Prince George Winyah Churchyard

The legend belongs to two graveyards at once. Across the street stands Beth Elohim, the second-oldest Jewish cemetery in the state, and the story — carried by Georgetown's ghost tours and tourism pages — binds them together. Pauline Moses and Eliza Munnerlyn were best friends who planned to marry on the same day in October 1885, at the same hour, in different ceremonies. They spent the summer sewing their wedding dresses. Then both fell ill — yellow fever in the older tellings, malaria in others — and died days before the weddings.

They were buried in their dresses: Pauline at Beth Elohim, Eliza in the Episcopal churchyard across the street, still within sight of each other by the legend's reckoning. Tour storytellers and visitors report girlish laughter drifting from both graveyards on summer nights, and orbs moving in the live oaks overhead — the two friends, the story says, still celebrating a wedding day neither reached.

No record verifies the laughter, and the file keeps it as documented legend — reported, retold, unresolved. What the churchyard demonstrably holds is the frame the story needs: an old wall, old graves, and a second cemetery close enough across Broad Street to make the friendship geologically permanent. In a town thick with haunted addresses, this is the gentlest of Georgetown's claims — a haunting that amounts to joy refusing to stop.