A Polaroid

A hermit living in an old WWII bunker on the beach in North Carolina soon became the state's second largest tourist attraction.

Transcript:

It’s the early summer of 1972. You and your family are on vacation and you’re heading to the same place you have for countless summer passed. A place to escape the troubles and worries of everyday life. Heading down US 421 you cross over Snow’s Cut bridge and enter Pleasure Island, or the town of Carolina Beach, North Carolina to be more specific. 

Your station wagon glides along. You pass through the central business district, filled with shops and restaurants. Just a block away is the Atlantic Ocean but between you and the water is the famous Carolina Beach Boardwalk. So many summers spent playing the carnival games, listening to the music pour from the dance halls, eating popcorn and ice cream, riding the rides. But the car doesn’t stop there.

You keep gliding along. You pass into Kure Beach and then to Fort Fisher. The number of buildings and homes falls away as the wilderness dominates the land now. You drive by the old earthen Civil War fort, the namesake for this area. Eventually the road ends and you see cars parked in the sand. You get out with your family and start walking, seemingly to nowhere, but you know better. This is what you’ve come for after all. The main attraction, the big show.

As you approach you see the people standing about. The small concrete bunker sits behind them. Some miscellaneous junk is strewn about and a fire is going. Some people sit around it. There are shells and knick knacks about and a frying pan sitting with a handful of coins in it. And at the center of it all is a man not much over five foot tall. He’s old. His bare chest and arms tanned and rough. His only clothes are a pair of old swim shorts and the beaten straw hat that sits upon his head. His bushy gray beard masks his smiling face. 

Here he is, in all his glory, the hermit of Fort Fisher. He’s lived here in that bunker for just about 17 years and entertained thousands of visitors and generations of families. But, at age 79, this will be his last summer living in the salt marshes in the old World War II remnant. The hermit, a remnant himself, so loved by all those who visit him, will soon be gone. 

This hermit, also known as Robert E. Harrill, first arrived in Carolina Beach in 1955, to start a new life at the ripe age of 62 years old. Except like much of the life he was attempting to leave behind, it didn’t go according to plan at first. He was staying in a tent that first summer after hitchhiking 260 miles down the coast. He was found and charged with vagrancy by the police. They also turned him around and sent him back where he came from. 

But he came back that next summer, and from then on he stayed. It wasn’t long before he found the bunker and realized it would do much better than an old tent if he was to make his life among the marsh a permanent fixture. He didn’t have many survival skills but he was a quick learner. He was an educated man and educated men only get that way by having a thirst for knowledge. And so Robert taught himself to live off the land and what the marshy waters had to offer him. It was the life he’d wanted for so long and now he finally had it. 

Then something strange happened. People started to hear about Robert, the “hermit living at the bunker”, and they started to talk, like people in small towns do. People went out to visit and ask him questions, ones he was happy to answer. And this here is what’s so strange. The hermit was turning out to be not so much of a hermit after all. He welcomed visitors and the visitors came. First locals and then tourists. Everyone wanted to meet the hermit, get their picture taken with him, and he loved every minute of it. 

As the years went on more and more people came to see Robert, the hermit. He even started keeping log books for people to sign their names in. Thousands of people, year after year and in the 1960s the hermit was recognized, though be it unofficially, that he was now the second most popular tourist attraction in the entire state of North Carolina. No small feet for such a small man. Especially for one living alone in a hollowed out bunker on the beach. 

They’d sit and listen to him talk, and the hermit would talk. He was passionate about the state of the world and what was wrong with it. He was even writing a book inspired by the lessons he’d learned throughout his life. He wanted to start and teach a “school of common sense” and that, in a way, was what he did there on that beach. He wasn’t just for show, he’d talk politics and philosophies with his visitors and they’d often leave with a new idea or two to go along with their pictures they’d taken with him. 

The locals essentially adopted the hermit as their own and looked after him. They’d bring him food and some old clothes for the cold winter months. They’d give him rides on the occasional times he went into town, looking to buy the few extra things he needed, using the spare change he’d collected from his visitors. They became a type of family to the hermit, something that never came easy in his life before. Always the outsider for being different, the hermit was now accepted and even loved by the community who embraced his differences. 

Before he became the hermit though, life was always a bit of a struggle for Robert. From growing up in a poor farming family in Shelby, North Carolina, to trying to support a family of his own during the great depression, and beyond. But it was trauma in his early life that was likely what set him on the path to becoming the hermit. He lost his mother and two brothers to illness when he was quite young. His new step-mother, after his father remarried, was unkind to him. Robert would later speak about her abuse and the hostile home environment. How he’d seek refuge in the woods and in nature; something that he’d carry with him for the rest of his life. 

He did eventually find some happiness in his education, a place where he also met his future wife, Katie Hamrick. They started a family and it was nice for a while. But Robert, not one to stay put for long, soon took his new family on the road. The couple and their four sons packed into a homemade sort of winnebago and set off. They’d go town to town, Robert doing what work he could get to make ends meet. It was a good enough life for Robert but the family needed more stability, so they eventually settled back down in Shelby.

In the years that followed more troubles arose. Robert’s in-laws did not approve of his unstable lifestyle and what it was doing to their daughter and the family. They thought too that Robert himself was unstable. So much so that they had Robert involuntarily committed. He wasn’t there long but the point had been made. Robert was different and they didn’t like it. 

As time went on it only got worse for Robert and his family. Things finally boiled over in 1935 when Katie took the kids and left for a housekeeping job in Pennsylvania. She worked for a rich man who she later married after divorcing Robert. And if that wasn’t enough, earlier that year, their eldest son, who was struggling with lack of work during the depression and a baby on the way, decided to take his own life.

Depressed and heartbroken, not much is known about what Robert did in the years following those two great losses. He worked various jobs, none for very long stretches. Then nearly twenty years later, in that summer of 1955, Robert pops up again. With just one bag with him, he set off on the road. A “normal” life just wouldn't do anymore for him. He was ready to live the life he wanted. Off the land, on his own, and without a worry in sight. The man many knew as Robert Harrill would soon be all but gone. Soon he would just be “the hermit”, and that’d be good enough for him. 

And here I would like to say that he lived happily ever after. That all those years as the hermit were pure joy. That everyone that came out to that bunker was kind and respectful. But life doesn't always have a happy ending. While many people embraced the hermit’s different choice of lifestyle, some others couldn’t just let him be. 

Men and boys, drunk and bored, they’d go down to the bunker just to mess with the hermit. They’d fight him and beat him up. Outnumbered four or five to one he did his best to fight them off and run away. They’d toss or drag him around. A group tried to break his neck on one occasion and he was hit in the head with a pipe on another. He had the scars to prove it. He was robbed of what little money he had, again and again. They’d expected a small fortune but left with just a pile of change. He was picked up by a car and kidnapped once. More people after some money and looking to give him a hard time. He got away that time too. He complained to the police, but what could they do, he was only a hermit anyway.  A man just wanting to get away from it all. A man who was different because he chose to live his life in a way that people didn’t understand. 

Then on June 4th of 1972, a group of boys who were regular visitors of the hermit, stopped to see him one morning and ended up seeing something they would never forget. There, in the bunker, that concrete relic from a previous generation’s war, was the body of Robert E. Harrill. 

The details about the death of the hermit are still much up for debate. Though the police declared he died of natural causes, no autopsy was done despite the pleas of many and a large amount of evidence to the contrary. The hermit’s sleeping bag was found a ways out in the marsh with signs that he was still in it when it was dragged there. There were other signs of a scuffle in the dirt near the bunker and tire tracks from a vehicle. The hermit also appeared to have been tossed inside the bunker. His clothes wet, his body covered with sand, his legs battered with cuts and scrapes. 

We don’t know exactly what happened to the hermit. Who or what killed him. And we probably never will. But instead of focusing on his death or how he died, let us focus on how he lived. With warmth and kindness. With honesty, to others and himself. When he finally embraced and started living the life he wanted, he found happiness. Perhaps we can learn something from him. One last lesson from the school of common sense. That “different” isn’t bad, that “different” isn’t even different if you’re being true to yourself. Perhaps being the hermit was just Robert truly being Robert, and we should all be so lucky. 

So as the family loads back into the car on that early summer day of 1972, some of the last visitors the hermit would ever have, they leave with a souvenir they will always remember. Not just the pictures they took with the hermit, or the stories the kids will tell their kids for years to come. But the thought, the idea, that a man could live a solitary life like that, away from the world, with just the clothes on his back, and be completely happy about it. 

On Robert E. Harrill’s grave there is a saying. Something one of his sons thought summed him up and I have to agree. Seventeen years living in the sand, thousands and thousands of visitors, seventy-nine years of life, and under his name, under his title The Fort Fisher Hermit, is a quote. “He made people think”. 

Today’s episode was written by me, Cory Greiner. Keepsake is produced and edited by Alex Hoelscher. If you have an idea you’d like us to explore on the show, send us an email at keepsakepod@gmail.com. 

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And finally, next episode’s item, A Pizza Box.

This has been Keepsake. Thanks for listening.