The Kelly house in Paxville is thought to have a ghost of a drifter

Diana Roof, site manager for Temple Sinai Jewish History Center, is a wealth of knowledge of lore about Sumter and surrounding areas.

Every year, Roof holds a Graveside Chronicles event where she shares local folklore while guiding tours through a Sumter graveyard, and this year she was kind enough to lend one of her stories to The Sumter Item.

The Kelly house is a real place that stands right outside of Paxville in Clarendon County. John B. Kelly lived in the home with his two oldest sisters up until 1850, when he decided to sell his share of the ancestral Kelly house to his sisters to pay for his medical schooling.

A year after their brother left, on a hot summer day, a drifter stopped by the Kelly house and asked the sisters if there was any work he could do. The sisters wanted to drain the bottom lands on the back of their property and hired the man to dig the ditches. However, due to the extreme heat of the day, the drifter died of heat stroke.

The sisters, unsure of who the man was, who his family was or where he was from, could think of no way to return his body to his family and buried the stranger beneath a dogwood tree near the road. Roof wrote that the sisters "both agreed this was a lovely spot for the grave."

When John eventually came home for a visit, his sisters told him about the stranger buried by the road, sparking an idea in John - the medical student wanted to expand his studies with a human skeleton rather than his textbooks. Naturally, he dug up the man's body and took it back to medical school.

After graduating, John returned home to practice medicine and brought the skeleton with him. Soon, John began experiencing strange things such as hearing hoofbeats from an invisible horse when he rode past the grave, hearing phantom footsteps behind him from an invisible being, feeling something rush by him and stomp up the stairs when he would reach for the door. John would also have scary experiences with the skeleton - he would hear the bones of the skeleton rattling, and he would sometimes hear what sounded like the skeleton's skull hitting the floor.

As the weeks passed, John decided that the ghostly happenings were too much for him, so he moved to Florida, leaving the ghost to haunt his sister, Mary.

Mary was not as scared of the ghost as John was, and the ghost even helped her get out of a tricky situation involving an overzealous suitor that she was not interested in. One evening as Mary's suitor brought her home with his horse and carriage, the couple heard phantom hoofbeats. Mary told her suitor that it was only the family ghost. He never did call on Mary again after that night.

Roof ended her story with, "I guess that's one way to get rid of an unwanted suitor!"