The Gray Man Haunts the Shores of Pawleys Island

Dylan Thuras: If you’re ever in South Carolina and you run into a ghost called the Gray Man, just know there’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news, well, he only shows up when a hurricane is about to hit. But the good news is if you see him, your house will be protected, even as everything around it crashes down. Or so the story goes. I’m Dylan Thuras, and this is Atlas Obscura, a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. And today, we’re doing a ghost story. We’re going to Pawleys Island, South Carolina, where the state’s most famous ghost has resided for more than a century. Who was the Gray Man? How did he become a ghost? And why do we keep telling his story?

This is an edited transcript of the Atlas Obscura Podcast: a celebration of the world’s strange, incredible, and wondrous places. Find the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and all major podcast apps.

Dylan: Pawleys is a tiny barrier island at the eastern end of South Carolina on the Atlantic Ocean. It’s part of the state’s popular beachy coastal resort region, but the town itself is tiny, home to just about a hundred people. At its best, it is astonishing. The water looks impossibly blue. But the trade-off is that the area is incredibly vulnerable to hurricanes. It’s been devastated by major ones throughout its history, particularly Hazel in 1954 and Hugo in ’89. But the Gray Man has been around way, way longer.

Tally Johnson: The Gray Man is probably the most famous ghost story in South Carolina. He appears on a sea island called Pawleys Island on the Atlantic Coast.

Dylan: That’s Tally Johnson, a folklorist who writes about South Carolina’s ghost stories.

Tally: He appears as a man in gray. There have been two different variants, I guess. One is: he appears in antebellum-style clothing, and some people call it pirate clothing. And more recently, he has appeared in gray coveralls or gray work clothes. He is typically a harbinger of major hurricanes that are going to make landfall. And if you see him, your property will be safe. But I would rather trust the weather service and evacuate than take my chances. My grandfather saw him before Hurricane Hazel back in 1954. Story is, he was vacationing at Pawleys with my grandmother. He had gone out for a morning walk on the beach, saw a figure in gray walking from the surf towards the dune line. He was far enough away that he couldn’t make out any features or distinguishing characteristics, but close enough to tell that the guy wasn’t wet. He ran up the beach a little ways to where the guy should have gone across the dune. No footsteps, no sign of anything else. And when he got back to the house, my grandmother told him they had to evacuate because the storm was coming in. But sometimes grandparents exaggerate and tell you what you want to hear. I think it’s cool that he said he saw him anyway.

Dylan: Tally himself hasn’t seen the Gray Man, though he hoped he might, back in 2018.

Tally: Before Hurricane Florence came ashore, I was planning on going down to Pawleys. And my wife very indelicately informed me that no, I was not. You could do that kind of foolishness when you were a teenager, but you can’t do it now.

Dylan: Tally is a true believer in ghosts, but he’s also got high standards for which stories he’s going to believe.

Tally: Eyewitness accounts are good because they give me a baseline for when I do start researching secondary sources. And if I go through and I don’t find any other reference to anything in the folklore or oral history of the area, the house, whatever, that’s not going to make the cut.

Dylan: One common theory for who the Gray Man was is the unknown sailor, a man who was rushing home to warn his beloved of a coming storm, but who got caught in it himself. It doesn’t pass Tally’s test.

Tally: That’s the romantic version. But like I say, I can’t find any hard paper that says, “My name is Eugenie Debedue, and my former lover came and told me to evacuate before the big storm.” It’s just not there. Like I said, I believe when I get lucky enough to see a ghost and I’ve seen a few, okay, that’s evidence that I can trust. If I find repeated stories about a site, especially from different places and different folks, I can accept that. But the romantic myth of this long forgotten suitor returning and all this, it’s too trite and I just don’t buy it.

Dylan: Tally thinks the more likely suspect is a man named Plowden C.J. Weston.

Tally: Plowden C.J. Weston. Plowden Weston owned a sizable chunk of land on Pawleys Island and the surrounding area, including The Pelican Inn, which is one of the hotbeds of the sightings. The beach near that house seemed to attract him. He was beloved by everybody. He served as captain in a Home Guard unit during the Civil War, got sick with tuberculosis, and they actually made him come home and that way he would be able to die at home. He apparently loved the Pawleys Island community and he died in 1864.

Dylan: Of course, it’s impossible to know for certain who the Gray Man was because he’s a ghost. But this telling fits with the folklore that Tally’s collected. Weston has a legitimate tie to the local history and he died in the area in 1864, which explains the antebellum clothing. But for Tally, the key is that there are a number of repeated stories coming from different people, like his grandpa. And the timeline works with all the most interesting stuff coming after 1893 and the Sea Islands Hurricane.

Tally: The written records seem to start up around the turn of the century, where he’s mentioned in a couple of letters after the 1893 storm. He’s mentioned in the WPA guide for South Carolina from 1939. So those are the accounts that I can lay hands on and they’re all post-’93.

Dylan: It’s important to note here that the real Plowden C.J. Weston was more than just a local landowner. He was a local plantation owner, a slaveholder. According to Weston’s original plantation journal, he held 199 enslaved people on his plantation. Ghost stories tell us about local history and about what people want to remember and what they want to forget. In this context, the Gray Man starts to feel sort of like a phantom Confederate monument wandering the shores of South Carolina in his antebellum gray. But then I come back to this thing that Tally said earlier about how the ghost has appeared more recently. Listen to this again.

Tally: There have been two different variants, I guess. One is he appears in antebellum style clothing. And more recently, he has appeared in gray coveralls or gray work clothes.

Dylan: Gone is the antebellum outfit of a plantation owner in favor of this more neutral set of working man’s clothing. As Confederate monuments are being taken down across the South, I wonder, is it possible that the Gray Man is being seen through the eyes of a new generation? I may just be projecting my hopes on a ghost. Which is funny, because I don’t believe in ghosts. But I am interested in ghost stories. Because just like a local museum or a unique historical site, these stories can be a way in to get a deeper understanding of a place. Even if I’m a serious skeptic and Tally Johnson is a true believer, the importance of these stories is something we agree on.

Tally: All I can say is, ghost stories are the parts of history that we don’t want to forget. Especially local stuff, because a lot of the ghost stories you have, people who aren’t world famous or even nationally famous, but like Plowden Weston, the favorite son who needs to be remembered by the people of Pawleys Island.

Dylan: To be clear, we are not recommending that you stay put during a hurricane on account of the Gray Man. That would be a mistake. But if you do go down to Pawleys, be sure to ask around. You might just get a first hand account of the Gray Man himself.

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This story was reported by the brilliant Matt Taub. Thanks to Tally Johnson for taking the time to talk to us. This podcast is a co-production of Atlas Obscura and Witness Docs. Our production team includes Doug Baldinger, Chris Naka, Kameel Stanley, Sarah Wyman, and John DeLore. Our theme music is by Sam Tyndall. This episode was mixed by Luz Fleming.

This story originally ran in 2021; it has been updated for 2025.