12. The Light at Land’s End.

The Lowcountry and Sea Islands of South Carolina are pretty well drenched in spooky folklore. My mom grew up in Beaufort and went several times to nearby Saint Helena Island to see the Light at Land’s End. The Light is a rather erratic ghost light that prowls (for lack of a better word) a marshy stretch of Land’s End Road on the southern part of the island. I say erratic because the thing manifests itself differently; sometimes it approaches people, other times it appears fixed in the distance.

When we were younger, Mom would tell my siblings and me about the times she saw the Light—how eerie it was, and the impression it made on her—so of course when we went started to spend summer vacations at Hilton Head (another nearby island in Port Royal Sound) I began pestering my parents to make a night drive out to Land’s End. The first several years we didn’t make it out for whatever reason (probably because the Light doesn’t appear every night and my dad didn’t relish the idea of ferrying a bunch of disappointed kids back to the resort if it didn’t show).

Finally, when I was about 20, I decided to go without the parents. So my younger brother and I take the family minivan, figure we’ll make a night of it. We stop by a Whataburger to grab some food for the wait and within an hour or so we’re posted up on Land’s End Road. There’s another car containing a few similarly adventurous souls already waiting when we arrived just after dusk, and we briefly exchange pleasantries. We turned the car off (you’re supposed to do that for the Light to show) and began to wait.

Now, for purposes of dramatic pacing, I wish I could say that my brother and I waited for several hours and were just about to give up hope when the Light appeared, but the damn thing showed up about half an hour later while I’m still stuffing my face with fries. My brother noticed it when it was about 50 yards away and elbows me excitedly. At that distance it looks like a car headlight. We both stare at it and it draws closer—it probably got to about 30-40 feet away from us. At that distance it was about as bright as a motorcycle lamp, and it’s just floating there. We had the windows cracked for ventilation (remember, car is off and this is humid South Carolina in the summer) and we hear nothing. I lost track of the time, but at some point the Light receded to its previous distance from us.

I can’t really describe how it felt, other than something akin to that numinous sense the Romans had about lares and genii loci. I wasn’t scared, but it was profoundly unsettling because I had no explanation for it. I can only imagine it was even creepier for my mom 40 years earlier when there was barely anything on the Island.

I did, however, just about jump out of my skin when one of the guys from the other car came up and knocked on the window to talk about what we saw. As it turned out, they needed a jump for their car battery—at first they thought the Light had drained it, but then they figured they had just been listening to the radio for too long.