This article was first published in “To The Point” Issue I – 2007. It is meant purely for entertainment purposes. We now know Maggie Comer was a real person who lived a real life, had a real family and passed away peacefully
Back in 1984, as remembered by Sandra Moretti, she and her sister Laura were sitting on the front porch facing the water one evening. “We are just rocking and talking. Then we heard this noise and we turned around and said, ‘What was that? What was that?”‘ They rushed to the screen door only to find it locked.
“The hasp was all the way in. Pushed down. It was really creepy,” Laura Moretti recalls.
“All I remember was her (Laura) freaking and saying, ‘It’s Maggie; she locked us out!”‘ laughs Sandra. “I said, ‘Come on, Laura.’ I wouldn’t believe her. I was always the practical one. But it was creepy.”
So what were the Moretti sisters doing on the front porch of the yet-to-be-restored lighthouse? Sandra, who was living in Houston at the time, was on vacation, just visiting her sister. But Laura was at work as a “land transportation specialist” and security guard for International Paper, Haig Point’s original developer. Her job included getting workers to and from Haig Point on the barge Monarch, and patrolling the property to make sure that the bonfires set by the crew clearing what would become one of architect Rees Jones’ great masterpieces were under control. “We would work 24 hours on, 48 hours off,” Laura says. When on duty at Haig Point, she stayed at the lighthouse. She never saw Maggie, “But I heard her a lot,” Laura states.
Then there is the tale of the lighthouse as a real party place in the 1930s. It had been decommissioned in 1924 and sold. Seems a group of hunters from Savannah would gather and have a grand old time. One of the hunters climbed up the light tower, got out on the walk and leaned against the rotted railing to get the last drop of his bourbon. The railing gave and he plunged to his death. Fellow revelers claimed “he didn’t feel a thing.” The parties ended but some claim his spirit remains, continually testing the railings.
The light tower seems to have been a rather popular place for strange occurrences. Restoration architect Bill Phillips, who along with a very talented crew brought the lighthouse back to life in 1986, remembers a few more.
His first recollection was when he and his wife Anita were invited to look at the lighthouse in 1984 by Charles Cauthen, a local developer who has a special appreciation for Daufuskie. It was Cauthen who sold International Paper the Haig Point land. The three motored over to one of the public landings on Daufuskie in Cauthen’s boat named Press On Regardless. As Cauthen and Phillips hacked their way through the forest with machetes to reach the lighthouse, Phillips gained an appreciation for the name of Cauthen’s boat. Cauthen was the first to mention Maggie to Phillips. “It was a good story,” Phillips says today. The lighthouse, he remembers, was in a state of decay perfect for ghosts. This was before he was even assigned to restore the building.
But the haunting memories of his first visit stuck. When his team first began restoration, Phillips says, local islanders told a different story. “The ghost was supposed to be the lighthouse keeper’s wife. Remember, I am telling you the stuff fourth and fifth hand. They told me the lighthouse keeper took a rowboat to the mainland to shop to get supplies, and storms came and he could not get back to the lighthouse for some period of time. In desperation, and despondent, she hanged herself. And when he came back he found her hanging in the light tower. So, that was one of the stories we heard. Don’t know if it’s a true story or not,” Phillips says.
He also remembers a situation when the restoration team was well into the project and one of the young workers came in one day and hung a straw cross inside the front door. “He said that it was to keep the workmen from being harmed. Of course, we all laughed at it. Then one day, one of the young guys came in and said, ‘That silly fool,’ and reached over and pulled the straw cross down. Then he turned around, stepped through a hole in the floor and broke his leg. We put that straw cross right back up there! I don’t know if it had anything to do with the supernatural or just bad luck,” Phillips says.
Enter Jake, a Daufuskie islander of indeterminate age. Jake helped out Phillips’ crew with his mule-driven wagon, hauling equipment and lumber. Jake had a pickup of equally indeterminate age that was missing most of the floor of the truck bed, and a boat he used to ferry the very few visitors to Daufuskie in the 1970s and early 1980s. But they all came in handy in those early days.
Phillips says, “Jake kept talking about a spirit. I would say, ‘The lady Maggie,’ and he’d say, ‘No, no; him fella.’ What he was saying was that it was a guy who died in the lighthouse. Whether it was a creative story he put forward or one he’d heard, we all kind of laughed about it. He finally let us know that a guy had been shot going up the stairs into the light tower with a shotgun. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that when we were taking boards out of the tower to be resurfaced, we found what we thought were beetle holes or some kind of insect holes in the paneling. And when we cleaned them there was lead shot filling the holes. They formed an outline of a person on the stairs. Did I investigate the stories? No I didn’t,” Phillips chuckles. “But did they make good conversation sitting there with a whiskey in front of a warm fire? They sure did.”
When workers began restoring the tower, a carpenter fell and broke a vertebra. The next day, a two-by-four fell and broke another carpenter’s arm. The next day no one – would go into the tower until Maggie advocate and head carpenter Tom Bass talked to Maggie, explaining they were restoring the house, not destroying it. The accidents stopped.
Forward to October 18, 1986. Phillips was there as the Haig Point lighthouse was relighted while the Savannah Symphony played a stirring rendition of “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
“It was a wonderful moment when the lighthouse was recommissioned,” Phillips says. The fireworks display as the lamp was lighted was just the right touch for the celebration.
The claim that four shadowy figures — a beautiful young woman, a distraught matron, a lovelorn gentleman from Michigan and a hunter not quite steady on his feet — could be seen on the fringes of the gathered crowd for the celebration was, of course, dismissed.
-Paul de Vere
The original story has been edited for clarity
