved to London, got a room together, and kept a low profile.

Except, well, their landlord Richard Parsons wasn't the easiest to get along with.

I won't bore you with the specifics, but the end result was a legal battle between William and Richard that created a lot of bad blood.

When Richard's new lover passed away from smallpox, it must have felt like the world was crashing down around him.

And that's when the hauntings began.

A spirit filled William's lodgings with all sorts of odd noises.

And after large crowds and a seance or two, William's old landlord claimed that the ghost told him a secret, that William had murdered his lover and possibly his wife before as well.

But the ghost, it turns out, was nothing more than the landlord's daughter, Elizabeth.

The father was prosecuted, found guilty, and sentenced to two years in prison, while the rest of the community had to come to terms with the realization that the whole haunting story had been just one big lie.

Oh, and because both my American and British listeners meet a good giggle every once in a while, the haunted house was located on Cock Lane, and the dead mistress's name was Fanny.

Do with that what you will.

In all seriousness though, some things are too good to be true.

A guaranteed investment, a sure bet, and yes, even a good old-fashioned haunting.

We want to believe, but at the end of the day, all we're guaranteed to find is disappointment.

At least, that's usually the case.

Because, as frightening as it is to consider, as with most things in life, there are always exceptions.

I'm Aaron Mankey, and this is lore.

To understand their story, we first need to understand the family.

The Burnetts were farmers living a simple life in rural South Carolina in the early 1800s.

If you want specifics, their homestead was situated in Greenwood County, pretty close to where U.S.

Highway 25 is today.

At the time, folks would have told you their farm was in the town of Edgefield.

To the Burnett family, though, it was just home.

Isaac and Hetty had lived there for a long while, too, and had been, well, busy.

By the time this story kicks off in 1828, they had eight children.

The oldest was 17, and the youngest wasn't even a year old yet.

Like I said, busy.

I also need to mention that the Burnetts were a serious bunch.

As one local paper from the time described them, they were, and I quote, simple-hearted, upright, and amiable persons, serious in their dispositions, and as far from encouraging any trick about them to make sport as anyone.

In other words, the Burnetts were trustworthy people.

In October of 1828, though, something arrived to test their mettle.

It started about 20 yards from the family home, in a thicket at the edge of the property.

What was it?

Well, no one could see it exactly.

but they could certainly hear it.

The sounds rotated through imitations of all sorts of common noises, like a spinning wheel, ducks and hens, that sort of thing.

And when Isaac couldn't find the source, he assumed it was a neighbor's kid having some fun.

But that all changed one afternoon when Isaac and Hetty were sitting outside on their porch and they heard whistling coming up the path toward their house.

Isaac wondered out loud if it was one of their neighbors, a guy named Bob Jones, who had told Isaac that he planned to take his kids possum hunting that evening.

But try as they might, they couldn't see the person doing the whistling.

which was all the more frightening when the invisible voice grew louder moved straight up the path to the house and then said good evening before passing through the open door a moment later everyone could hear the whistling again this time from the loft above their living space

now it's important to understand the geography of the burnett household it was a simple farmhouse that consisted of one massive room where everything happened there was no basement beneath it and the loft that i just mentioned was honestly just a handful of planks that had been laid across the rafters above the room.

So when you imagine the interior of their home, just think of the phrase, nowhere to hide, because that pretty much sums it up.

The mysterious noises weren't a frequent occurrence at this point.

One report says that they happened about once a month.

But in a household with only three adults, counting Mr.

and Mrs.

Burnett and an older enslaved woman, it was bound to be the kids who became the most involved.

Yes, Isaac Burnett was irritated by it, but the children?

Well, they started to communicate with it.

One of the kids, we don't have a record of which one, sadly, claimed that he could interpret the odd sounds and chirps that the invisible entity was making.

He even asked it questions, and this sort of interaction caused the parents to worry quite a bit.

Although, at that point, there was something bigger to be concerned about.

The visitors.

You see, people are curious by nature, so when a community hears that there's a house in town that has some ghostly lodger answering questions from the kids, they all wanted to see it.

In a matter of speaking, of course.

Pretty soon, the Burnett household was packed with neighbors and strangers alike.

They came from both near and far, but there are two visitors that played a more central role.

The first was the local minister, Reverend Nicholas Ware Hodges, who showed up ready to fight, expecting this ghost to be a demon of some sort.

After holding a handful of meetings there at the house in an attempt to communicate with the spirit, one thing became clear.

The ghost did not care for Reverend Hodges or his religious talk.

And then there was James Shepard, one of the Burnett's neighbors.

He apparently managed to have full conversations with the ghost.

He asked it all sorts of questions about the people in the neighborhood, and the voice replied with correct answers, astounding everyone who had gathered to watch.

At one point, he even asked the ghost why it had picked the Burnett's loft as a place to live.

Its reply?

Because there was no other place to go.

Which honestly sounds like a great answer to that age-old riddle.

Why did the chicken cross the road, right?

And then Shepard made a mistake.

Looking for more questions to ask and wanting to please his tight-knit Baptist community, he asked one last question.

Did the ghost love Jesus Christ?

Its response?

Silence.

Apparently, the answer was an unspoken no, something that worried those who had gathered there.

And with that, James Shepard, the man who had become a sort of ghost whisperer whisperer for the Burnetts, lost his access.

And he would never get it back.

There will always be skeptics.

I don't mean that in a negative way.

Skepticism is a healthy part of the search for truth.

We will always need people who question popular assumptions.

In the case of the Burnett Burnett family, though, there were plenty of people who weren't exactly convinced about this ghostly voice.

There was, as you'd expect, that old accusation of ventriloquism.

One of the kids, they suggested, was simply throwing their voice, playing the entire community for a fool.

But right away, some problems with that idea arose.

For one, if it really was the kids, you'd expect that they would play the same tricks at school or over at friends' houses.

But they never did.

There was also this curious thing that would happen whenever someone tried to search for the source of the voice.

If the sounds seemed like they were coming from the fireplace, for example, someone would creep around to that spot on the outside of the house, presumably where the tricky child could not see, and then catch them.

Instead, the voice would simply stop when they approached, each and every time.

Others suspected the enslaved black woman who had an outdoor kitchen a few yards from the house, but the voice had been heard when no one else was home beside the three-year-old and the infant.

And some just assumed one of of the kids was hiding in the shadows of the corner of the main room.

But the voice was also heard in broad daylight when there were no shadows to hide in.

People just assumed it was fake.

One article from the time in the New York Post said, The Edgefield ghost is almost as ingenious and mysterious a spirit as the celebrated Cock Lane ghost, which puzzled so many wise and worthy men in London 50 years ago.

It will turn out that somebody is practicing upon the credulity of the good good people of Edgefield.

Try as they might though, no one was able to offer proof that the voice was just a prank, which led to the most common assumption of all, that the Burnetts were the victims of a supernatural visitor.

And as the voice started to be heard more and more frequently, that didn't feel like a good thing.

Most disturbing of all, though, was the way the invisible entity began to focus on one of their children, their younger daughter Martha.

But while the ghost seemed to care for her, it wasn't mutual.

In fact, Martha would frequently run out of the house to escape it, and even then, that wasn't always enough.

Once, while returning home from school, the voice called out as she got close to the house, declaring that she got a whipping at school today.

Martha was terrified, partly because of the ghostly voice, but mostly because what it said was true, which means it was following her and watching her.

As kids do, Martha told one of her good friends about the problem, and that pious pious friend offered another solution.

Remembering that the ghost didn't care for Reverend Hodges and went silent when James Shepard mentioned Jesus, Martha's friend recommended that she memorize a Bible passage and quote that to the voice whenever it harassed her.

As predicted, the voice appeared to her not long after that, and Martha, having done her homework, managed to remember the scripture she had committed to memory.

Summoning as much courage as she could, the little girl recited the words out loud to the invisible entity, and the response was telling.

Hold your jaw, the voice told her.

But Martha kept going.

And just like the Reverend and their neighbor James Shepard, the ghost got the hint.

It never bothered poor Martha again.

By May of 1829, it had been seven months.

That's seven months of living with eight kids in a one-room house with an invisible being haunting you from the loft space above everything you do.

Seven months of visits from curious neighbors and strangers alike.

Seven months of no peace.

Newspapers everywhere were covering the events.

I quoted the New York Post a few minutes ago, and that should tell you how far and wide the tales were spreading.

Everyone was watching to see what would happen next, an early 19th century version of the O.J.

Simpson trial in a way.

But they had learned a lot about it, whatever it was.

It tended to communicate in whistles and bird-like sounds and could be summoned by calling upon it.

Someone even managed to get the voice to name itself, although I can't seem to discover whether anyone ever wrote it down for us.

And of course, they now understood how much it hated religious talk.

Passages from the Bible, church hymns, and even just questions about religious matters.

All of it had a way of shutting the ghost up for a while.

But on May 26th of 1829, a way out of their mess presented itself, and they took advantage of it.

That was the day Reverend Hodges heard from a local woman that the spirit was active and talking, so he grabbed James Shepard, our former ghost whisperer, and together they headed over to the Burnett Farm.

The two men wouldn't go inside though.

You see, they knew that the voice spent most of its time talking to the kids, and they were certain that it would go silent the moment the Reverend stepped foot inside the house.

So instead, they got creative.

The men asked the kids to stay inside and keep the spirit talking to them.

Hodges and Shepard listened from the other side of the door, which was ever so slightly ajar.

And as they did, they passed questions to one of the young Burnett boys who stood on the other side.

And he, in turn, would ask those questions of the ghost.

According to Hodges, most of the replies from the invisible voice sounded more like bird sounds than actual words.

But despite that, the boy interpreted the noises for him, whispering them back through the cracked door.

And then he had the boy ask about him specifically.

The ghost, in reply, made it clear that it did not care for Reverend Hodges.

And that's when Hodges burst into the house and shouted out that he had come to drive the spirits away.

Considering how much the ghost seemed to be aware of things outside of the home, it was caught off guard.

Still, it pushed back.

Do if you dare, it challenged the minister.

So Hodges asked it to whistle the tune of one of his favorite church hymns.

The ghost declined though, opting instead to whistle Yankee Doodle.

It seems that Reverend Hodges had failed, but the head of the household, Isaac Burnett, would eventually manage to get the job done.

It's reported that he took the family Bible up into the loft and left it there.

Instantly, according to an article in the Evening Post, it left the place, came down into the house, and said it was going away.

They asked it why it was going away.

It replied it was obliged to go, it could stay no longer, and bade them farewell.

So, where did it go?

Well, it seems that it spent the next two weeks touring the rest of the Edgefield community, popping into a number of other houses, where the people inside all heard the voice clearly.

And the most amazing thing about those supernatural house calls:

no member of the Burnett family was present in any of the houses in which the voice appeared.

There are a lot of unexplainable things in our world.

Even now, deep into the era of modern science and groundbreaking technology, we're still left baffled by the occasional mystery.

And I think that's why the story of the Burnetts in Edgefield, South Carolina hits home for so many of us.

We are, even today, part of a long line of of people with questions and we just want answers.

It's easy to resonate with the frustration that the Burnetts must have felt.

From the general disturbances inside their family home to the specific harassment of little Martha, there's nothing about their experience that seems fun or benign.

They were haunted, in the literal sense of the word, month after month after month.

That two-week break at the end of May of 1929 must have been wonderful though.

But like all vacations, that moment of bliss had to come to an end.

In early June, the voice was back.

But rather than head back up into the loft, it called out from all sorts of other corners and locations.

Maybe that family Bible was doing the trick.

Instances of hearing the voice, however, dwindled over the coming weeks.

The last time it was heard in the Burnett house was in October, marking a full calendar year since its arrival.

But just because the voice seemed to be gone doesn't mean that it would soon be forgotten.

In fact, the Burnetts and others would be writing about it for decades to come.

Over the years, people have speculated, what exactly was the Edgefield ghost?

Some believe it was an evil spirit, like a demon.

One apocryphal story has Reverend Hodges using that popular quote, get thee behind me, Satan, and causing the voice to vanish forever.

But that only appears in the 1950s.

To this day, No good explanation has been offered, at least none that have the proof to back them up.

And while while the stories of the ghostly voice have remained, like a spirit that haunts the area's history, the Burnett Farm has sadly gone away.

Fire consumed the place in the 1940s, leaving us nothing but tall grass and trees.

Thanks to that, and the passage of nearly two centuries, it's fair to say that the mystery will probably never go away.

Unless, that is, the ghost returns and answers all our questions for us.

The story of the Edgefield Ghost has become one of those iconic episodes in South Carolina's more unusual history.

An entire family held hostage by an invisible entity for an entire year.

It's hard to find another haunting with as many interesting lessons and unanswered questions.

But South Carolina Carolina has more in store for us.

And if we head toward the coast, there's one more tale of ghostly visitors that needs retold.

Stick around through this brief sponsored break to hear all about it.

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The east coast of the United States has a few popular seaside destinations for those who want to get away.

The Outer Banks, the Hamptons, even Martha's Vineyard in Nantucket come to mind.

But 200 years ago, the first big seaside resort was Pauly's Island, just off the coast of South Carolina.

It was a popular spot for wealthy plantation owners to get away from their life deeper inland and spend time in their fancy ocean view properties.

Pauly's Island is a lot like the Outer Banks farther north, being less of a stereotypical island and more of a slice of coastline that's become separated from the mainland.

It's basically four miles of beaches and houses right at the edge of nature.

And nature, as we know, can sometimes be brutal.

Pauly's Island though has one other feature, a ghost.

And there are a few different stories at the root of it, explanations by people over the years for why the ghost is even there.

And most of them start centuries ago.

One legend tells the story of a young sailor in Charleston who was in love with the daughter of a wealthy plantation owner.

In 1822, after two years of passionate letters and boundless love, he boarded a ship and made way to Polly's Island, where his true love was staying at her family's summer home.

But the weather did not play along with his romantic plans, and even though the household prepared a grand dinner to receive him, his ship went down in a terrible storm.

The young man though somehow managed to survive, only to make it to shore and be swallowed up by a pit of quicksand.

However, the young sailor died, his beloved was left to grieve and mourn and took to long walks on the beach.

Maybe she needed time by herself, or perhaps being close to the cold gray sea was her way of staying close to him.

But one day while out on her walk, she spotted a figure in the gray clothing of a sailor, so she approached him.

The legend tells us that it was the ghost of her dead lover, and he had a warning for her.

Another terrible storm was coming, and if she did not urge her family to leave, they would lose everything.

Taking the ghost at its word, she rushed home, forced her household to pack up, and they escaped the storm.

Every house in the area was destroyed, they say.

Except hers.

One other theory claims that the story actually begins in the 1700s, when a young woman from a wealthy Charleston family rejected all of her suitors in favor of a man known to be a little wild and rebellious.

And because both of their parents refused to allow the young couple to get married, the man is sent by his family to tour Europe for a few months, hoping that it would put an end to their romance.

But word soon came to the young woman that her lover died in a duel in Europe.

And after a period of mourning, she eventually married a rich widower.

Maybe it was their shared grief that brought them together or just the need for companionship.

Soon though, they had a growing family and found a path toward happiness.

In the summer of 1778, though, a ship was wrecked off the coast of Polly's island where she was staying with her children, and only one sailor survived.

The servants of the house brought the man into one of the bedrooms and provided medical help, saving his life.

And in the morning, the mistress of the house came in to see how he was doing.

When she saw the man, she fainted.

It was her long-lost beloved, back from Europe where he did not, in fact, die tragically in a duel.

Frightened by her response, the man jumped out of the bed and left the house.

True to the fairy tale nature of the story, it's said that he died a short time later, possibly from some tragic illness.

Whatever the truth at the center of the legend really is, it manifests today in a common sighting known as the Gray Man.

Just like the first story, he is often seen as a ghostly man dressed in the gray clothing of an old sailor, right down to the jacket and hat.

Whenever people spot him, it's apparently an ill omen that should definitely be heeded, all before vanishing in a puff of mist, his voice blending into the sounds of the harsh wind of the approaching storm.

In 1893, for example, the gray man was spotted right before a tidal wave caused by a hurricane crashed over the island.

In 1954, he was seen again, followed immediately by Hurricane Hazel.

Locals spotted him just before Hurricane Hugo made landfall in 1989 and again before 2018's Hurricane Florence.

Most chilling of all though is how his appearance seems to have helped certain households escape the ravages of these storms.

One woman claimed that a neighbor of hers on the island had encountered the gray man and after returning to the island after Hurricane Hazel in 1954, that neighbor discovered all of the other houses destroyed.

Theirs, however, was still standing.

Most chilling of all is the claim that nothing near their house had moved an inch.

Even the beach tiles they left on their railing, they said, were right where they'd left them.

This episode of Lore was written and produced by me, Aaron Mankey, with research by Cassandra De Alba and music by Chad Lawson.

Lore is much more than just a podcast.

There's a book series available in bookstores and online, and two seasons of the television show on Amazon Prime Video.

Check them both out if you want more lore in your life.

Information about all of that and more is available over at lorepodcast.com.

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And when you do, say hi.

I like it when people say hi.

And as always,

thanks for listening.

Okay, they are two three.

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