Gertie’s Ghost

Via Ann, Belle Grove

Gertie placed conservation easements on the house and the remaining land, shielding it from estate taxes while prohibiting commercial development. Over the past 25 years, South Carolina landowners have used such legal instruments to preserve some 560,000 acres. “The beauty of an easement is that it protects the property in perpetuity,” says Katharine Robinson, executive director of Historic Charleston Foundation, which enforces the one on the house at Medway. But they also place inflexible restrictions on future generations.

“Clearly, a piece of property with an easement is worth less than a piece of property without an easement,” says Charles Lane, a South Carolina plantation owner, real estate broker and conservationist.

“You buy Medway, and the only person you can sell it to is somebody who wants to use it for exactly what you bought it for.”

Thank the good Lord and PNC for easements.
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Katherine Wolkoff for The New York Times

In 2000, Bokara Legendre, an artist and a stage performer, inherited her family’s plantation in the Lowcountry of South Carolina. She promptly set about making the place her own, redecorating the antebellum mansion with abstract paintings and a pastel color scheme. But this seemed to unsettle the house. The first night Legendre spent in her redone bedroom, there was a problem with the fireplace, and the chamber filled with thick black smoke. As a member of the plantation staff put out the fire, he glimpsed an apparition: the late mistress of the house, Legendre’s mother, Gertie. She was not pleased with the changes.

Legendre tells this ghost story to illustrate a mortal lesson: It is one thing to live in a house, quite another to possess it. Most people can only fantasize about coming into something like Medway, a pink gabled plantation house surrounded by 6,700 acres of moss-hung oaks, pine forests and swamps. But every homeowner wrestles, in ways great and small, with the recalcitrant spirit of the property he occupies. Legendre, a student of Tibetan Buddhism, says she saw a sort of cosmic opportunity in her mother’s bequest, a chance to “change the karma” of an estate once cultivated by slaves and used by her parents as a hunting playground. She discovered that the gift came with hidden conditions, however; some legacies aren’t so easy to exorcise.

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