Fort Walker Ghost Legend on Hilton Head Island

THE LEGEND: A Confederate doctor killed at Fort Walker is said to still wander the old battlefield

On Nov. 7, 1861, Union warships opened fire on Fort Walker during the Battle of Port Royal, unleashing a devastating bombardment that helped force Confederate troops from Hilton Head. Among the Confederate dead was surgeon Dr. Edward S. Buist. Accounts of exactly how Buist died differ. Historical reports indicate that he was killed by an exploding shell during the bombardment. Over generations, however, the story became considerably more gruesome. Buist was said to have been struck by a cannonball while tending the wounded, leaving him without his head. That image became the foundation of one of Hilton Head’s darker ghost stories.

According to the legend, Buist’s headless figure has been seen wandering the former Fort Walker area, today part of Port Royal Plantation. Witnesses describe a bloodstained Confederate uniform and a figure moving silently through the darkness as though searching for something lost during the battle. The story grew further after graves from the old Union Cemetery were relocated in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Later island tradition held that Buist’s remains may have been among those exhumed and moved.

That added a particularly unsettling wrinkle to the legend. Did everything leave with him? Perhaps the apparition searches for something left behind on the battlefield. Perhaps a violent wartime death simply became fertile ground for generations of storytelling. Either way, Hilton Head folklore remembers Dr. Buist, not simply as one of Fort Walker’s casualties, but as the surgeon who never quite left.

The remains of a Civil War-era steam gun battery stand near the former site of Fort Walker in Port Royal Plantation. The surrounding ground was the scene of intense bombardment during the Battle of Port Royal on Nov. 7, 1861, when Confederate surgeon Dr. Edward S. Buist was killed. His death later inspired one of Hilton Head’s darker ghost legends.