At the age of 62 Robert Harrill hitchhiked his way to the end of the earth. If you start driving east in the foothills of North Carolina and don't stop till you run out of land you might end up there too. Fort Fisher is the tip of a peninsula called Federal Point, just before you get to the islands that make up the Cape Fear. Growing up on the coast, I heard stories about the Fort Fisher Hermit my entire life. I think the very earliest I remember learning the story was the early 1980's, I was four or five. My twin sister and I were sitting on a beach blanket in the back of our family's Carolina blue WWII Jeep.
We were holding on as we bounced along the east beach on Bald Head Island. We often went out to 'the point' where the east facing and south facing beaches come together and form the cape. This was the first trip I can recall when we headed north up the beach past Middle Island and into the 12,000 acre preserve. We went all the way to the New Inlet, which by then was not so much an inlet as a flat where the ocean reached across the sand at high tide and spilled into the marshy bay behind it. It was high tide by the time we had our picnic lunch and so going the rest of the way up the beach to Fort Fisher was not an option. Story telling was. Dad told the tale of an old hermit who had lived just up the beach from where we were. People from all over drove out on the beach from Fort Fisher to sit with him, hoping to gain wisdom from his lifestyle. The ride up the beach seemed endless and there was nothing out there but sand dunes, marsh, wind stunted junipers, and palm trees. I imagined the hermit, as a man on a deserted isle.
That is probably how popular culture has imagined him as well. The truth is, he was a troubled homeless man who opted out of the pressures of modern American society. Harrill was raised in an abusive home, they were poor, with no electricity or indoor plumbing. He spent a lot of his childhood playing in the woods to escape the traumatic home life. In 1913 he got married and the couple had five children. It wasn't a happy home. The eldest son tragically took his own life and Harrill's mental health deteriorated. He was unable to hold a job and support his family. His marriage was failing. His wife knew he would no longer be a caregiver for their family. During the Great Depression the marriage ended and Harrill was institutionalized. In 1955 he took his fateful hitchhike ride.
Life in and out of mental facilities, jail, and, halfway houses was terrible and Harrill decided it was only making his condition worse. Life would be better by the beach. Several hundred miles later he saw the ocean. He walked from Carolina Beach down to the Confederate Fort where he camped for a while in a tent. He was considered a community nuisance, as he was collecting things off the beach and living on land he did not own. He was charged with vagrancy and trespassing but upon release went right back to life by the beach. He met another hermit who lived in the area. Empie Hewett, had lived most of his life in the marshland around Fort Fisher and taught Harrill many necessary life skills. Harrill adapted to his life by the beach with much more success than he had life in the 'real world'. He moved into a concrete bunker that had been built during WWII. He furnished it with driftwood and seashells and anything else that washed up on the nearby beach. He didn't suffer from lack of food. He planted veggies and gathered berries and nuts. He ate an abundance of seafood, crabs, shellfish, flounder, and all sorts of surf fish. He made a hat from palm frons and wore nothing but it and a pair of shorts most of the year. Because Fort Fisher is home to a military recreational facility, people came from all over the country.
They spread the word of the philosophical beach bum far and wide. Eventually, Harrill became one of the most popular tourist destinations on the coast. Beatniks, hippies, and square but curious suburbanites made pilgrimage to his sandy home. Locals partied with him around the bon fire each night. He was rarely alone. People left money in an old cast iron pan outside his home. They also brought him supplies, warm clothes in winter, and booze. Stray dogs had a way of finding him and settling down. Life by the beach was better.
In 1972 a group of college age boys went down to visit the hermit and found his body. The crime scene photographs tell a different story than the police official report. Hindsight is 20/20, but there was an obvious cover up. His death was ruled natural and his family was notified that he died of a heart attack, only learning the truth sometime in the next decade. His body had been found battered and covered in marsh mud and sand, dragged from the marsh up into his bunker, tossed on a pile of trash and then closed in with some boards. The truth shocked the community. Demands for an investigation led to release of the crime scene images and public interest reignited. Books have been written, movies, documentaries, and plays have all been produced. Fort Fisher State park and recreational area has added a well maintained trail out to the bunker, which now has a plaque, commemorating the famous man that lived there for 17 years.
Tourists from all over can still visit his home and his gravesite, where people continue to leave coins in a cast iron pan. He is buried in the historic Federal Point Cemetery, in the Dow Road Woods, just north of Fort Fisher. (Click HERE to read about the cemetery and what's hiding in those woods.) Watch the movie below for a great look at the life and death of the Hermit of Fort Fisher. Warning: Movie contains crime scene photos, including his body.
Huntington Beach State Park is my favorite place to camp and my favorite place to blog about! If you read my first post, you went down the rabbit hole of history with me and met the colorful cast of characters that add layers to the history of this Carolina castle. This post is meant to give you a closer look inside the beautiful castle. I searched YouTube to find the best tour to share with you because I know my pictures don't do it justice.
This is the best video I have found of the Castle. Check it out!
My first encounter with the castle was just before dark. It was not open, so I walked around the exterior taking pictures and imagining the life of the couple who built this as their winter home. I could hear an owl in the woods.
This is the 'front' of the home, facing out towards the ocean. The rooms on the front from left to right are; the Huntington's bedroom, the secretary's room, the library, the sunroom, the breakfast room, the dining room, a food service room, and the staff's living room. Sitting on that patio I could hear the ocean waves.
This side of the home had storage and utility rooms on the outside and staff rooms on the inside. Each staff room has a fireplace and a window looking out to the courtyard. The parts of the structure on the right side of this picture are the laundry and cold storage.
This is in the outer courtyard at the entrance. To the left were garages and an oyster shucking room and to the right animal enclosures for the dogs, horses, and bears. Click here to read my DETAILED blog about Huntington State Park.
My mom standing with one of many giant palm trees in the inner courtyard. The water tower for which the castle is named is in the background. An extreme animal lover, Mrs. Huntington had 'bat holes' installed so the bats could roost inside the tower.
Ivy growing on a wall in the courtyard.
Mrs. Huntington designed the signature turquoise wrought iron.
Inside the brick is exposed and cracked in places from years of settling.
Most of the windows no longer have glass in them.
I saw a bat snuggled up taking a snooze in the secretary's closet.
Make a reservation today to camp in beautiful South Carolina paradise beside the Atlantic Ocean, and check out this Castle for yourself. If you want to know more about the Huntington's check out my blog post.
Warning: Government property, no trespassing, area patrolled by military police!
Location: Dow Roads Woods along the Cape Fear River on 'Pleasure Island'
Original Purpose: In 1934 Dow Chemical began extracting bromine from salt water.
There's tales of spirits and spooks and creepy creatures all through the Cape Fear region, but the woods on the west side of Pleasure Island seem to have something extra that makes them magic.
On Dow Road somewhere between Carolina Beach and Kure Beach 'Alice' and her friend parked in a sandy parking area with a wooden sign for Federal Point Methodist Church Cemetery. No cemetery was visible from the road, all they could see was a mossy, sandy path into the dark woods. There was a large yellow barrier blocking any vehicle traffic, which anyone wanting to mourn at the cemetery would need to go over, under, or around. The temperature seemed cooler as soon as they began walking the path. The air smelled of earth. Something ran off through the woods as they approached. It was big. They decided it was a dear. The first signs of the cemetery became visible, the girls see a cracked concrete table sitting crooked in the sand and a rusted and damaged chain link fence. They slowed and became skeptical. They were looking for a historic site. They saw newer tombstones adorned with shabby fake flowers and tattered miniature flags. It was not well taken care of but it didn't seem historic. Disappointment was adding to the gloom of the day. It began to sprinkle and the girls were just about to go back to there car when they saw it. Just to the back of the modern cemetery was a historic plaque, they ran towards it. Alice tripped over an exposed root but landed in the sand with some amount of laughter. They joked about horror movie cliches.
The girls started googling on their phones. The Newton Home site and Graveyard at Federal Point is the oldest archaeological home site of Europeans on North Carolina's islands. Artifacts dating from the 1700's and 1800's have been found there. The graveyard contains markers with well known local names of early settling families. Many tombstones are missing or destroyed. The graveyard is surrounded by woods. The oral history of the area says there was a grave site for people of color as well, today it remains unmarked.
There is a doghouse sized replica of one of the structures that burned in a fire that destroyed buildings and took lives in the early settlement.
Beside the chain link fence between the modern cemetery an the historic one are two graves decorated in seashells and coins and other strange collected things. They are paupers' graves. Donated to those who had no means for a burial. One was a vagabond who ended up in the area and was well loved by the community and the other was a legend, The Fort Fisher Hermit, a man who'd lived on the island in the middle of the 1900's alone as a hermit. People would pilgrimage to meet with him and hear his philosophical take on the perils of the modern world. (Click HERE for a post on the Hermit) From the back of the old grave yard there is a sandy path going off into the woods. Knowing the river was nearby, the girls decided to follow the path hoping it would lead to the water. It was still sprinkling every now and then but it was warm and not to much of a bother. The moisture increased the smell of earth in the air.
The River
The girls saw the sunlight before they saw the water. It was shining still to the west. They came to a clearing and saw that they were on a bluff above the river bank. It was about four or five feet and sandy so they jumped down the embankment. The sun was shining off the river. There was a little beach there and they walked along it taking in the sun and beautiful scenery. No other humans anywhere to be seen.
It was so beautiful they got a little carried away and walked a long ways down the beach. Taking pictures of the river and the trees along its shore. They walked along for sometime until they came to a place where they could not go any further. There was an old structure, rusted metal and wooded pilings. It was a retaining wall of some kind. Alice climbed atop and announced that there was water, black and deep on the other side. It was not cross able. There was smoke on the horizon across the water. The girls used Google maps to see what was there. Sunny Point Military Terminal. They joked about the men in black. They Googled some more. Dow Chemical. They had heard of the ruins in the woods and the legend of how they came to be. They scurried up the ridge to see if they could see anything else. Nothing but dark woods, the smell of earth, and rustling of some small animal in the underbrush.
More Google.
Into the Woods
They found a picture of the old site. Dow had chosen it because a nearby Carolina Bay made a perfect natural holding reservoir and there was already a trench that had been dug during the Civil War as part of the defenses along the Cape Fear. Using the picture of the old site they decided they'd need to venture into the woods a bit and try to find a way around or over the trench. The woods were dark and dense. The smell again was strong. Earth. Enough smell of earth in the air to almost choke a person. Alice swore she saw a dog. Her friend wondered if it was a coyote. They went into the woods anyway. They were on an adventure and they were determined.
They peered out into the forest, looking for any signs of structures or creatures like the big cats they'd heard prowled these woods. Reassuring each other that it was just legend. Something caught Alice's eye. She tried to use her phone's camera to see what it was without going closer. The picture didn't really help. They decided to cautiously approach. As they got closer they could smell the odor of death. It was a bird. A large bird. To their surprise it was a hawk. It was hanging from an odd low limb of a tree. It had the claws of one foot deep into the wood. Nothing about its position in the woods looked natural. This beautiful bird hanging there to decay and be eaten. Needless to say the creep factor was rising. The rain started back.
The girls were not going to give up. They went deeper into the woods following along the trench.
That's when Alice screamed. A pile of bones were in the path and off to the side was a skull!
The bones were real but the skull, thankfully was a cheap plastic Halloween decoration. It wasn't even close to Halloween. The girls had theories about what they had come across. Maybe it was a ritual of some kind. Witchcraft. Maybe it was just the killing field of a predator animal and the skull was dragged there by mistake. Whatever it was they had finally found the way across the trench just past the bones. It was like a land bridge across the trench. Once across the girls saw thick woods and something colorful. It was their first glance at the graffiti that adorns the ruins.
The ruins have long been a popular spot for mountain bikers and graffiti artists and any other youngster looking for a slightly illegal way to pass the time. The remnants of the buildings are brick and concrete. There are concrete footings and tunnels and a towering pile of brick rubble.
The girls walked through the tunnels. It was surprisingly colorful. Graffiti covers everything and some mischievous people have created a fairy land with pink and green fiberglass and plastic wands over a bed of bricks, broken and splattered with red paint. The wall above scrawled with a plea to jump in, lay down and get comfy. It started raining harder and the girls sat in one of the tunnels listening to the silence and the rain.
More time to Google. What exactly did they make here? Bromine, used for photography and chemical warfare!? What happened to this place? Officially: It was decommissioned in 1946 when a plant opened in Texas. But ask a local and you might hear the legend about what happened there during WWII. There is very little information about the chemical plant during the war years and the decommissioning and destruction of the structure isn't well documented. A media black out surrounding certain events led to the wide spread belief that there had been a cover up. Locals say that at the end of the war the Nazi's desperate to stop production of chemical agents drove a submarine up the Cape Fear to the site of the chemical plant and fired on the structure, damaging it beyond repair. The area became a part of the Sunny Point Military Terminal's buffer zone after the war. An area protected and patrolled by the military to insure security and safety surrounding the nations largest marine terminal for munitions. Any person wanting to see the ruins for themselves does so at some risk. There are wild animals of course, and there could be some sketchy people, as well as the military police on atv's and carrying guns. There are also bugs. Lots of bugs. Mosquitoes are everywhere because the ruins have a lot of standing water in low spots. People have come out of these woods covered in hundreds of baby ticks, like specks of dirt crawling up their legs. In the summer there are spiders that build giant webs across the trail at face height, they can be as large as a human hand. This is not a place for the weak or easily frightened.
At the age of 62 Robert Harrill hitchhiked his way to the end of the earth. If you start driving east in the foothills of North Carolina and don't stop till you run out of land you might end up there too. Fort Fisher is the tip of a peninsula called Federal Point, just before you get to the islands that make up the Cape Fear. Growing up on the coast, I heard stories about the Fort Fisher Hermit my entire life. I think the very earliest I remember learning the story was the early 1980's, I was four or five. My twin sister and I were sitting on a beach blanket in the back of our family's Carolina blue WWII Jeep. 
