Plat-Eye

Also Known As: also plateye; a Gullah-Geechee word of the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry, whose first element *plat* has never been traced to a source
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: African American Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Undead/Cursed Beings
Mythical Attributes: A restless spirit that puts on and discards bodies at will and is known chiefly by its burning eyes.
Role in Mythos: It is the worst of the returning dead on the Gullah-Geechee coast, the one that waits on the roads and at the graves and cannot be reasoned with.
Relation to Humans: People who lived along the coastal roads and island paths timed their walking to avoid it and did not speak of it afterwards if they met it. It punishes trespass rather than sin, which makes it far harder to avoid than a devil.

The road at Sandfly is nine miles southeast of Savannah and it goes to sand under your shoes about a mile in, pine barren on one side and oak on the other, the moss hanging low enough to touch. A woman walking it at dusk in the nineteen-thirties stopped where the car tracks crossed and saw a small man sitting on the rail, no taller than a forearm, with a little tin lamp on his head that gleamed. She looked hard at him. He had a moustache, so he was grown. She shouted for someone to come and see, and by the time anyone got there the rail was empty. Afterwards other people saw him too, always when the moon was new and it was drizzling, sometimes walking as a man and sometimes running as an animal, and the reason everyone gave for his being there was that money was buried nearby.

That is the shape of the thing. Not a face, not a body, a habit. The Savannah Unit of the Georgia Writers’ Project spent 1936 to 1938 on that coast and its islands taking down what elderly Black Georgians told them, and when they printed the results in 1940 they put a word list at the back for readers who had never heard the speech. Most of the entries are food and prayer and household work. One of them is four words long: plat-eye, especially dreaded ghost.

The ordinary word for a ghost on that coast was shadduh. A shadduh could be a nuisance, a relative, a hungry thing that wanted feeding. The plat-eye was the one you did not want. Merriam-Webster, which carries the word to this day, calls it a ghost, spook, or evil spirit with fiery eyes, and notes that the first half of the name has no traceable origin. The neat explanation everyone offers, that its eye is flat and round as a plate, is a guess made after the fact by people who wanted the name to mean something.

What the eyes are attached to changes. Katie Brown, whose great-grandfather Belali Mohomet had been Thomas Spalding’s driver on Sapelo Island, came down the road one night and heard something behind her running low and close to the ground. It passed near enough for her to see it well: long tusks, tongue out, thick hair like a Newfoundland. There had never been a dog like it on the island. Another night, walking home with her husband, she heard a stamping, and something came so close she could nearly have touched it, and then it turned into a spotted ox and galloped off across the field. Her husband saw nothing at all. She had a word for the moment of the change. Budge, she called it. And she took a lesson from the night: when you see one, you do not talk about it.

Nobody agreed on what it looked like.

The people who described these encounters were describing spirits generally, and the compilers filed all of it under the same heading, but the pattern is consistent enough to say what the dreaded version was dreaded for. It appears where the dead were not settled. A body that died away from home had to be shipped back for burial or the spirit would find no rest and would go wandering the countryside instead. The spirit never goes into the ground with the body, one woman in Sunbury explained; it just wanders about, and it comes out when the moon is new. First dark and the middle of the night were the dangerous hours. And it appears where something is buried and unaccounted for, which on that coast could mean a grave and could mean money.

Grant Johnson found out what happens when you take a shortcut past all this. He wanted firewood and he climbed the cemetery fence to get it, and he did not stop at the gate to ask leave, which on Sapelo you do whether or not anyone is standing there. He was cutting as fast as he could when he looked up and a big black dog was coming at him with one forepaw raised, red eyes, teeth bared in something like a grin. He went back over that fence without finishing the job. Two men on opposite sides of the island told that story to the collectors independently, in almost the same words, and neither of them offered it as a story. They offered it as the reason you ask.

Set against this, the version of the plat-eye that circulates now is a great deal tidier. It has one eye the size of a dinner plate, it stands over Confederate gold buried by a fleeing planter, and it can be shaken off with a splash of whiskey poured on the ground while you run. Some of that may be old. The written trail is shorter than the belief: Ambrose Gonzales, the white newspaperman who founded The State in Columbia, printed a story called “The Plat-Eye” in his 1922 collection The Black Border, rendering Gullah in heavy phonetic dialect for a white readership. He is a transmission point and worth reading as one, in the same way Joel Chandler Harris is, but he is not where the plat-eye comes from. It comes from a coast where the dead were understood to be present, hungry, and easily offended, and where a great deal of the population had good reason to know that a grave could go unmarked.

Its powers are all consequences of that. It can wear whatever will get close to you, and it does not need to keep the same body twice. It holds ground rather than hunting, so it turns up at the bend, the gate, the piece of woods that everyone walks around instead of through. It does not need to touch anyone to do its work; the fear is the whole of it, and the fear is durable enough that a road can be avoided for two generations after the last sighting.

Its limits are just as practical. It is tied to a place and cannot follow far. It is a poor enough impersonator that the eyes always give it away, which is why the eyes are the part the name kept. And the entire apparatus of coastal burial practice, the setting-up with the body through the night, the food left in the room, the possessions broken on the grave, the leave asked at the cemetery gate, exists to keep a spirit from becoming one of these in the first place. The plat-eye is what you get when that work is skipped.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a plat-eye?

A plat-eye is a shape-changing ghost from the Gullah-Geechee folklore of the South Carolina and Georgia Lowcountry. The Georgia Writers’ Project glossed the word in 1940 as “especially dreaded ghost”, distinguishing it from shadduh, the ordinary word for a spirit. Merriam-Webster records it as a ghost, spook, or evil spirit with fiery eyes.

What does a plat-eye look like?

The plat-eye has no fixed body. Coastal witnesses described it as a dog larger and hairier than any real dog, as something that turned into a spotted ox mid-stride, and as a small figure carrying a light, and the one constant across the accounts is the eyes. The popular claim that it has a single eye as wide as a plate is a later explanation of the name rather than a detail from the field record.

Where does the plat-eye come from?

It is understood to be the spirit of someone whose death or burial went wrong. On the Gullah-Geechee coast a body that died away from home had to be brought back or the spirit would never rest, and the spirit was not thought to go into the ground with the body in any case. A plat-eye is that unsettled spirit staying near the place it is bound to, which is often a grave or something buried.

How do you avoid a plat-eye?

Mostly by not giving one a reason to exist. The coastal burial customs, sitting up with the body, leaving food for the spirit, placing the dead person’s possessions on the grave, and asking leave at the cemetery gate before entering, were all understood as ways of settling a spirit properly. Katie Brown of Sapelo Island added a rule for anyone who meets one anyway: once you have seen it, do not talk about it.

Is the plat-eye the same as a boo hag?

No. A boo hag comes indoors, takes a sleeping person’s skin and rides them through the night, and the harm is done to the body. A plat-eye stays outside on the roads and at the graves, holds its ground rather than hunting, and works entirely by dread.