Hey, everybody. We have been at the beach all week. We've been going to very strange, unusual beaches this week. We went to beach with penguins. We went to a beach with rusty death machines. We've got shipwrecked Doritos. They're great episodes. If you missed them,

go check them out. They are definitely not your average beaches. But we did succeed in escaping

the summer heat, which we tried. While we're at it, I want to ask a quick favor. Take a moment

to rate and review the show. It both shows the platforms,

you know, Apple, whoever, that people are listening and actually like the show. But it also

shows us the team that makes the show. It shows me what you guys are thinking, what you like,

what you want to hear more of. We read the comments. We just do. We can't help ourselves.

And leave us a nice one.

It makes an enormous difference to the team. All right. On to the show. If you're ever in South Carolina, and you run into a ghost called the gray man, just know there's good news and there's bad news. The bad news, well, he only shows up when a hurricane's about to hit. But the good news is if you see him, your house will be protected, even as everything around it crashes down. Or so the story

goes.

I'm Dylan Theris, and this is out withcira, a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today, we're doing a ghost story.

We're going to Pauli's Island, South Carolina, where the state's most famous ghost has resided for more than a century.

It was the gray man?

How did he become a ghost?

And why do we keep telling his story?

After this. Pauli's is a tiny barrier island at the eastern end of South Carolina on the Atlantic Ocean.

It's part of the state's popular, beachy, coastal resort region, but the town itself is tiny,

home to just about 100 people.

At its best, it is astonishing.

The water looks impossibly blue.

But the trade-off is that the area is incredibly vulnerable to hurricanes. It's been devastated by major ones throughout its history, particularly

...