Buried Alive
Someone Should Have Sat Up All Night With Her
There’s a road down Edisto Island way. It’ll take you past green swamps and oaks dripping with Spanish moss. Here and there shanties with bright, sky-blue doors used to appear. Hard to tell at night. Used to be some shacks were painted haint blue entire. Churches white as egg whites line the road. Hauntings live here.
Voodoo and ghost stories make a sobering mix as you drive across ancient sea bottom. As you spirit into the past among the ghosts of cruising sharks and skittering blue crabs you’ll pass the Edisto Island Presbyterian Church. Lovely as can be with a congregation said to be among the oldest of its denomination in the country. 1685. People have been laid to rest in the churchyard since 1797. Among their number is Julia Legare, who died on the island in 1852 at the age of 22. They buried her alive ... so the story goes.
When I come across tales such as these, I cannot get past what Cormac McCarthy wrote in Suttree. “How surely are the dead beyond death. Death is what the living carry with them. A state of dread, like some uncanny foretaste of a bitter memory.”
It’s the God’s truth. I carry it and maybe you tote it too. “Tote”, what a fine word down here. “Boy, tote this sack of seeds over yonder by that tractor.” Tote that fear of death but maybe a worse fate exists. Being buried alive.
My history repeats itself. In 1992, around 3:30 p.m. in the last strong light of a winter afternoon before the sun dips beneath the treeline, when the Spanish moss seems more alive than the oak hosts themselves, and a mysterious air surrounds an elder among American churches, I was working on a book, South Carolina, A Timeless Journey. I stopped at the Edisto Island Presbyterian Church. That aura of mystery intensified the moment I stepped into the cemetery. The call of a barred owl, anticipating nightfall, floated over from mossy woods. It gave me a chill. I knew nothing of Julia Legare back then.
February 9, 2026, on the way to a book event I stopped at the church again. Stepping from my car I saw it. The Legare mausoleum.
The following information comes from the Edisto Beach website: “Back in the mid-1800s, Julia Legare was visiting family on the island when she became ill and slipped into a coma. Her family anxiously awaited the day she would wake up, but that day never came. The family physician declared the young girl dead. Fifteen years later, another death in the family required the mausoleum to be opened. It was then the family realized what a tragic error they had made. Julia’s remains, which had so long ago been entombed, were crumpled at the foot of the mausoleum’s door. She had been buried alive.” Someone should have set up with her all night, though it might have been a spell before she came to.
