Beaufort has lots of spooky stories and one of the most popular is the legend of the Lands End Light.
The Land’s End Light is a yellowish orb that appears on a roughly 3 mile stretch of Land’s End Road on St. Helena Island just a few miles past the Chapel of Ease.
Some say that particular stretch of road is the most haunted road in South Carolina and it’s also been called the state’s very own Sleepy Hollow.
According to reports, the orb usually appears at a distance at a height of about 10 to 12 feet above the road before zooming up to onlookers and then abruptly disappearing in a blink. It’s also been reported that the light also hovers next to cars or chases vehicles down the road.
When it first appears, the light looks like a single beam of an automobile headlight, as if the car had one light out. But as it comes closer, it gets bigger but dimmer than a headlight. The light has an oval shape and a hue between yellow and pale orange.
It’s a very popular local legend, too. About thirty years ago, sheriff’s deputies could count as many as one hundred cars parked along the road on a single night.
Nobody knows what the light really is, but there are a few ideas.
During the Civil War, Confederate soldiers were stationed here due to the location’s strategic position on the Beaufort River. In 1861, soldiers got into a fight with some of island residents and one of the soldiers, Pvt. Frank Quigley, was decapitated in the fight. Legend says that he now wanders Land’s End Road with an old iron lantern in his hand, looking for his missing head. The lantern is the orb.
Another legend is that the light is the ghost of a slave who was hanged on the island or the ghost of a heartbroken man who was sold away from his wife and he is left endlessly searching for her along the road.
Others say that it is from the ghost of some run away slaves that were caught and hung from one of the large oak trees that line the road.
On the other side, naysayers claim that the light is nothing more than marsh gas, swampfire. But there’s no swamp there, at all. And, no marsh either.
Hmmm…
The Lands End Light is certainly a mysterious paranormal phenomena. Whatever story you choose to adopt as the likely source, it sure is spooky.
Go and check it out for yourself. You may end up making your own ghostly story.
