Captain Dickie’s Narrow Escape

One summer evening in the late 1930s, young Dickie Crayton received a phone call at his home in Georgetown from a young lady friend who needed a favor. Could Dickie drive her over to Pawleys Island? She had made plans to meet some other young ladies at the Pawleys Island Pavilion. Her friends were staying on the island, but she was in Georgetown and did not have a ride. Dickie agreed to drive her.

The pavilion at that time was built on stilts so that it stretched out over the salt marsh on the west side of the barrier island. A good time could nearly always be found there. Young people from Georgetown as well as those staying on the island thronged to the pavilion. Known for its dancing, live bands, and happy camaraderie, it was a popular meeting place.

Driving north out of Georgetown, Dickie and the young lady talked happily about mutual friends and acquaintances. They were glad to be able to drive to Pawleys without having to board the old automobile ferry. Crossing over the new two-lane bridge just outside Georgetown was much more convenient than waiting for the ferry. The bridge crossed the channel just below the point where it divided into the separate Black and Pee Dee rivers. Next, it crossed the narrow island separating the channel from the Waccamaw River, then headed across the wide Waccamaw. At last, the dark bridge ended. They drove onto the southern end of the Waccamaw Neck, the twenty-mile-long isthmus of fertile forest bordered by the Waccamaw River and its rice fields on the west and the Atlantic Ocean on the east. Nine miles north up the Waccamaw Neck on the Atlantic Ocean lay their destination, the four-and-a-half-mile-long Pawleys Island. Eleven miles north of the center of Pawleys, the Waccamaw Neck ended at the fishing village of Murrells Inlet on the northern edge of Georgetown County.

Now, at the end of the bridge and the beginning of the Waccamaw Neck, Dickie and his friend headed into the total darkness of the Low Country night, the blackness broken only by the twin beams of their headlamps. To the left, or west, lay Arcadia, the vast Vanderbilt-owned estate comprised of the antebellum rice plantations Prospect Hill, Forlorn Hope, Bannockburn, Oak Hill, Clifton, Rose Hill, George Hill, and Fairfield. Hobcaw Barony, the sprawling property of Bernard Baruch, lay east, to their right. Like Arcadia, Hobcaw Barony was made up of many former rice plantations. No lights shone from either Arcadia or Hobcaw Barony. Their grand plantation houses were far from the Kings Highway, deep among the moss-laden live oaks and towering pines. No lights shone on the narrow, two-lane Kings Highway either. But for the headlamps of their automobile, the darkness of the Waccamaw Neck was complete. It was not unusual to drive from Georgetown to Pawleys Island or even the entire length of the Waccamaw Neck without meeting even one other vehicle.

All of a sudden, the light of a single headlamp appeared in the darkness coming around a distant bend. They would soon, it appeared, meet a motorcycle. The single light grew closer and closer, and they could hear the faint guttural sound of the only vehicle they were likely to pass on their lonely trek. The headlamp kept coming, the engine growing louder and louder, until the approaching vehicle was only seconds away.

Suddenly, a glowing white figure clothed in flowing folds of pale gossamer appeared in the air right in front of their automobile.

“It looked like a lady wearing a dress with a long train,” Captain Dickie recalled. “She was up in the air, so the train didn’t flow behind her. It hung straight down—right in front of the windshield on my side of the car.”

Dickie swung the steering wheel to the right, barely missing the figure. At that instant, the vehicle with the single headlamp whizzed by on his left.

It was no motorcycle.

Inches from Dickie’s face—exactly where his automobile would have been had he not swerved—an unlighted headlamp whooshed by. The vehicle they had thought was a motorcycle was in fact a motorcar with one lamp burned out.

Dickie and his friend were speechless in their shocked relief. What a narrow escape! Had the figure not appeared in the air in front of their vehicle, Dickie would never have swerved. They would have crashed head-on into the vehicle with the burned-out light.

Neither Dickie nor the young lady ever forgot their narrow escape.

Years later, married and living far from Georgetown, the once-young lady told her children, and later her grandchildren, of her and Dickie’s adventure. Then, on a visit to Georgetown, she introduced her grandchildren to Captain Dickie.

“Remember that story I’ve been telling you all these years about the lady who appeared in the sky and saved my friend and me from wrecking? This man,” she told them proudly, “is my friend Dickie. He was driving that night we saw the lady up in the air with her gown flowing down in front of the car—the lady who made us swerve around her to save ourselves.”