SUNNYSIDE PLANTATION
Historic Plantation — Murrells Inlet, Georgetown County County, South Carolina
Status: Status unknown · Access: Access unknown
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/sunnyside-plantation-murrells-inlet-south-carolina/

Estate with marsh-side folklore.

A historic plantation in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina, Sunnyside Plantation is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Estate with marsh-side folklore. HauntHunt files it with haunting reports. Ask the file who haunts it and it answers: Ruth. The dossier holds 1 reported claim and 1 legend, every one filed as account rather than fact. Visitor status is unverified; confirm before making the trip.

Sunnyside is the sunny side literally: a point of land at Murrells Inlet that catches the light all day, where Waccamaw rice planters built summer cottages in the nineteenth century to escape the heat and the mosquitoes of the river plantations. The main house is documented to the early 1800s and anchored the Murrells Inlet Historic District. An 1800 plat and persistent oral history go further, crediting Governor Joseph Alston with building it for his bride Theodosia Burr — who boarded the schooner Patriot in the winter of 1812-13 and vanished at sea, the coast's most famous disappearance.
The name on the haunting, though, is not Theodosia's. It is Ruth Bigham's — and hers is a murder, not a legend.

THE MURDER OF RUTH BIGHAM
Henry Gilmore Smith, kin to the Bigham family of the Pee Dee, bought Sunnyside in 1909 as a retirement home, and relatives from Marion became regulars. It was not a peaceful family: Edmund Bigham was tried three times in the 1920s for murdering his mother, brother, sister, and two children, and his son Smiley was about to face trial for the alleged killing of a servant. A month before that trial, Smiley's son — Dr. G. Cleveland Bigham — and Cleveland's wife Ruth were visiting Sunnyside. Ruth was expected to testify against her father-in-law.
On a foggy evening, Ruth took her customary stroll to the shoreline in the long, pale dress fashionable women wore. Cleveland and a friend, William Avant, were boating offshore, and by the record Cleveland persuaded Avant that the figure moving in the fog was a ghost — and that he should shoot it. Avant fired; Ruth died on the spot. Both men were convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three years. Cleveland went free on bond pending appeal, left South Carolina, and never served another day.

THE REEDS BEHIND THE HOUSE
The legend says Ruth never left — that she still walks the marsh reeds behind the estate on foggy evenings, which is to say she still walks it dressed as the trap that killed her. The house later ran as an inn, where guests reportedly phoned the front desk about a bell that kept ringing even after its mechanism was removed. Today Sunnyside is a wedding and event venue, which gives the file its final note: a bride who never got to testify, haunting the grounds where other brides arrive on purpose.

FILED CLAIMS — 1 on record, reported not verified
· [Documented legend] apparition: Tour storytellers attribute a marsh apparition to Ruth. Reeds behind estate is where the accounts cluster — the site's own map of where to look. The site in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina gives the account a documented setting: real place, real history, unresolved reports. It's a documented legend: the telling is real, the contents remain folklore. The report is preserved in sources like 'Find the 10 most-haunted places on the Hammock Coast'. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting.
  source: Find the 10 most-haunted places on the Hammock Coast (https://hammockcoastsc.com/what-are-the-10-most-haunted-places-on-the-hammock-coast/)

SOURCES — 1 cited
· Find the 10 most-haunted places on the Hammock Coast — Georgetown County Chamber of Commerce / South Carolina Hammock Coast
  https://hammockcoastsc.com/what-are-the-10-most-haunted-places-on-the-hammock-coast/

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HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not.
Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/