Common Sense and Mystery: The Curious story of the Fort Fisher Hermit - By Kate Sweeney - North Brunswick Magazine
Common Sense and Mystery: The Curious story of the Fort Fisher Hermit
By Kate Sweeney
Everyone is fascinated by a hermit. Since local filmmaker Rob Hill made his film, The Fort Fisher Hermit: The Life & Death of Robert E. Harrill, which details the life and mysterious death of the region’s legendary hermit, the movie has caught the attention of a lot of people. The Academy of Arts and Sciences recently nominated the documentary for a Mid-South Emmy. Major indie film distributor Cinetic Media has snapped up the digital rights. And if you missed the poignant documentary at the Cucalorus film festival in the fall 2004, perhaps you can catch it on the small screen beginning in March, when American Public Television plans its nationwide release.
The story compels and haunts. Here’s a man who jettisons everything—possessions, profession and indoor plumbing—to live, for 17 years, exposed to the elements on Fort Fisher’s scrubby landscape.
Even after seeing the film and talking to Hill in his pleasant, modern film studio on Princess Street, I wanted more. I wanted to understand better. I wanted to go to the bunker. So, on a brilliant morning in early fall, Hill and I hiked out together to the place Robert Harrill lived—and died.
To begin with, it’s hot. Nine-thirty in the morning and already the heat—unseasonable for October—is bearing down heavy through the muggy air. Ten minutes ago we were strolling the cool, other-worldly halls of the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. Now we’re pulling small burrs from our socks as we traipse through the salt marsh and maritime forest at the southern end of Fort Fisher. It’s wild country, the air swarming with mosquitoes and those small buzzing flies that hover around your ears. Wooden walkways caked with sand bridge the paths across estuaries thick with sedge grass between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic. There are deer, egrets and other wildlife—even tales of a black panther—that roam this marshland. What brings us to this untamed place, however, is the dwelling place of a man. After a 20 minute’s walk, our shirts are soaked through with sweat and our ankles are knobby with bug bites. We knew beforehand that this would be the case. We came anyway, or maybe because of this, like pilgrims, to see the bunker of the hermit.
There’s a tape recording from the 1960s in Hill’s documentary. The recording is of the hermit talking. He’s saying he can’t afford the high-priced insect repellent you buy in stores. "I mix kerosene oil, diesel oil and gasoline… and put a few spoonfuls of high-priced mosquito spray or repellent in it, and I get along pretty well," he says. One time, Hill tells me, the hermit slapped on some discarded military repellent before settling down to his fire for the evening. By the next morning, he had serious burns across his leathery chest, his arms and legs.
untamed place, however, is the dwelling place of a man. After a 20 minute’s walk, our shirts are soaked through with sweat and our ankles are knobby with bug bites. We knew beforehand that this would be the case. We came anyway, or maybe because of this, like pilgrims, to see the bunker of the hermit.
There’s a tape recording from the 1960s in Hill’s documentary. The recording is of the hermit talking. He’s saying he can’t afford the high-priced insect repellent you buy in stores. "I mix kerosene oil, diesel oil and gasoline… and put a few spoonfuls of high-priced mosquito spray or repellent in it, and I get along pretty well," he says. One time, Hill tells me, the hermit slapped on some discarded military repellent before settling down to his fire for the evening. By the next morning, he had serious burns across his leathery chest, his arms and legs.
Visitors made the drive down from Carolina Beach; they put some change in his small iron skillet and the hermit talked. He’d gesticulate wildly with his arms, speaking about current events, politicians and society’s "psychotic problems." He was writing a book, see. He had plans to open a school, right there at the bunker. It would be called the School of Common Sense, and it would be all about living simply.
He became The Hermit. Tourists visited even in the dead of winter and paid for a picture. For this, he removed his parka, hat and shirt and donned the trademark straw hat. They came, after all—and paid—for the true experience of the hermit who lived at the beach, and he made sure they left satisfied.
Robert Harrill didn’t spend his whole life a hermit. He was born in 1895 into a hardscrabble farming family in the South Carolina foothills. There’s talk of an abusive childhood, a troubled marriage and mental problems that led to stints in Broughten Mental Hospital in Morganton, North Carolina. In 1955, after a lifetime spent navigating storm-tossed relationships and fighting personal demons, Harrill came to Fort Fisher, at the southern tip of Carolina Beach.
On the sands of the scrubby salt marshland between the Cape and the Atlantic, about half a mile from where the fort’s ancient Confederate earthworks eroded silently away year by year, Robert Harrill knew of a World War II military bunker. He had visited the place with his wife and kids years ago, on vacations. At age 60 he returned for good. What must it have been like, walking through the sharp sedge grass alone, bearing every possession he intended to keep? What did he think as he entered for the first time the concrete bunker where he would live out the remainder of his life? The sands and the scrubland offer no clue.
In the late 1960s, the Fort Fisher Hermit was unofficially declared to be the region’s second most popular tourist attraction, after the Battleship North Carolina. Harrill had a guestbook. He kept it atop a rock and weighted its pages open with shells and stones. People visited once, twice, a dozen times. They brought him barbecue from their picnics, or beer and marshmallows. They spent the afternoon and evening around his fire. They went home and got married, had kids and told them about this old hermit they met years ago, as teenagers. Then the family went on vacation and the kids got to meet Harrill for themselves. Second-generation hermit fans.
One time, a wandering preacher came to see the hermit. Reverend Vaughn preached hellfire and brimstone and he rode a motorcycle. He and Harrill hit it off and the good Rev’ convinced the hermit to accompany him to the Kure Beach Pier, where, for an afternoon, they preached and lectured simultaneously: holy damnation and salvation from one mouth, common sense and oneness with the world from the other.
Robert Harrill played this part for the crowds, but he also lived it. That meant 17 years of 100-degree heat and 30-degree cold, and long winter weeks of seeing not one other soul. It meant subsisting on a mixture of the few odd groceries, picnic food brought by visitors, and the occasional seafood he caught. It also meant that he was subject to ill treatment by some. He said the summer’s nonstop tourist traffic exhausted him. He couldn’t control when people came, or who came. In his years at the bunker, the hermit, a man in his 60s and then 70s, was harassed, stolen from, knocked around, even kidnapped once. His makeshift home was trashed repeatedly by rowdies who came late at night. He had no telephone to call for help.
On the morning of June 3, 1972, Robert Harrill was found dead inside his bunker. His body was bruised, cut and fairly saturated with water and sand. A crime scene investigator found his sleeping bag bunched up in the nearby sedge grass, also plastered in sand. Also found was a set of tire tracks and a man’s wingtip loafer. No further investigation into his death was conducted.
Robert Harrill was buried in Shelby, North Carolina. In 1978, at the request of his son, his body was exhumed and examined, but by then the evidence had been destroyed, and he was re-buried near Carolina Beach. The real story of his death remains a mystery. When I asked Hill about this, the filmmaker shrugged and said, "It was never the intention of my film to uncover who killed the hermit. You know?" He paused and leaned in. "Okay, okay." Gave me a look. "I like living in Wilmington."
Just as compelling as questions of his end are those of Robert Harrill’s life itself. The bunker still stands, four slabs of concrete smaller than one of those driveway storage units, so very alone out there in the marshland near Fort Fisher. You stand before it and you have to wonder: Why did a man choose to live here for close to two decades? Many people who got to know him say that Harrill found his calling here, that he found himself. What that means, though, is less than clear, out here under the heavy sun, the bunker nearly overrun with inhospitable flora. There is only the buzzing of flies, only the roar of the ocean in this place that’s otherwise again grown silent as the grassy earthworks nearby.
http://www.thenbm.com/show/fortfisherhermit.html
By Kate Sweeney
Everyone is fascinated by a hermit. Since local filmmaker Rob Hill made his film, The Fort Fisher Hermit: The Life & Death of Robert E. Harrill, which details the life and mysterious death of the region’s legendary hermit, the movie has caught the attention of a lot of people. The Academy of Arts and Sciences recently nominated the documentary for a Mid-South Emmy. Major indie film distributor Cinetic Media has snapped up the digital rights. And if you missed the poignant documentary at the Cucalorus film festival in the fall 2004, perhaps you can catch it on the small screen beginning in March, when American Public Television plans its nationwide release.
The story compels and haunts. Here’s a man who jettisons everything—possessions, profession and indoor plumbing—to live, for 17 years, exposed to the elements on Fort Fisher’s scrubby landscape.
Even after seeing the film and talking to Hill in his pleasant, modern film studio on Princess Street, I wanted more. I wanted to understand better. I wanted to go to the bunker. So, on a brilliant morning in early fall, Hill and I hiked out together to the place Robert Harrill lived—and died.
To begin with, it’s hot. Nine-thirty in the morning and already the heat—unseasonable for October—is bearing down heavy through the muggy air. Ten minutes ago we were strolling the cool, other-worldly halls of the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher. Now we’re pulling small burrs from our socks as we traipse through the salt marsh and maritime forest at the southern end of Fort Fisher. It’s wild country, the air swarming with mosquitoes and those small buzzing flies that hover around your ears. Wooden walkways caked with sand bridge the paths across estuaries thick with sedge grass between the Cape Fear River and the Atlantic. There are deer, egrets and other wildlife—even tales of a black panther—that roam this marshland. What brings us to this untamed place, however, is the dwelling place of a man. After a 20 minute’s walk, our shirts are soaked through with sweat and our ankles are knobby with bug bites. We knew beforehand that this would be the case. We came anyway, or maybe because of this, like pilgrims, to see the bunker of the hermit.
There’s a tape recording from the 1960s in Hill’s documentary. The recording is of the hermit talking. He’s saying he can’t afford the high-priced insect repellent you buy in stores. "I mix kerosene oil, diesel oil and gasoline… and put a few spoonfuls of high-priced mosquito spray or repellent in it, and I get along pretty well," he says. One time, Hill tells me, the hermit slapped on some discarded military repellent before settling down to his fire for the evening. By the next morning, he had serious burns across his leathery chest, his arms and legs.
untamed place, however, is the dwelling place of a man. After a 20 minute’s walk, our shirts are soaked through with sweat and our ankles are knobby with bug bites. We knew beforehand that this would be the case. We came anyway, or maybe because of this, like pilgrims, to see the bunker of the hermit.
There’s a tape recording from the 1960s in Hill’s documentary. The recording is of the hermit talking. He’s saying he can’t afford the high-priced insect repellent you buy in stores. "I mix kerosene oil, diesel oil and gasoline… and put a few spoonfuls of high-priced mosquito spray or repellent in it, and I get along pretty well," he says. One time, Hill tells me, the hermit slapped on some discarded military repellent before settling down to his fire for the evening. By the next morning, he had serious burns across his leathery chest, his arms and legs.
Visitors made the drive down from Carolina Beach; they put some change in his small iron skillet and the hermit talked. He’d gesticulate wildly with his arms, speaking about current events, politicians and society’s "psychotic problems." He was writing a book, see. He had plans to open a school, right there at the bunker. It would be called the School of Common Sense, and it would be all about living simply.
He became The Hermit. Tourists visited even in the dead of winter and paid for a picture. For this, he removed his parka, hat and shirt and donned the trademark straw hat. They came, after all—and paid—for the true experience of the hermit who lived at the beach, and he made sure they left satisfied.
Robert Harrill didn’t spend his whole life a hermit. He was born in 1895 into a hardscrabble farming family in the South Carolina foothills. There’s talk of an abusive childhood, a troubled marriage and mental problems that led to stints in Broughten Mental Hospital in Morganton, North Carolina. In 1955, after a lifetime spent navigating storm-tossed relationships and fighting personal demons, Harrill came to Fort Fisher, at the southern tip of Carolina Beach.
On the sands of the scrubby salt marshland between the Cape and the Atlantic, about half a mile from where the fort’s ancient Confederate earthworks eroded silently away year by year, Robert Harrill knew of a World War II military bunker. He had visited the place with his wife and kids years ago, on vacations. At age 60 he returned for good. What must it have been like, walking through the sharp sedge grass alone, bearing every possession he intended to keep? What did he think as he entered for the first time the concrete bunker where he would live out the remainder of his life? The sands and the scrubland offer no clue.
In the late 1960s, the Fort Fisher Hermit was unofficially declared to be the region’s second most popular tourist attraction, after the Battleship North Carolina. Harrill had a guestbook. He kept it atop a rock and weighted its pages open with shells and stones. People visited once, twice, a dozen times. They brought him barbecue from their picnics, or beer and marshmallows. They spent the afternoon and evening around his fire. They went home and got married, had kids and told them about this old hermit they met years ago, as teenagers. Then the family went on vacation and the kids got to meet Harrill for themselves. Second-generation hermit fans.
One time, a wandering preacher came to see the hermit. Reverend Vaughn preached hellfire and brimstone and he rode a motorcycle. He and Harrill hit it off and the good Rev’ convinced the hermit to accompany him to the Kure Beach Pier, where, for an afternoon, they preached and lectured simultaneously: holy damnation and salvation from one mouth, common sense and oneness with the world from the other.
Robert Harrill played this part for the crowds, but he also lived it. That meant 17 years of 100-degree heat and 30-degree cold, and long winter weeks of seeing not one other soul. It meant subsisting on a mixture of the few odd groceries, picnic food brought by visitors, and the occasional seafood he caught. It also meant that he was subject to ill treatment by some. He said the summer’s nonstop tourist traffic exhausted him. He couldn’t control when people came, or who came. In his years at the bunker, the hermit, a man in his 60s and then 70s, was harassed, stolen from, knocked around, even kidnapped once. His makeshift home was trashed repeatedly by rowdies who came late at night. He had no telephone to call for help.
On the morning of June 3, 1972, Robert Harrill was found dead inside his bunker. His body was bruised, cut and fairly saturated with water and sand. A crime scene investigator found his sleeping bag bunched up in the nearby sedge grass, also plastered in sand. Also found was a set of tire tracks and a man’s wingtip loafer. No further investigation into his death was conducted.
Robert Harrill was buried in Shelby, North Carolina. In 1978, at the request of his son, his body was exhumed and examined, but by then the evidence had been destroyed, and he was re-buried near Carolina Beach. The real story of his death remains a mystery. When I asked Hill about this, the filmmaker shrugged and said, "It was never the intention of my film to uncover who killed the hermit. You know?" He paused and leaned in. "Okay, okay." Gave me a look. "I like living in Wilmington."
Just as compelling as questions of his end are those of Robert Harrill’s life itself. The bunker still stands, four slabs of concrete smaller than one of those driveway storage units, so very alone out there in the marshland near Fort Fisher. You stand before it and you have to wonder: Why did a man choose to live here for close to two decades? Many people who got to know him say that Harrill found his calling here, that he found himself. What that means, though, is less than clear, out here under the heavy sun, the bunker nearly overrun with inhospitable flora. There is only the buzzing of flies, only the roar of the ocean in this place that’s otherwise again grown silent as the grassy earthworks nearby.
http://www.thenbm.com/show/fortfisherhermit.html
posted by robhill at 2:22 PM
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