Entry · catalog no. 1213
plat-eye
/ /ˈplæt ˌaɪ/ /PLAT-eye
noun · Sea Islands and coastal Lowcountry, South Carolina and Georgia · 1920s
✓ Verified
1.
In Gullah Geechee belief along the Georgia and South Carolina coast, a dreaded spirit met at night on paths, causeways, and the edges of the woods. Coastal Georgia speakers interviewed in the late 1930s described it by its single enormous eye carried out in front of the body, and they treated an encounter as plain bad luck rather than as entertainment. In the wider Lowcountry tradition the plat-eye shifts shape, appearing as a dog, a hog, a calf, or a person, and it is often said to hold to one particular spot. It is not a costume monster; in the communities that name it, it is a hazard you go around.
“He would not walk that causeway after dark for any money — said a plat-eye met him there once and he turned right around.”
2.
In popular Lowcountry retelling, the plat-eye is explained as the spirit of someone murdered or buried without proper rites, set to guard a place or a buried thing. That explanation is everywhere in modern accounts but is looser than the 1930s field record, in which coastal Georgia speakers described the thing and its one eye without supplying a backstory. What the field record does connect is burial: informants in the same conversation held that a decent funeral, with the dead person's belongings placed on the grave, keeps a spirit from wandering.
“Folks say it guards something buried out there, but the old people only ever said what it looked like.”
Origin & Attribution
Gullah Geechee, from the Sea Islands and coastal mainland of South Carolina and Georgia, communities descended from West and Central Africans held on the rice and indigo plantations of the Lowcountry. The earliest printed appearance verified in this pass is a 1922 sketch titled The Plat-Eye, at p. 183 of Ambrose E. Gonzales's The Black Border. The firmest documentary record is Drums and Shadows, the 1940 volume produced by the Savannah unit of the Georgia Writers' Project, which carries the word in its glossary and prints an account of it from Ben Washington, an elderly man interviewed in the pine woods near Eulonia in McIntosh County, Georgia. Popular writing routinely files the plat-eye under generic Southern ghost lore or Charleston tourism. That is a misplacement. The word and the belief belong to a specific Gullah Geechee tradition with African antecedents, carried in a creole language, and should be recorded that way.
1922
Earliest verified print appearance, as the sketch The Plat-Eye in Gonzales's The Black Border
1940
Recorded from Ben Washington near Eulonia, Georgia, and glossed in Drums and Shadows
Region of origin
West
Midwest
N.East
South
The South
Sea Islands and coastal Lowcountry, South Carolina and Georgia · 1920s
Spoken by
Gullah Geechee people of the South Carolina and Georgia coast
$PLATEYThe Record · cultural traction
▲ Steady104 yrs
ahead of the mainstream
35/100
peak cultural energy
Introduced to English by the culture — logged here before the mainstream caught on.
Cultural usage — the recordMainstream search interest
First used
1922
in the culture
Cultural energy indexed from documented usage, search interest, and citation frequency. The recorded date is the archive’s permanent point of record.
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Citations & Sources
■
Ambrose E. Gonzales, The Black Border: Gullah Stories of the Carolina Coast, with a glossary, The State Company, Columbia, S.C., 1922; the sketch The Plat-Eye at p. 183
book · printed
■
+ Cite a sourceGeorgia Writers' Project, Work Projects Administration, Savannah Unit, Mary Granger, District Supervisor, Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies Among the Georgia Coastal Negroes, University of Georgia Press, Athens, 1940
book · printed
See also