Pawleys Island

Pawleys Island invented the beach vacation by accident — the rice planters of the Waccamaw Neck started moving their households to the barrier island in the summers to escape the malaria and the heat, and by 1822 there were cottages of cypress and pine on four miles of sand. It was one of the first seaside resorts on the East Coast, and it stayed one by refusing to change: 'arrogantly shabby,' the locals call it, no high-rises, no neon, creek docks and porches and rope hammocks.

The hammocks are the famous product — Captain Joshua John Ward designed the woven rope hammock in 1889 because his grass-stuffed mattress on the rice boat was too hot to sleep on, and the Hammock Shops have been weaving them the same way ever since. The island's other export is the Gray Man: a figure seen walking the beach before every major hurricane, warning residents to leave. He appeared before Hazel in 1954, before Hugo in 1989 — a ghost that saves lives, which makes him the most useful haunting in the archive.

The island's history goes deeper than the planters — Spanish slavers landed at Pawleys in 1520 scouting for Ayllón's colony at San Miguel de Gualdape, the first European settlement attempt in what's now the continental United States. The colony failed within months; the island outlasted it by five centuries. George Washington slept here on his southern tour; the hurricanes keep coming; the Gray Man keeps walking.