Stepping On My Grave

No, I didn't die.

I was just resting.

Actually, I've been driving some, and I hurt my wrist a little, so I took a while off from typing. I'm not dying anytime soon. But I have been wondering about our fascination with graves, the famous, the infamous, and the unknown.

I wrote about Tom Dula's grave in my book. It is difficult to find, up a muddy and overgrown path, and possibly on private property, but still it has been visited numerous times, to the point that it turned into a souvenir stand for overzealous fans. Why I don't know, he was a bit of a syphilis infested cretin who slept around and may or may not have killed a girl. Still, we want to see it.

Less visited, even though it is just down the road, is Laura Foster's grave. Laura didn't get a trial, let alone two, but she got a rather pretty and peaceful resting place. Less molested than Dula's that's for sure. It could have something to do with being surrounded by cows and an electric fence.

Less known for the person in the grave, and more for the statue on it, Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward Angel stands in a cemetery in Hendersonville. It is a marker for Margaret Johnson. This sculpture has seen its share of repairs. The wing has fallen off and been fixed, and now it resides behind a wrought iron fence.

A more hidden, and less known grave, if you can call it that, is Annie Lee's grave marker. A stone pylon was designed by a Confederate veteran to honor the final resting place of the daughter of the famous general. Annie died young, and was placed in the small cemetery because it would have been impossible for her remains, and her family, to travel back to her mother's ancestral home. Her mother, a descendant of George Washington, had lost the farm when they had to move after threats from the Republican government nearby, since she was the wife of Robert E. Lee. Her home was then given up to become a military cemetery.

A more peaceful spot is where Robert Harrell rests now. More well known as the Fort Fisher Hermit, his grave is decorated with shells, photos, and a pan where people can still give him a few coins to help him out. 

The curious thing about his gravesite is that it sits just outside a cemetery. There is a local Methodist church cemetery there, where an old church used to sit. The church cemetery is still used, but Harrell's grave is not inside the fences. It sits in an older spot, a local historical site, with a few other graves. I'm guessing that he was placed there before the cemetery was well used. I know that the spot was donated for his resting place by a local family.

There are so many grave sites that seem to be famous, either for who rests there, or what they represent. I haven't been to the grave of the little girl buried in a keg of rum, or the grave of a man's legs, the one that looks like tree branches, There's the grave of the guy who got trampled by an elephant, and they put an elephant on his grave marker. Kinda cruel, I think, but then, maybe th elephant got his revenge. Otway Burns has a grave with one of his cannons on it in Beaufort, NC. And there are the two grave sites in Hatteras and Ocracoke where British sailors rest after their ships were torpedoed during World War II.

I did once try to go find Chang and Eng Bunker's grave near Mt. Airy once, but I was with my sister-in-law, and didn't want to seem extra creepy searching out a grave site when she just wanted to go to Mayberry. 

Plus I really have mixed emotions about visiting and discussing people's graves. I like the weird stories, the strange events that either led up to their final spots, or just the rather unique markers they use. But at the same time, I don't like the idea of sending people to see them, trampling underfoot the peaceful graves of someone's family member just to get to another person's grave. 

At the same time, one day, long in the future, when I finally shed this mortal coil, I wouldn't mind a cool marker for people to visit. Maybe a giant question mark. And a picnic table.

Fort Fisher Hermit

I'm going to start out by saying, if you want to know more about the Fort Fisher Hermit, please read the chapter in my first book, Did You See That? A GPS Guide to North Carolina's Out of the Ordinary Attractions. It contains a fairly complete, yet concise, tale of Robert Harrill's life and times, as well as information on his tragic death. Harrill's story is pretty amazing, and it was the reason my once short little book of weird places in NC became the much longer behemoth that it is now. After learning about Harrill and his life, I just couldn't write about him in a few paragraphs.

For those of you that don't know about Harrill, I'll give you a quick synopsis. He lived near Charlotte as a child and young adult, but after several bad turns for him, most which were not really his fault, he decided to run away to the coast, south of Kure Beach to the uninhabited shores past Fort Fisher. He was 63 years old at the time. He lived for 17 years in an old concrete bunker, and became known as the Fort Fisher Hermit, a celebrity on the coast for tourists and locals alike.

Sadly, not all people liked Harrill. Often, people would go down and harass the old man. It was something people would do "for fun." Ultimately, the "fun" probably cost Harrill his life. Some boys went down to see him in June of 1972, only to find him dead, tossed on top of a pile of junk in his bunker, with the signs of a struggle all around the sand outside. Police and the medical examiner ruled his death natural causes, essentially saying he died when his heart failed from being an old man living alone in a bunker on the beach.

Now, obviously, there is more to this story. As I recommended at the beginning, please read my chapter on Harrill in my book for more information. I've just got to say that this has always preyed on my mind some ever since I wrote the chapter. Who killed the Fort Fisher Hermit?

It should have been easy to figure out. Harrill had told some visiting locals that there were people out bothering him the day before, in a VW Beetle. A popular car, sure, but just how many were there around Carolina Beach at the time? I just got suspicious. I mean, it most likely was someone from the area, maybe as far as Wilmington, sure, which would really enlarge the search, but still, probably younger, probably male, probably more than one person. And as I learned more and more, probably known by other people as the likely suspect. I even remember an interview with a filmmaker, I believe, who was asked if he could discover who did it, and his response was something to the effect of, "I still have to live here."

Harrill's family even wanted to know, They were sure it was murder, or at least not natural causes. As it turned out, several people knew who the alleged attackers were. Michael Edwards, who headed the Fort Fisher Hermit Society, was told by other locals of overhearing the men who did the crime discussing it many years later. Four young men went to hassle the Hermit, pulling him out of his sleeping bag, and chasing him into the marsh, where Harrill then fell and went limp from a heart attack. The men put Harrill back in the bunker and left. Edwards went on to explain that it was more likely a bullying gone horribly wrong rather than an actual murder, and that the people were known in the community, and that they know that others know.

This is all alleged in an article in the Star-News from 2001.

And what bothers me? What just kinda creeps me out? Aside from the death, the bullying, the sad history? I'm surprised after all this time that nothing more has been done. I can understand letting the dead rest in peace, but it it just feels really creepy to know that there probably, possibly, allegedly, are a few men, now in their 60s, still walking around, knowing they caused the death of someone. And there are people who know who they are. And they are satisfied with the way things are like that. The horrors of the conscious...