Zion Cemetery Ghost Legend on Hilton Head Island

THE LEGEND: A ghostly procession is said to still carry William Baynard toward his final resting place

William Eddings Baynard was a wealthy planter from a prominent Charleston and Edisto family who acquired Braddock’s Point Plantation during the 1840s. A deed held by the South Carolina Historical Society places his purchase from the Bank of Charleston in 1845, the same year he acquired the Davenport House in Savannah. The following year he built the family mausoleum overlooking the Zion Chapel of Ease Cemetery.

Local legend offers a more colorful version of the transaction, insisting Baynard won Braddock’s Point in a poker game. History points instead to the Bank of Charleston. Baynard enjoyed only a few years on Hilton Head before contracting a fever and dying in Savannah in October 1849. According to island tradition, his body was returned to Hilton Head for an enormous funeral. A procession made its way from Braddock’s Point toward Zion Cemetery, accompanied by family, friends and island residents. The sadness of that journey, legend says, never left.

For generations Hilton Head residents have told of seeing a ghostly funeral procession traveling toward Zion Cemetery on dark, rainy nights. Witnesses describe shadowy wagons gliding through the mist, while an eerie wailing drifts from the moss-covered oaks and nearby marshes. One story passed down by early Sea Pines employees tells of a grounds worker who encountered “Mr. Baynard’s funeral wagons” in the early 1960s. So shaken was he by the experience, he reportedly tried to resign. He was persuaded to stay, only to encounter the procession again several years later. This time, the story goes, nothing could convince him to remain. The account survived through longtime Sea Pines employees, including Tom Norby and Happy Mitchell, becoming another strand in Hilton Head’s oral history. On the right kind of night, when rain hangs in the air and the island grows quiet, some say the old procession can still be heard making its way toward Zion.

Weathered headstones stand beneath ancient live oaks at Zion Cemetery on Hilton Head Island, where William Eddings Baynard was laid to rest in 1849. According to island legend, the funeral procession that carried him here never truly ended with ghostly wagons said to still make their way toward the cemetery on dark, rainy nights.