Historic SC home tied to a ghostly legend is for sale. Take a look

Most folks who have spent time around Pawleys Island and Murrells Inlet have heard the story of Alice Flagg.

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She’s one of the Lowcountry’s most enduring ghost stories, yet how much of it is true is, shall we say, a bit embellished.

This much is true. The house where she spent at least the last year or so of her life is for sale. Known as The Hermitage, it’s one of the oldest homes in Murrells Inlet. The listing price is $1.85 million.

Located at 563 Chandler Avenue, the 3,856 square-foot home has three bedrooms and four baths and is listed on the Register of National Historic Places.

And listing agent Cal Harrelson of Peace Sotheby’s International Realty says one of those bedrooms belonged to Alice.

“In my 33 years of selling coastal South Carolina, I’ve never had a listing that literally stops prospects in their tracks,” he said. “The beautiful stately home and bedroom of Alice Flagg, do just that.”

He said the house has a mystique about it.

“Alice Flagg’s sad story has been repeated over and over,” he said. “Her room, although empty now, is just as it was so long ago. When prospects enter the home, with its wide foyer, they are struck by the beauty of the spiral staircase leading upstairs, to Alice’s room. They just stand there for a minute, almost as if catching their breath.”

The original Hermitage was moved brick by brick a mile or so to its current location in 1990.

The 3.11-acre property has a spring-fed freshwater pond stocked with bass and bream. The front porch, walkway and chimney brick is known to be from ships ballast coming from England, the listing says.

The South Carolina Picture Project describes Alice’s story as historical legend. It is true she came under the care of her brother when their parents died. He had inherited The Hermitage, then on a salt water creek.

Read more Historic SC home tied to a ghostly legend is for sale. Take a look

“According to the legend, when Alice was a young woman of 15 or 16, she fell in love with a man whom her brother considered beneath the family’s social status,” the Picture Project said. “The story goes on to say that in an effort to keep the two apart, Alice was sent away to boarding school in Charleston.”

It’s not known for sure if that was why she was sent away since it was commonplace for young women of a certain status to go to boarding school.

She contracted what was most likely malaria at school and returned to the Hermitage. Her brother was said to notice a ring tied around her neck while she was in a coma and threw it into the creek.

She died in 1849 and the story goes that her spirit haunts the house as she looks for her ring.

Another story is that she will appear at a grave marked simply Alice at All Saints Church in Pawleys Island if someone circles the marker backwards 13 times and then lies on it.

This one can’t be true because it’s likely the marker commemorates another Alice relative who was swept out to sea in a hurricane. Records from All Saint’s show no one is buried there, the Picture Project said.

Alice Flagg is buried in an unmarked grave at Belin Memorial United Methodist Church.

Nevertheless, the story of the Lady in White persists and a portrait of Alice and a purse that belonged to her will convey with the house.

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