The Summerville Light is believed to be the ghost of a woman who lived here over 100 years ago. Legend has it that she met her husband at the train after work every night, with a lantern to guide them home. He was killed in a logging accident nearby, and apparently, these many years later, the woman’s ghost still makes the trek. The light is a green glow, some say basketball sized, that hovers over the road. It may start out small and far away.
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Geographic Information
- Address:
- Sheep Island Road
Summerville, SC
United States
Get Directions » - GPS:
- 33.0789929, -80.15235369999999
- County:
- Berkeley County, South Carolina
- Nearest Towns:
- Sangaree, SC (3.3 mi.)
Summerville, SC (4.4 mi.)
Lincolnville, SC (5.0 mi.)
Centerville, SC (5.8 mi.)
Ladson, SC (6.9 mi.)
Ridgeville, SC (9.5 mi.)
Goose Creek, SC (9.7 mi.)
Moncks Corner, SC (11.4 mi.)
Pinopolis, SC (12.2 mi.)
Hanahan, SC (13.4 mi.)
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Disclaimer: The stories posted here are user-submitted and are, in the nature of "ghost stories," largely unverifiable. HauntedPlaces.org makes no claims that any of the statements posted here are factually accurate. The vast majority of information provided on this web site is anecdotal, and as such, should be viewed in the same light as local folklore and urban legends.
I have a stir from this location it is 100% real a green orb and it hovers in the road! Most freaky thing I have seen!
I have been here and seen the light. Along with my Husband and Son! It is freaky indeed!
Visual confirmation… It acts almost too natural; however, it is very rare, do not be disappointed if not seen. Stop by the chapel ruins nearby, it has orbs. Further down the road boasts a civil war fortification. A few orbs, and a lot of destruction. Not worth the risk of going there at night, as you could get hurt or worse (by the living, of course.)
I’ve seen the light several times over the years. It used to be what my girlfriends and I would do after Summerville High football games. It’s never been green when I saw it though, just a yellow light that appears at the end of the road that slowly moves towards you until finally disappearing, sometimes off into the woods on either side of the road. Definitely gave us teenage girls a good scare!!!
Me and my friends went a while ago and they were hype and so was I but I kinda didn’t believe it and we got there and parked by the road by the barricades and we walked past them and walked , it was like 20 min since we got there , cold asf and was like man I’m ready to go forget this , then we saw very light white smoke cross the street far far back and i was like no lol I’m just hallucinating , but my friends said if we saw that then we watched no one talked and all you saw was a light that got bigger and bigger and I completely lost it I’m the heaviest in the group and I literally beat them to the car except for my friend who runs alot. I honestly say it was sorta weird but fun. -CMJ
Went out three times just after high school in 73. I feel that conditions have to be right because I saw it only once. But it was a show. We watched it a good while moving back and forth from side to side in the road then it went into the woods and we didn’t see it. I put my car in gear and crept up to try to get a close look and figure out what it was. I had a carload of girls with me. All of a sudden the started screaming, “THERE IT IS, THERE IT IS IN THE BUSHES!”. I wasn’t afraid of the light, but I took a quick look around, put my car in reverse and backed up to stop the damn screaming. It showed itself less from then on so we had our fill and left. I tried two more times but never saw it. I went out there as an adult, the road is like a washboard and a lot of it is plowed fields now. I’m not even sure if there are trees where the light used to be. I’d like to know if it still there. From reading the above post it sounds like it it.
Oh, I should mention that the last time I went about 20 years ago it was daytime. I was just scouting the area to see if it was suitable for viewing.
I was at this same location many times back in the early 60s. I wrote a paper trying to explain what was actually happening. Email me at fmeacher@aol.com and I will be happy to share it with anyone. It is interesting to see that this crazy thing still gets teenagers excited over 40 years since I was last there.
F.M.
With all the construction in the area the ghost seems to be angry. The light moves faster and is glowing darker than ever before. I first saw the light with a group of friends in June 1976. I’ve seen it a number of times since. I viewed it recently on May 1st 2017. It’s the same light in the same place only more active. Many unsettled ghost seem to be in this area. With stories of the Carns farm ghost and the the legend of Lavinia Fisher, a 19th century Charleston woman convicted for highway robbery and hung just off Meeting Street. Some claim she was America’s first female serial killer, based on speculation that she and her husband would lure travelers to their inn, slip poison in their tea, steal their belongings, and carry their bodies out back. However, her and her husband actually belonged to a band of highway thieves that settled in the Summerville area now known as Cane Bay. They were never accused of serial murder. Still, the details surrounding her death are chilling. Believing that she would be pardoned up until the moment she was hung, Lavinia, according to legend, used her last breath to scream, “If you have a message you want to send to hell, give it to me, and I’ll carry it!” Her ghost still haunts the Old Charleston Jail House, and tourists still claim sightings of her ghostly apparition. The husband and some of his victims restless spirits can be spotted between Cane Bay, where a number of victims are buried just below the waters surface at the Lakes and Sheep Island Road, home of the Summerville light.
I live off of Sheep Is. Road in a newer development. I am not from Chas. but I have friends from the area who refuse to come to my house after dark! My question is…exactly where on Sheep Is. road is the light? I’d love to go see what has all my friends scared of my house.
Thanks!
The place where the light has been seen is the section of Sheep Island Rd. and that blocked off, about halfway in.
Yes it is real. Saw it several times mostly when it was a little rainy. But I have seen it on clear nights. Loved taking girls there it scared the crap out of them. An old friend of mine had a real cool cane he carried around a lot. I asked him where he got it -he said he took it from a skeleton he found while hiking through the woods down the light road. He said the skeleton was so old that the clothes had roted and fallen off.i asked if he reported it he said no I was scared I would be harassed or blamed I just took the cane and ran.cant blame him cops around there were kind of redneck back in 1977.
Road is now closed after a development project. Only way to access is by foot, bicycle, or ATV/motorcycle.
In 1969 I was going to Hanahan High School and it was infamous. A group of us rode out there one night and we did see a foggy light and we backed out at breakneck speed and left. A few days later a guy in a fancy Camaro with a really nice paint job drove out there with friends and they swore the light landed on his hood and burnt it! The hood DID have a large round blackened area, and the paint job was expensive, so whatever happened I am sure wasn’t intentional — and perhaps it was the Summerville Light!
When I was about 10 years old my sister and her friend drove back there while I tagged along. It was a bumpy road but it went straight to Sheep Island from what’s now called Holiday Drive. She pointed the light out to me as we were driving. That was the first time I saw it. Later on in life I used to take my ATV out there to go mudding and ride around in some of the flat ponds when I was in high school between 2006 and 2009. From the Holiday Drive side in Summerville you could only drive your vehicle a little ways in before you came across three huge dug up and flooded sections of the road. Only the biggest trucks could get through there. I was always told that they were dug by DEA officers trying to stop people from growing pot in the woods. Not sure how true that is. We’d unload the four wheeler and my friends and I would be out there from 4 or 5PM until just before dark. We would see the light all the time. It was just a distant white light by itself that looked really far down the road. Sometimes you saw it sometimes you wouldn’t. And sometimes it would just appear, disappear and then reappear all throughout the time we were there. The older kids always said everything from it was a woman with a lantern searching for her husband’s head after a train accident to him never coming home and that she was still waiting for him to come home to it’s just the headlights of the cars driving on the Sheep Island side reflecting off the swamp gas as they passed by. I never saw any railroad tracks but I guess they were removed or left abandoned and grown over with brush. We thought it was cool but we never paid much mind to it. One day we went out there and one of my friends started to walk alongside the dug-up portions of road and I followed him. When we got past the second one he started yelling at the light telling it to show itself and calling it names. I started walking back because nothing happened. About two seconds later all I heard was him say “DUDE GO!”. When I looked back he was running at me full-speed and I’ll never forget that I saw three white lights speeding at us and then the center one turned red. I don’t remember ever seeing anything so fast and it scared the daylights out of me. It seemed like it went from being a mile away to 20 feet away in just those few seconds. When my friend tried to run past me he tripped and all I could do was grab him by his shirt and drag him through the water while I ran on the sides holding on to the small trees to help pull myself through. When we got back to the truck I looked back and the light was right back where it had been at first about a mile down the road looking the way it normally did when we saw it. I wasn’t sure if I’d actually even seen it. But before I could tell my friend what thought I saw he described the same thing. Three white lights, the center one turned red and racing toward us super fast. Couple months later I went back with my girl and my cousin to go mudding in his truck. He got the frame stuck on a stump. While we waited for somebody to come snatch it out we kind of hung out and saw the light again. Same as it always was. No one was really scared about it because it wasn’t doing anything but what it always did before. Shining from far away. We went out a few more times throughout the years until they finally blocked it off just after the bridge over I-26. We always saw the light but never worried about it. I don’t believe in ghosts but I really can’t explain what happened that day. My best guess is that it is swamp gas and that us walking one in front of the other the sun may have been reflecting off it or something causing us to see the same thing in just about the same place. But really I just don’t know. I’m not sure if there’s a way to get to it anymore now that they built the Nexton overpass and tore down the Light Road Bridge. I’m pretty sure Cane Bay is blocking it from the other side along with all that Nexton development. It’d be awesome if our future generation could hear the story and see it but I imagine they’ll build it up eventually. I still live just up the road from it but I haven’t been there in 10 years. Summerville is an interesting place. On top of that I think we have the only Walmart with an old 1800s graveyard in the front entrance median.
I have seen this light! My husband, myself, son and some friends went to see the Summerville Light. We drove down the dirt road and stopped a long way down from the entrance. We cut the car off and all the lights. We sat for a few minutes waiting to see if we could see the light. It was quiet and still! Suddenly we observed a glow of light way out in the distance. It was a red glow though and going back and forth. We were all standing there in the front of the car. The light started to come closer and closer as it did it got brighter and brighter. We all decided that we had seen enough so we got in the car, turned around to leave looked back and the light had gotten closer. So close that it appeared to be right behind the car and we all started to scream! It was so scarry. We said we would never go back again!!!!!!
This is indeed real. This was 2010-2015? Idk. saw it with three friends. I usually don’t believe in stuff like this. Just like others have said it’s just a ball of light. We parked at the gates and we saw it in the distance in the middle of the road. It then just kept getting closer, very slowly. It was like yellow or off white light. I thought it was a motorcycle headlight coming down the middle of the road at first till I realized there was no sound. Eventually it hovered over the top of our truck and at that point we were so scared we just left. we looked back and saw it disappear into the woods.
I used to tell ppl this story and nobody knew what I was talking about except the people I was there with. I’m glad to have found this website and found other people’s stories. I wonder if you can still access the road nowadays.