This past summer I went to Purgatory. To be clear, it was Purgatory Mountain — part of the Uwharrie Mountains in North Carolina’s Piedmont region. What is it about a place name, one that conjures up an image, a feeling? Would you rather live in Happy Valley Or Kill Devil Hills? Take a holiday to Pleasure Island or Hell’s Kitchen? But even names like Amityville, that should bring to mind friendly faces, can have their own dark associations. Nevertheless, these names do bring a certain air to the experience one may have, or expect to have, when visiting.
Luckily, my visit to Randolph County was not fraught with the tension and restlessness that the name Purgatory exudes. It was actually peaceful. I took a much-needed break from life on the coast and eased my way back into the great outdoors. I enjoyed a gentle hike up a low mountain and a stayed in a tiny house cabin away from wifi and email. I read Mary Oliver and journaled. I made campfires and toasted far too many marshmallows. And above all, I gave myself the space to breathe.
My mind, however, could not help drifting to the terrain that I had traversed on my first day out. Purgatory Mountain is situated on land that is now part of the North Carolina Zoo, but its trails are free and easily accessible. The paths are well-marked and rise over a gentle grade to the top of this 900-foot landmark. It also happens to be designated the geographic center of North Carolina.
A few of the signs marking the main trail to Purgatory’s summit and a side trail known as “Moonshine Run” alluded to the fact that this natural landmark has a storied past. One that reaches back to the Uwharrie peoples who inhabited the region and a more recent one of violence and mystery during the American Civil War and the Prohibition era of the early twentieth century. You see, Purgatory became a place of refuge, secrets, and vengeance that would come to inspire stories of specters and spooks in years to come.
One of these stories tells of a ruthless Confederate army recruiter known simply as “The Hunter.” In the nineteenth century, a large Quaker community inhabited the Piedmont near Asheboro. The Quakers were and have traditionally been anti-slavery and pacifist — two things that did not sit so well with any secessionist neighbors going to war over the protection of the dark institution of slavery. In 1862 the Confederate States of America instituted the first conscription law of its kind in American history, requiring all men aged 18-35 to enlist in its ranks. In some cases, there may have been those in the military willing to “recruit” by more forceful means and impress those into service who were well below the legal age to fight. Desperate times, desperate measures?
One Sunday morning, as families gathered at the Quaker meeting house, the Society of Friends found a wolf within their midst. This predator’s reputation preceded him and the Hunter had come for his prey. As the story goes, twenty-two boys — some barely teenagers — were forcibly taken and carted from their homes in the Piedmont to the coast. After arriving at the nearest training camps at Wilmington, the boys waited, still hog-tied, for the chance to make their move. It’s here that the legend starts to take on different iterations, but somehow the young men made their escape and navigated their way back to Randolph County. There they took up residence in the woods atop Purgatory Mountain to wait out the war, stealing down to their family homes under the cover of darkness to gather provisions and supplies. The Hunter, however, could not be fooled and retribution was on his mind. When he reappeared in the shadows of oak and birch, however, these boys were prepared. Eschewing their Quaker principles, they took one of the Confederate rifles that they absconded with from the camp and shot him onsite. With the Hunter now dead, the boys' lives could return to normal.
According to locals, however, the Hunter is still lurking in the shadows on Purgatory Mountain — doomed to an afterlife of restlessness after causing so much pain. Or is he?
When one of them staggered out of the pines covered in blood, there was only one explanation. It was supernatural.
In the early twentieth century, the woods around Purgatory became the home of stills and bootlegging routes in the era of Prohibition. It was the perfect hideout for those attempting to elude the law and what better way of keeping people off the mountain than to disguise it with stories of haints and horrors? Evidently, enterprising moonshiners and bootleggers were notorious for this — either encouraging such stories or choosing these liminal locals for their illicit operations. It also made me think about something closer to home.
I grew up in northwestern New Hanover County, just outside of Wilmington on land that once comprised a rice plantation on the Cape Fear River known as Sans Souci. Part of that land gained the name “Ghost Hill” in the twentieth century and it has stuck ever since. When my sister and I decided to open an independent bookstore last year, we settled on Ghost Hill Press as an homage to local legends and our love of anything gothic and spooky. This tract of land runs along the northeast branch of the river and is slowly being consumed by development, but its history is a dark one — stained by years of enslavement, forced labor, and, yes, moonshining. According to family sources, a group of boys was playing in the woods along the river in the vicinity of Ghost Hill in the 1940s. When one of them staggered out of the pines covered in blood, there was only one explanation. It was supernatural.
In reality, the young man likely stumbled into some trouble — bears and panthers had long roamed those parts until development began shifting the ecosystems. Not to mention the most likely story is that he happened upon a functioning still among the piney wetlands and was attacked by the bootlegger who hid behind the illusions of ghostly apparitions that kept nosy neighbors from interfering with his operation. Perhaps an altercation took place, an attempt to scare the boy out of the woods. We will likely never know for sure. In any case, the name of Ghost Hill has stuck.
The names of places can tell us a lot about the past. They can tell us about people’s hopes and dreams, or their greatest tragedies. And sometimes they are downright deceiving.
