In 1955, Robert Harrill left the state mental institution at Morganton, NC. He hitchhiked 260 miles (420 km) to Fort Fisher, about 20 miles (32 km) south of Wilmington, presumably traveling with only the clothes on his back. According to one account, he made a key out of a kitchen spoon and escaped into the night. The 62-year-old man, who had experienced a rather bleak life, decided to chuck it all and go to the beach. He stayed there for 17 years, living by his wits and inadvertently becoming a cultural icon.
Harrill had a rough childhood. When he was seven, his mother, Ellen, died of typhoid. His father remarried, and Robert did not get along with his stepmother, Corrie, or her family. The 1910 census shows the then-17-year-old Harrill listed as a servant living in the household of Joseph Washburn, likely a relative on his father’s side.
As an adult, Harrill suffered a devastating series of setbacks. He married Katie Hamrick in 1913, and they had five children. Their daughter, Nellie, died one month after she was born of bronchopneumonia. Antibiotics would not become widely available until the 1940s.
Robert Harrill struggled to keep a job. His vocations included cotton mill sweeper, jewelry street vendor, linotype operator (an early form of typesetting used by newspapers), and part-time printer. At one point, he and his family traveled and lived in a Model T Ford.
“We lived hungry, we lived dangerous, and we lived weird,” Harrill’s son George Edward Harrill told Dennis Rogers of the Raleigh News and Observer in 1988. “My dad would sell jewelry on street corners to live. We slept in cow pastures as we traveled from town to town in the Depression. We never had enough to eat. We really suffered from malnutrition.”
Eventually, the family found their way back to Shelby. In 1935, the oldest son, 21-year-old Robert “Allen” Harrill, leaped to his death from a 76-foot-high (26-meter) Southern Railways trestle. He had been out of work for some time and was despondent. I think Allen’s death broke the family.
Katie Harrill found a job as a housekeeper in White, PA, southeast of Pittsburgh, and took her three sons with her. She and Robert divorced, and she later remarried. Harrill was on his own, and he did not fare well. According to a 2002 article in the News and Observer, he was involuntarily committed to mental hospitals at least three times in the 1930s and diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Surf, Sand, and the Wild Man
According to Fred Pickler, a former New Hanover County Deputy Sheriff, photographer, and author of two books about Harrill, another hermit, Empie Hewett, sometimes called “the Wild Man,” befriended Harrill and showed Harrill techniques for catching fish in traps and finding edible plants. Pickler says it was Hewett who showed Harrill the 14 x 18-foot abandoned concrete bunker that became his home. Harrill learned his lessons well.
“He’d comb the bush and get sassafras for tea,” Pickler said in a 2009 article on Star News Online. “He’d dig up tubers, potato-like things; I had no idea what they were. He’d gather cattail roots and roast them; they were actually quite good. If he could’ve somehow passed the health inspection, he could have run a restaurant.”
A 1958 Raleigh News and Observer article reported that “Cap’n Empie” was one of the first people Harrill met when he arrived in the Fort Fisher area. It goes on to say that Harrill had gotten his boots so filled with sand that he couldn’t take them off, so he wore them for five days until Empie came by and helped him get them off.
His diet included fish, clams, oysters, turtle soup, berries, and vegetables from a small garden.
Hurricanes And Hassles
There were plenty of obstacles, both natural and human, to overcome. Harrill attempted to manage bloodthirsty mosquitoes by sleeping on top of observation towers, but those were torn down a couple of years after he arrived. He also tried rubbing motor oil on his skin. Hurricanes were a far more momentous problem.
A September 1958 Associated Press story described Harrill’s evacuation to Wilmington during Hurricane Helene.
“A bedraggled figure of a man staggered into the police station here last night, his foot-long white beard and matted hair dripping from the rain outside. … The man identified himself as Robert Harrell, 68, a hermit who has lived for years in a Quonset pillbox near the site of Civil War Fort Fisher, 20 miles south of here. … Harrelll, dressed in ragged Bermuda shorts, a torn shirt, and barefooted, said he had walked some 12 miles from his hideout before he was picked up by some teenagers and brought here.”
“I’ve lived through some blows in my time, but this one looks too bad. I couldn’t stay down there. I like to be alone, but not that alone,” he said.
(Robert E. Harrill changed the spelling of his last name to Harrell at some point. No one else in his family did. His name is reported both ways in news accounts and documents.)
In 1960, he sheltered in place during Hurricane Donna, reporting four feet of water in his bunker and two and a half feet in his yard. Harrill said that he, his dog Smiley, and his cat Curley stayed in his camp and got along fine.
J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA
People proved to be a much more severe threat to his seaside habitation than any storm. According to a 1962 article in the Durham Herald-Sun, many people wanted him removed permanently, including the local health department, various law enforcement agencies, and the military. There was an ongoing dispute between Harrill and the Air Force in which he invoked the Homestead Act.
Despite frequent and regular brushes with the law and efforts by neighbors, developers, government officials, and the military to claim his bunker and the patch of sand he called home, somehow, the wily hermit always managed to thwart them.
Harrill’s growing popularity and the intervention of kind, thoughtful people seem to have been the deciding factors in his being allowed to stay. Here is an excerpt from State Archaeologist Stanley South’s April 23, 1960, letter to his supervisor advising against evicting Harrill. South noted the clear benefits of letting the hermit stay and the potential negative publicity from removing him.
“In summary, it seems that it comes down to a question of who wants him out. As you say, it is not customary for a hermit to live on historic site property, but for that matter, hermits are not customary, and a friendly tourist-attracting hermit is even a rarer phenomenon. What historic site in the country can boast of an authentic hermit? As I see it, he is doing no harm, and if the Archives and History Department would not push it and suggest that it is the Army’s responsibility, then I doubt that they would move him out. However, if Archives and History wants to move him, then the responsibility and the publicity that would follow would be our own.”
South also pointed out the presence of a second hermit in the area, the Wild Man, making the case that evicting him from the swamps where he fled whenever spotted by the authorities would be far more difficult than evicting Harrill, perhaps involving bloodhounds and the National Guard. Stanley South knew how to make bureaucrats nervous.
The Hermit Business
Harrill claimed up to 17,000 visitors annually from all 50 states and a dozen foreign countries. This number was based on a register he had set up for guests to sign on a desk he made from scrap lumber. By 1960, he had put up signs that read “The Fort Fisher Hermit” to “keep people from getting lost or stuck in the sand.”
He would spin tales and share his views on politics, religion, and the general state of society with tourists. Some said that he had a spiel, a monologue that he often gave. I could not find an article that quoted it. I would love to have heard it, although I’m sure it changed over time.
He kept a frying pan set out on a concrete block beside the bunker for donations and would put a half dollar, quarter, dime, nickel, and penny in the frying pan between tourist visits. He felt it encouraged tourists to donate.
“If I don’t keep that 91 cents in there, I don’t get anything,” he winked. “Now, that’s good psychology.”
“The School of Common Sense”
Harrill was influenced by Dr. William Marcus Taylor, an ex-Unitarian minister who traveled the country in the 1930s, lecturing and teaching correspondence courses in “Bio-Psychology.” Taylor appeared to be something of an early self-help guru. He and his wife ran the school from the back room of their house in Chattanooga, TN. Taylor’s books are still around on the internet if you’d like to check them out for yourself.
Malcolm Fowler, in a 1958 News and Observer article describing the interior of Harrill’s bunker, mentioned seeing one of Dr. Taylor’s pamphlets on an upended nail keg. The following is from the article.
“He was my teacher, said the Hermit, picking up the booklet. “ He had the greatest mind I ever knew. Taught me bio-psychology, he went on. Leastways, I got introduced to it under him.”
Harrill appears to have taken one of Taylor’s courses and may have met him at a month-long session of classes that Taylor conducted in Spruce Pine in the summer of 1933. The East Carolina University Library has a letter Taylor wrote to Harrill in 1934. In the 1971 UPI interview, reporter Thomas P. Fazio describes Harrill as a self-proclaimed biopsychologist:
“I studied 319 religions of the world, trying to find one to believe,” Harrill said. “I found the Unitarians the only one fit to believe. I’m a Baptist (and ordained minister) and hate to leave the Baptists because they’re going to need help. They’re selfish, stingy, greedy, narrow-minded and damn prejudiced.”
Harrill always had multiple typewriters, and he was always working on a book. He also sent letters from time to time. When Nikita Khrushchev, head of the Soviet Union’s communist party, toured the United States in 1959, Harrell sent him a letter inviting him to visit Fort Fisher to meet some real Americans.
He frequently talked about the book he was writing and complained about the loss, theft, or destruction of the most recent draft due to a storm or vandalism. In the UPI interview, he said, “I came here to write a book, my think book, on humanity.”
The article mentions a 400-page book called Psychological Hijackers. Other reports say he was working on a book titled A Tyrant in Every Home. Harrill hoped to make enough money from book sales to open a school, “the school of common sense.”
The Hermit’s Mysterious Death
No one can say for certain what happened on the night of June 3, 1972. The next morning, five teenage boys found Robert E. Harrill, the Fort Fisher Hermit, dead, lying on his back just inside the bunker he called home. Many people suspected foul play, including his son, George Edward Harrill, and Fred Pickler, a former New Hanover County deputy sheriff.
Pickler was a crime scene technician at the time of Harrill’s death and was called to the scene. He said that the sand in front of the bunker was disturbed. Harrill’s sleeping bag and a man’s brown-and-white loafer were found in the marsh mud.
The officer in charge thought Harrill had suffered a heart attack and dragged himself back to the bunker. To Pickler, it looked like the hermit had been dragged. He described the hermit’s clothing as torn, wet, and covered with marsh mud and said his legs, face, and arms were blood-stained and abraded. No autopsy was performed, and the medical examiner ruled the death a heart attack.
Over the years, those who feel he was killed have put forth three main theories. Some people think that robbers who were after the money that tourists gave him killed him. Others believe he was attacked in an attempt to drive him out of the area. The third theory is that a group of roughnecks harassed him, and things got out of hand.
For years, there was a rumor that Harrill was taken out of the bunker in his sleeping bag and dragged over oyster beds until he died.
In 1984, 12 years later, Harrill’s body was exhumed and sent to Chapel Hill, where NC Chief Medical Officer Page Hudson performed an autopsy. He said the embalmed body was moderately decomposed but that he could rule out severe blows, bruises, strangulation marks, stab wounds, or gunshot wounds. Dr. Hudson stated that he found no evidence of violent death.
The State Bureau of Investigation reopened the case, but the evidence and the file had disappeared from the sheriff’s department. A 1994 Raleigh News and Observer article noted that none of the boys who found the body had been contacted during the four subsequent investigations. An SBI Special Agent, Curtis Register, who investigated the case in 1981, agreed with Pickler that there did appear to be drag marks after viewing copies of photos that Pickler had kept. The case remains unsolved.
Harrill was buried three times. It’s almost as if he was as restless in death as in life. In June 1972, he was buried at Sunset Cemetery in Shelby. In October 1984, 12 years later, his body was exhumed for the autopsy, and he was reburied. In 1989, his son, George, had his remains moved to the Federal Point Methodist Church Cemetery, about five miles from his beloved bunker. The Fort Fisher hermit had come home. His headstone bears the legend, “He Made People Think.” Interestingly, his hermit mentor, Empie “Wild Man” Hewett, is also buried there. If ghosts are a thing, it must have been one helluva of a reunion.
A Legacy of Renewal and Hope
Filmmaker Rob Hill, who made the documentary The Fort Fisher Hermit: The Life & Death of Robert E. Harrill, summed up Harrill’s legacy in a 2013 article in Our State magazine as saying:
“People all turn him into what they want him to be. Everyone has their own Hermit.”
That is true of Harrill in particular and perhaps of hermits in general. But as Stanley South said in his letter, “a friendly tourist-attracting hermit is even a rarer phenomenon.” Harrill was an extraordinary person in many ways and struggled with extraordinary problems. Of all the hermits I’ve read or written about, he is the only one I wish I had met.
Some see Harrill as a broken-by-the-world man who retreated to the beach to live out his remaining life in the place he loved, a resourceful yet tragic figure. Others see him as an iconoclast, social reformer, environmentalist, and a bit of a celebrity. A few mark him as a modern-day Henry David Thoreau. A group called the Hermit Society honors his memory and perceived philosophy. There’s even a Facebook group. Maybe check it out.
I am deeply indebted to the Joyner Library at East Carolina University for images, documents, and assistance. I could not possibly have written this post as completely or as accurately without them.
On the BRTC recluse to misanthrope (hermit hatchet) scale, I’m going to rate Robert E. Harrill a half hatchet out of 5. I really want to give him a zero hatchet score, but I feel like his son George’s description of his abusive parenting style in multiple interviews has to be addressed. Robert took in stray animals and genuinely wanted to change the world for the better; there’s a case for zero hatchets.
Check out my new book, Blood on the Blue Ridge: Historic Appalachian True Crime Stories 1808-2004, cowritten with my friend and veteran police officer, Scott Lunsford on Amazon. Buy it here!
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Sources
Robert E. Harrill Papers (#428), East Carolina Manuscript Collection, J. Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University, Greenville, North Carolina, USA
South, Stanley. 2006. An Archaeological Evolution. Springer Science & Business Media.
Edwards, Michael F. 2002. Adverse Possessions: The Complete Story of Robert E. Harrill, The Fort Fisher Hermit
Charlotte Observer, Tuesday, April 02, 1935, Page 7, “Cleveland Man Leaps to Death”
News and Observer, Raleigh, Sunday, March 30, 1958, “The Psychologist in the Pill Box”
Charlotte Observer, Thursday, October 27, 1960, Page 4 A, “Sea and Marshland Lure Shelby Hermit” by Don Gray
Herald-Sun, Durham, NC, Sunday, July 15, 1962, Page 38, “Fort Fisher Hermit” by Grady Jefferys
Charlotte Observer, Friday, November 26, 1971, Page 23, “Concern for People Made Hermit of Him” by Thomas P. Fazio, UPI
Charlotte Observer, Saturday, October 27, 1984, Page 19, “Son Seeks Answers About Life, Death of the Fort Fisher Hermit” by Tish Stoker
News and Observer, Raleigh, Thursday, December 08, 1988, Page 45, “Son Hopes to Lay Fort Fisher Hermit to Rest Near the Sea.” by Dennis Rogers
News and Observer, Raleigh, Sunday, November 13, 1994, Page 1 “The Strange Death of the Hermit.” by Trish Wilson
News and Observer, Raleigh, Sunday, May 26, 2002, Page 57, “The Hermit’s Strange Afterlife” by G.D. Gearino
Charlotte Observer, Friday, July 23, 2004, Page 8, “The Man Who Found Nirvana on the Beach” by Joe DePriest
Starnewsonline.com, August 15, 2009, “Eye on the Fort Fisher Hermit” by Ben Steelman
Ourstate.com, June 28, 2011, “The Legend: Fort Fisher Hermit” by Our State Staff
