From: alkelly@cris.com (Arnold and Lynne Kelly)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.ghost-stories
Subject: Charleston Ghost Stories #1
Date: Wed, 19 Jul 95 23:08:00 GMT
I have a record called “Ghost Tour of Charleston”, which has some very interesting tales. One of the stories, The Gray Man, is one that I find very interesting, because I have a personal experience with it. Anyway, here goes:
Legend has it that the cemetery of St Phillips Church on Church Street in Charleston, S.C. is haunted by the ghost of a gray man. The legend also says that anyone unfortunate enough to see thing apparition will die shortly afterward. When I lived in Charleston during my high-school days, some of my friends told me about the “Gray Man”. I was skeptical, and thought they were just making it all up.
One Friday evening, a group of us decided to put the legend to the test. We went to St Phillips that night after our football game, about 11:30 pm. When we got there, we kept up a steady banter of joking as we opened the gate to the graveyard. As we approached the part of the cemetery where the phantom was said to be seen most frequently, the moon went behind a cloud. This caused some nervousness among our group, but we kept on.
We passed through the rows of tombstones until we arrived at the tallest monument in the graveyard, where the gray man was most often reported to be seen. We stood there for awhile, joking about how nothing bad had happened to us, when suddenly the moon came out from behind the cloud. Just then, one of the guys looked up, turned pale and pointed over to the tombstone…There stood the Gray Man!!!! Needless to say, we all left rather abruptly. I spent several sleepless nights, worrying about the “death follows soon” part of the legend, but, after a few weeks of nothing happening to any of us, I decided that only part of the legend was correct. All of this happened about 15 years ago, and, as far as I know, all of the original group is still alive and kicking. So much for the “death soon follows the sighting of the Gray Man”
Lynne Kelly
alkelly@cris.com