September 13, 2018.
It’s the middle of the night, and the Avalon Fishing Pier in Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina,
is completely deserted.
The wind is blowing hard.
Seaspray fills the air.
Suddenly a CCTV camera catches something in the darkness: a ghostly figure waving its
arms.
It’s the Gray Man.
He’s doing what he’s always done.
Warning people that a great storm is on its way.
September 14, 2018.
Hurricane Florence first hits land at Wrightsville Beach, North Carolina.
The sea swells and the wind rages, reaching speeds of 150 mph (240 km/h).
The damage from this hurricane will cost $24.23 billion.
53 people will die, and many others will be injured.
Some of you devoted skeptics out there are now thinking, “What a load of baloney.”
You have every right to have an opinion and we can’t blame you for embracing scientific
rationality.
Still, we humans have a built-in feature to believe in the magical.
We’ve been doing it almost since day one.
Some say there’s a reason for that.
Maybe magical things do happen, or at least have happened and the stories have been passed
down to billions of believers.
That’s the basis of the Gray Man existence theory.
He was seen back in the day and his legend has been carried down for many years.
But more than that, every now and again he comes out of the woodwork and gives the people
a head start on approaching hurricanes.
We’ll now talk about the past, and then we’ll move on to the recent sightings.
When we reach the end, you can make your mind up as to if the Gray Man is real or not.
Ok, so even though you’d expect ghosts to have the ability to travel over vast spaces,
the Gray Man seems to stick to one patch, a few parts of North and South Carolina.
But his hood of choice is Pawleys Island in South Carolina, a tiny place home to just
over 100 residents.
That’s where he appears mostly, but it seems occasionally he spreads his vaporous wings.
The folks on Pawleys Island certainly need an apparition that can forecast terrible weather.
During hurricane season the place is as blustery as an average day in Congress.
It’s classed as a “very high-risk hurricane zone.”
Historically, entire houses have just been swept into the sea when great storms came.
That happened in 1954 during Hurricane Hazel.
One woman who claimed she saw the Gray Man back then and heeded his warning said her
house was spared, when others weren’t so lucky.
But let’s go back to the beginning.
As the legend goes, on September 27, 1822, there was a huge storm in the area.
A man who’d been at sea for two years was desperate to see his lover.
He got off the ship and started riding his horse, only to hit a mire in the marshland.
He was so desperate to get to her that he took a shortcut, a dangerous one.
He slowly sank, his eyes filling with tears for the lover waiting for him at home.
She was understandably upset at hearing the news.
She wept uncontrollably as she walked alone on the empty beach.
And then she saw him, or at least, she saw the ghost of him.
For a moment she believed it was really him.
She ran towards the gray figure and like sea mist, it just drifted away.
But as he disappeared she heard his words, carried on a gust of wind.
In a fading tone, she heard, “Leave the island at once.
You are in danger.
Leave the island!”
She told her pop what had happened, but he just thought grief was tormenting her fragile
mind.
The following day a hurricane ripped through the island, taking with it all the houses.
One house was spared.
Her house.
From that day on, the Gray Man stayed on the island, coming out now and again to warn the
residents that doom was around the corner.
That’s one take on the tale, anyway.
Another iteration is way bleaker, but it doesn’t really gel with the Gray Man supposedly being
some kind of Good Samaritan ghost.
This story says he’d been on a ship, longing for his lover, who was also his fiancé.
But while he pined for her out at sea, she was back on land enjoying amorous recreation
with his best friend.
All we’ll say is when he found out he was so grief-stricken he soon died.
So did the two lovers.
Maybe that happened, maybe not.
He might even have been a pirate that got on the wrong end of a hurricane while out
at sea.
He could have been the first owner of the island, Percival Pawley.
Or he might have been mixed up in other matters.
We don’t know.
We’re not even that interested.
It’s what happened after that floats our boat, excuse the pun.
The sightings have been numerous throughout the decades, but the story got some legs when
the owner of the island’s most famous house saw the Gray Man.
She was Mrs. Eileen Weaver, and the house was the Pelican Inn.
It’s still there now, functioning as a Bed & Breakfast…maybe a haunted Bed & Breakfast,
with a five-star TripAdvisor rating, no less.
Anyway, Mrs. Weaver claimed to have seen the Gray Man, but then she also claimed to have
seen a Gray Woman who appeared in the kitchen while she was kneading bread.
Her daughter-in-law, Gayle, also said she once felt something tug on her clothes from
the back while she was reading a comic.
She turned around and there was nothing, but she heard footsteps.
A guy named Bill Collins swears that he saw the Gray Man in 1954.
He was on his honeymoon with his new wife when at around 5 am, he heard a knock at the
door.
Feeling a bit peeved at the early morning call, he got up and opened the door.
In front of him stood a man dressed in what looked like rags.
On his head was one of those old oilskin fisherman’s hats.
The guy told him to get off the island immediately, to pack his bags, and leave with his wife.
He said a great storm was coming.
For a second, Collins instinctively turned around to look at his sleeping wife.
When he turned back, the Gray Man had gone.
The next day, Hurricane Hazel made landfall, and parts of North and South Carolina were
almost annihilated by it.
We are talking destruction on a major scale, not just there, but over vast areas of the
US, the Caribbean, and Canada.
Up to a thousand people died.
President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced a “major disaster” had happened in the Carolinas.
News reports said 80% of all oceanfront houses from Little River to Pawleys Island had been
reduced to piles of bricks and wood.
Had the Gray Man foreseen this?
If he had, he could have been a bit more instructive to more people, but hey, two lives saved is
better than none.
It seems he has a thing for saving lovers.
Three decades later a couple went on TV and told the American public that they too had
seen the Gray Man.
This was groundbreaking since people got to hear about the ghost from the horse’s mouth,
not just in books or around the campfire.
The couple was Jim and Clara Moore.
On September 19, 1989, they were walking down the beach on the island when a ghostly figure
appeared in front of them.
It disappeared just as soon as it appeared, but they didn’t need to ask questions.
They knew what they’d seen.
The Gray Man.
A storm was coming.
They packed and left without blinking an eye.
Not long after, Hurricane Hugo caused untold damage all over the US and further afield.
The Carolinas, as always, took the hurricane’s knockout punch right on the chin.
Over 50 people died.
129,687 families in the area suffered overall.
After the hurricane had left, Pawleys Island looked as though Godzilla and King Kong had
chosen it for the location of their latest scrap.
100 homes there were totally destroyed.
Resident Dave Garlock described the destruction, saying even the island’s sand bar had been
cut in half by the sheer force of the winds.
A news report back then said, “Winds gusting up to 140 mph raced through the Bird’s Nest,
wiping out a row of 11 oceanfront homes.
Some smashed into the second and third rows of homes.
Others were carried into the creek.”
You get the picture, hardly anything was spared.
So, when Jim and Clara appeared on the TV show “Unsolved Mysteries” and said the
Gray Man had saved them, you could say some folks were surprised.
Others were understandably a bit annoyed that people were claiming ghosts saved them.
Looking at the ruins of their house, the last thing they wanted to hear was a ghost story.
Nevertheless, this is what Jim told the interviewer, “You see so many people walking on the beach
at that time of day.
That particular afternoon we only saw the one, and he was coming directly toward us.
When I got within speaking distance, I raised my hand to say ‘hi’ or ‘beautiful evening’
and he disappeared.”
Jim also said that while most houses on the island had been felled, his was ok.
Both Jim and Clara said the good lord and the Gray Man had served them well, which didn’t
go down too well with some homeless residents.
We’re not sure Georgetown County Civil Defense Director Eddie Carraway was impressed either.
He’d been saying for years another massive hurricane was coming and people should live
accordingly.
We found Clara’s obituary.
She died after Jim, in 2008, aged 91.
There was no mention of how she’d been saved by the Gray Man, but it said she was a Sunday
school teacher and a member of the Pawleys Island Presbyterian Church.
Moving on.
We can’t seem to find the date of this next story, and we can’t be sure who the fisherman
is, but the tale has been repeated a lot.
According to a fisherman, he saw the Gray Man at a place called Murrells Inlet, a coastal
town around 10 miles from Pawleys Island.
He said he’d been out on his boat all day when he thought he saw something.
In his own words, he said, “I was going to do one more sweep of the Inlet for oysters
when I noticed a man standing alone on the shore, waving to me.”
He said as he got closer, he realized the guy wasn’t waving, but signaling for him
to stop.
The fisherman explained what he saw when his boat drew close to the figure.
“He was dressed in all gray and looked like an old pirate.
I couldn’t believe what I saw.
I literally rubbed my eyes and looked again.
He was gone.”
This tale doesn’t end with a hurricane.
It’s just a regular sighting, which doesn’t often happen.
He’s a prophesier, not a regular spooker.
From what we can tell though, the Gray Man has been seriously lacking when it comes to
making appearances at the right time.
It seems he was a no-show when Hurricane Matthew made a mess of the island in 2016 and washed
away at least 16 houses.
The disaster was compared in the press to what Hurricane Floyd did back in 1999, which
also saw an absence of the ghost.
In 2019, there was Hurricane Dorian, and again, Gray Man was asleep on the job.
He could also be accused of a dereliction of duty on many other occasions when storms
damaged the island.
Though it could just be also that folks don’t feel comfortable talking about having seen
a ghost, so we don’t have any gray man stories to link to the hurricanes.
Admittedly, though, when he has gotten off his unembodied behind it’s been for some
of the worst storms.
That’s why some people still believe he’s real and he’s needed.
This is what a 23-year old college student on the island told the media in 2018, “He’s
a friendly entity.
… Not that it’s a good thing to see him, but when someone does claim to see him, it
gives us locals an idea of what we’re dealing with.”
She said that when she asked her parents what happens when you dismiss what the Gray Man
says, they told her those people’s houses are destroyed.
As you know, he came out for Hurricane Florence in 2018, but this time things didn’t quite
work out so well.
Here’s what someone Tweeted, “Oh lordy, it's getting real now.
I just read that there was a sighting of the Gray Man at Pawleys Island yesterday.
South Carolina better get ready because he doesn't appear for nothing!”
In defense of people that believe in the Gray Man, that tweet was sent five days before
Florence hit land in North Carolina.
Still, it seems that the Gray Man got that one all wrong.
News media said the island actually fared really well during Florence and there was
no significant damage or injuries.
Other places had it much worse, but the Gray Man’s home turf was fine.
Other news reports suggest that the Gray Man might do well from trying to understand modern
crime trends.
Homes were evacuated on the island before the hurricane hit, but after that, a series
of burglaries took place at a number of expensive residencies.
In just one house $100,000 was stolen from a safe, not to mention all the jewelry and
other valuables the thieves got.
Six homes were raided in what can only be called a hurricane heist.
Maybe the Gray Man should hang up his gloves.
Don’t we have meteorologists now, anyway, utilizing data and high-tech forecasting models?
Who would you put your trust in?
Now you need to watch, “Russian Sleep Experiment – EXPLAINED.”
Or, sticking with ghosts, “New Video Evidence That Proves Ghosts Are Real.”