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 Atlas Obscira,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

And today, we're doing a ghost story.

We're going to Pauley'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.

Yeah. Paulies 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 Hazel in 1954 and Hugo in 89.

But the gray man has been around way, way longer.

The gray man is probably the most famous ghost story in South Carolina.

...