In South Carolina, a flooded farm, a haunted island, and a cemetery almost lost to time. Lake Hartwell harbors its fair share of legend. Cemetery Island is no exception.
The lake was fully filled in 1962, the glistening surface a watery grave for farms, homes, and even an entire town.
“There’s, there’s a lot of history that’s underneath that lake for sure,” said Dustin Norris with the Anderson County Museum.
And Cemetery Island is just the tip of the iceberg. The island used to be part of the Harris Plantation for more than 200 years before the Army Corps of Engineers built the Lake Hartwell Dam.
“They would have to either sell or forfeit their land, for the construction of these lakes,” said Joshua Johnson with the Bart Garrison Agricultural Museum of South Carolina. “And a lot of people elected to sell their land. A lot of them wanted to say, there’s a very famous story of a woman who actually threatened the Corps of Engineers, you know, surveyors and land buyers with a gun.”
While other landowners moved their burial grounds, the Harrises had high ground. The family plot has 59 graves.
“With less than 20 of them actually having stone markers, which indicates to me,” Johnson said, “that there were quite a lot of enslaved people buried there because the Harris’s had a large plantation.”
It was some of the area’s only history preserved above the surface, the cemetery inspiring the name “Ghost Island.”
“I have heard it mentioned, several times, that there were legends about a witch that would roam around on the island,” said Norris.
Johnson added, “People seeing shapes and figures and shadows or hearing voices out there.”
The tide regularly draws in adventure seekers and sends out young history buffs to share the island’s history and mystery.