50 States of Wonder
6 Hallowed Grounds in South Carolina

For any tourist or local traveling to Myrtle Beach on Highway 501, Travelers Chapel offers a tiny place of rest and prayer. In the early 1970s, Dr. Gaylord Kelly had an idea for a compact chapel after discovering a similar petite place of worship on the side of the road in Washington state. He decided Conway should have something similar, and in 1972, the chapel was constructed with help from his son Bruce and volunteers, and funds from local businesses, churches, and land donated from a local real estate company. This quaint structure measures 12 feet by 24 feet and can only seat 12 people on its six small pews. (Read more.)

Set among tall, leaning oaks and smatterings of old graves from the brief periods the church was in service, what remains of the Old Sheldon Church has survived the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. Now the crumbling structure is often used for wedding photos and other moody photography. (Read more.)

If legends are to be believed, this natural spring dates back to at least the Revolutionary War, when a handful of severely wounded British soldiers were said to wander into the woods to die, and supposedly drank from the healing waters. Despite their grave wounds, the soldiers were said to stroll back into their camp six months later, looking like the picture of health. No matter how unlikely the story may be, each subsequent owner of the land has capitalized on the spring's purported properties and perpetuated the myth. (Read more.) 

Porch ceilings throughout the marshy, coastal Lowcountry—stretching from northern Georgia to Charleston—are drenched in “haint blue,” a centuries-old Gullah Geechee spiritual tradition meant to stop evil spirits from entering a home and wreaking havoc. 

“Haints” and “boo-hags”—witches or wraiths who looked like regular people during the day but slipped out of their skin at night—were especially dangerous. Various methods were used to ward off haints, including capturing them in shiny bottles. Painting the ceiling of a porch in robin’s-egg blue was said to trick a haint into believing that the porch was water, which it could not cross, or endless sky, which would lead it further from the intended victim. Through the 19th century, the tradition of painting porch ceilings haint blue grew to include not just Gullah homes but also those of plantation owners and other white landowners in the Lowcountry—especially Beaufort, South Carolina, one of the few places in the region where large numbers of antebellum mansions survived the Civil War. (Read more.) 

Some of the 18th-century worshippers who attended St. Helena Parish in Beaufort could not make the long trip to town each week, so sometime around 1740, a “chapel of ease” was built as a more convenient place to worship. Set among oak trees laden with Spanish moss, only the church walls and small cemetery remain. Local lore has it that the ruins are haunted. (Read more.)

In 1989, construction workers were instructed to demolish an old railroad trestle in the Olympia neighborhood with a wrecking ball. When the structure refused to crumble, they left it standing. Now, the old stone looks as though it could be an ancient artifact. A South Carolina artist and muralist named Richard Lane thought the weathered sandstone pillar looked like an Egyptian obelisk. In 1993, he decided to paint a mural on the structure depicting Ra, the Egyptian sun god, along with various symbols and hieroglyphs.

Underneath Ra’s throne is a scarab, which, in the mythology, rolled the sun across the sky. If you stand at the base of the obelisk on a sunny day, the light from the sun will create a glow above Ra’s head. (Read more.)