Charleston may be the hub for paranormal activity in South Carolina, but Anderson County certainly has its share of the spooky and supernatural.
In this season of Halloween, Anderson SC Living checked in with Upstate author John Boyanoski who has written two books, Ghosts of Upstate South Carolina and More Ghosts of Upstate South Carolina on some of the area’s more harrowing tales.
Many cities and towns around the country claim to have a haunted bridge, but Cry Baby Bridge off Broadway Lake Road in Anderson County is among the more famous, Boyanoski said.
One legend is that a young woman threw her baby off the bridge, and another is that a young woman who lost her baby jumped off the bridge in despair.
“Either way, you see a vision of a woman all in white, walking across the bridge at certain times of the night and certain times of the year,” Boyanoski said. “Or, you hear the baby crying beneath the bridge, and you go down and there’s nothing there.”
Another bridge haunting tale is associated with Three Bridges Road in the Powdersville community. That legend holds that a young black woman, possibly a slave named Eloise, committed suicide along one of the three bridges that gave the road its name.
Stories of haunted homes also abound in Anderson County, with the story of the old Welborn home in West Pelzer topping the list.
Sightings, voices and other oddities have been associated with the ghost of Lulu Welborn over the years. Lulu was married to Walter Leland Welborn who built a home for his family along Main Street in West Pelzer in 1893. Lulu gave birth to eight children before she died during an influenza epidemic in 1913. The Welborn house became a funeral home in the early 1930s and was sold and resold until it came into the possession of Rey McClain.
“A family renovating the house started hearing things and seeing things,” Boyanoski said. “As they were researching the history of the house, they saw pictures of the house and families who lived there, and they recognized one of the ghosts. This vision, this woman they kept seeing in windows, had lived in the house years before. At one point during the (renovation) process, it became public about this ghost story and one of the children of a former owner called them and told them ‘we saw this, too, when we were kids, and we are so happy now that someone is believing us.’”
The music hall at Anderson University also reportedly has ghosts, according to Boyanoski, with accounts of people hearing a piano playing in the hall when no one is there.
And in Boyanoski’s first book, Ghosts of Upstate South Carolina, a chapter is devoted to Anna of Anderson College. As the legend goes, Anna was the teenage daughter of an Anderson University president in the 1920s who was dating someone her father did not approve of.
One night, Anna and her father fought, and the college president threw his daughter’s engagement ring out the window. Anna decided to fake her own hanging from the second flooring landing of their home to frighten her father into approving of the relationship. Unfortunately, things did not go as planned and Anna did hang herself.
Since then, dozens of students and faculty members have reported seeing Anna’s spirit in the building and roaming the front lawn of the college.
For the record, school officials don’t talk about the ghost but admit there is evidence that the daughter of a former college president died while living on campus in the 1920s, Boyanoski says.
Ghosts of Upstate South Carolina and More Ghosts of Upstate South Carolina are available at Amazon.com.
For more spooky Anderson County stories, read Our creepy county: Anderson County ghost stories.
