The death of the Fort Fisher Hermit 50 years later: The legend, and the questions, remain

WILMINGTON, N.C. —  It was not unusual for the Hermit to get late-night visitors. Often, these visitors came to call on his out-of-the-way abode — an open-air, World War II concrete ammunition bunker on Fort Fisher south of Kure Beach that he'd occupied for more than a decade and a half — after a night of drinking, with mischief on their minds. 

So when the 79-year-old man, laying in his sleeping bag in or near the bunker, heard an approaching car, and then one or more car doors opening and closing, a familiar refrain likely ran through his mind. 

"Here we go again."

Annoyance at being woken up may have turned to fear when the Hermit, whose name was Robert Edward Harrill, heard someone say, "Let's go down and give him a bath," a sarcastic reference to Harrill's notoriously strong body odor. 

Footsteps approached. Suddenly, Harrill, still in his sleeping bag, found himself being picked up off the ground.

"Put me down!" he hollered, as his anonymous visitors carried him to the nearby marsh a dozen or so yards away and dumped him in the drink. Humiliated, dazed, angry and likely afraid, Harrill ran further into the water to evade harassment. When it seemed the coast was clear, Harrill walked back toward his bunker home.

His "guests" pounced again on the walk back. They tossed Harrill around, pushing him from one to another as if they were playing a game of catch. 

"Please stop," Harrill pleaded. "I got a bad heart."

As if to prove the point, Harrill dropped to the ground and lost consciousness, drawing his final breath.

Now it was his attackers' turn to be afraid. Curse words were uttered. Panicked thoughts expressed. The old man, by now covered in sand, was picked up and hurled back into his bunker like a sack of potatoes. A large sheet of thick plywood was placed over the entrance, and the vehicle that had arrived just minutes earlier sped off into the night.

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Or, maybe it didn't happen that way at all. 

Maybe a 79-year-old man, who'd lived a rough, outdoor life, essentially as a homeless person, for the past 17 years, a man with a hernia and a heart condition, picked a cool June night to do what many 79-year-olds have done before him, and gave up the ghost when it was his time. 

These are just two of the theories on how, five decades ago, Robert E. Harrill, the longtime Hermit of Fort Fisher, lived his final minutes on June 3 or 4, 1972.

Among the agreed-upon facts are that, on the morning of June 4, five teenage boys showed up at the police department in Kure Beach, saying they had gone to see the Hermit and found him dead. Shortly after, the county coroner and a medical examiner ruled Harrill died of a heart attack, or of natural causes. It wasn't until 12 years later that an autopsy would be performed.

It's the questions that weren't asked, the evidence that was ignored and the legend of an elderly man that keep this story alive. Finally, all these years later, some think they know what happened to the Hermit of Fort Fisher.

Up until this year, Fred Pickler of Wilmington said he believed individuals in law enforcement might’ve been responsible for Harrill’s demise and that a quick investigation was an attempt to cover up possible wrongdoing. Pickler, a former New Hanover County Sheriff's deputy who was the crime scene investigator of Harrill's death, was a friend of the Hermit and a frequent visitor to his bunker.

He recently told the StarNews, a part of the Paste BN Network, that a "waterman" who was illegally clamming near the Hermit's bunker the night of his death allegedly observed an attack on Harrill by three men. Pickler said the man called him in 2010, shortly after a film documentary, "The Fort Fisher Hermit: The Life & Death of Robert E. Harrill," in which Pickler appears, was released on DVD and told him over the phone about witnessing the attack. But Pickler said the man refused to give his name and he's never been able to determine the identity of the purported eyewitness. 

Pickler said he now believes a group of young men, at least one of whom eventually began working locally as longshoreman, were responsible for the Hermit’s death. He bases this new theory on a retirement party a friend of his attended in which one longshoreman, who was retiring, espoused details about Harrill’s death that only a person at the scene would’ve known, he said. Pickler declined to identify the individual, despite claiming to know his identity.

Rob Hill, who directed "The Fort Fisher Hermit" documentary, originally released in 2004, also has a new theory about what happened to Harrill. A follow-up to his first documentary is in the works, he said. 

Hill declined to say who he suspects is responsible for Harrill’s death.

“The story is not over,” Hill said. “The killer is out there."

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Becoming The Hermit

A legend in his own time, Harrill remains one in death.

Untold thousands have seen the wall-sized mural of his visage, painted by artist Rob Fogle. Multiple books, and countless newspaper and magazine articles, have been written about his life, and his death.

There are at least two film documentaries, including "The Fort Fisher Hermit: The Life & Death of Robert E. Harrill," which played on public television in North Carolina.

He's not the only one who's found plenty in Harrill's life story worth exploring. A play based on Harrill's life, "The Hermit of Fort Fisher" by David Wright. 

"The amazing thing is, he's been gone 50 years, and people still get emotional about what he meant to them," said Wright. "People who knew I had written the play would call me or come up to me on the street and say, 'Let me tell you my story about the Hermit.'"

Harrill was born in Gaffney, South Carolina, west of Charlotte, in 1893. According to multiple biographies and documentaries on Harrill based in part on information collected at East Carolina University's Joyner Library, where many of Harrill's letters and writings reside, his mother and two of his brothers died of typhoid fever when he was a child. The relatives he went to live with were often less than kind. 

In 1913, Harrill married Katie Hamrick, with whom he had four sons and a daughter, although the girl died as an infant. In 1935, one of the couple's sons committed suicide by jumping off a train trestle. Shortly after that tragedy, Harrill's wife left him, moving to Pennsylvania and taking their other three sons with her. Later, the marriage would officially end in divorce. 

Although he had thought he might become a Baptist preacher, Harrill dropped out of what would become Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, the town where he attended high school. He worked a number of odd jobs — cotton mills, watch repair and even serving as Linotypist, setting type in hot lead, supposedly quitting after he contracted lead poisoning.

He also struggled with his mental health. His in-laws committed him to a mental hospital at least once. 

In terms of Southeastern North Carolina, the Hermit's story begins back in 1955. 

That's when Harrill, who was then 62, walked away from a mental hospital in Shelby, North Carolina, possibly fashioning a spoon into a key to make his escape. He hitchhiked his way to Carolina Beach, where he'd vacationed with his family nearly three decades earlier, and started living off the land as best he could. 

Arrested on a vagrancy charge — the first of many brushes with local law enforcement — police sent him back to Shelby. But Harrill returned to Fort Fisher the next year, striking up a friendship with another local character named Empy Hewitt, from whom Harrill learned about the abandoned bunker he would later make famous. 

Pickler spent countless hours getting to know Harrill when he was alive. Since Harrill's death, Pickler has spent decades pursuing the truth about how a man he calls "my friend" might've been killed. A big bear of a man with close-cropped gray hair who is a bit of a character himself Pickler took thousands of photographs of Harrill and co-authored two books on him.

Pickler, who's now 80, said he first encountered Harrill as a teenager in 1956. He was visiting the area near Fort Fisher as part of a camping trip with a Boy Scout troop out of Pinebluff, North Carolina, west of Fayetteville.

“We were set up in camp there and were cooking that night," Pickler said. "And this apparition comes out of the woods there. It was the Hermit.”

When he first came to Fort Fisher, Pickler said, Harrill was living in a wooded area near what's called Battery Buchanan, a little bit west of where he would later find refuge in the bunker, which is nestled between the Atlantic Ocean and the Cape Fear River in an area called The Basin.

On Aug. 16, 1959, the first known reference to "The Hermit" appeared in Wilmington's Sunday Star-News, a predecessor to the current StarNews. Rip Collins, who was then the paper's city editor, wrote a column under the banner "It Seems To Me" with the headline, "The Hermit, The Fisherman."

Describing Harrill as "a character known as 'Joe,' 'The Hermit,' and, according to some, 'That crazy old man,'" Collins said he and Harrill, after meeting a few times, began "discussing all sorts of things. The state of the world, science, humanity — and the lack of it — and the sea."

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Harrill told Collins "people around here were very unkind," and that he'd been shot at and arrested "lots of times." Even so, Harrill had already started to develop an audience of tourists and visitors, with a guest book boasting 4,000 signatures.

Many more newspaper stories would follow, and his legend seemed to grow each year. In fact, Harrill’s estranged son, George Edward Harrill, reconnected with his father after seeing a newspaper article about his dad.

At his peak in the 1960s, according to Michael Edwards, who wrote a biography of Harrill and co-founded The Hermit Society dedicated to preserving his memory, the Hermit was getting 17,000 people a year to sign his visitor's log, leading some to make the claim that Harrill was the area's second-biggest tourist attraction after the Battleship North Carolina. 

“He said he never came there to be a hermit. He enjoyed people,” Edwards said. “He liked company but he wanted to get away from all the negative people in his hometown."

Many of those who came to see him sought the Hermit's sage advice. 

"He saw himself as a psychologist, the 'school of common sense,'" said Wright, the playwright. 

“He talked about the evils of society. He was warning people about government control and crooked politicians,” Edwards said.

Visiting the Hermit became something people just did. 

Key to the Hermit's appeal, perhaps, is the idea that "we’d probably all like to take a break from work, responsibilities and everyday problems and just go off alone somewhere," Eben French Mastin, who has played Harrill five times over the years in "The Hermit of Fort Fisher," told the StarNews in 2017. "I know why he did it. What I don’t know is where he got the strength and willpower to do it for 17 years."

Harrill was known for living off the land, eating shrimp, oysters and fish, even game like possum and raccoon. He always kept dogs, and even a skunk, as pets, and one newspaper story mentions him having a pet horseshoe crab he'd lead around on a string.

But "he didn't live off the land all the time," Pickler said, and people would often bring Harrill food or money, or give him rides to or from the A&P grocery store, now the Sea Merchant, in Carolina Beach.

In her review of the "Hermit" play for the StarNews in 2017, Bridget Callahan wrote that the legend of the Hermit is "the most quintessential Wilmington-area myth we’ve got. It’s how Wilmington wants to think of itself — the lofty-minded renegade shedding the confines of man-made stress and choosing instead the wholesome waters and sand … Harrill did that very thing that so many of us want to but don’t, because we actually like our soft beds, our air-conditioning and our cars."

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Trouble in paradise 

Like most legends, the stories of Harrill are often kinder than reality. He wasn't beloved by all. To some, the Hermit was more of a nuisance than an attraction.

"He wasn't a perfect person," Wright said.

The land Harrill lived on for more than a decade was owned by the U.S. government, and they didn't appreciate his presence. The government leased the land to the North Carolina Department of Archives and History but banned individuals from living on the premises. 

The U.S. Army also argued nobody should live around Fort Fisher because it was within the "safety zone" of Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point, a U.S. Army base used to export weapons, ammunition and other military equipment abroad.

Efforts to evict Harrill were made on multiple occasions. Public health officials made threats, the Army pressured the state to remove Harrill and occasionally sheriff’s deputies served legal papers, but none of the efforts worked.

“The thing that I think put a target on his back was any time he had a problem he’d call the sheriff’s department,” Pickler said. “The sheriff's department had to go and do an investigation. They didn't want to spend time back in the middle of nowhere, but several times they had to send a detective.” 

Harrill also became a target for bored, rowdy teenagers and young people looking for something to do in a New Hanover County that was far less developed than it is today. 

“People would go down there and take out their frustrations on somebody that doesn’t have any protections, so they get in there and beat on the Hermit,” Edwards said.

Harrill was beaten, robbed and harassed throughout his time as a hermit. For some, Harrill was an easy target, elderly and alone, living out in the wilderness. Others likely heard rumors of the Hermit’s buried "wealth." Many patrons put money in Harrill's famous frying pan when they visited, and the Hermit did bury some of that money in and around his bunker.

Multiple fires engulfed Harrill’s bunker during his time at Fort Fisher. One fire in January 1972, less than six months before his death, destroyed all of Harrill’s clothing, supplies and bedding.

On one occasion in 1970, Harrill was arrested and charged with assault with a deadly weapon, reportedly for shooting a 10-gauge shotgun at a group of teenagers who came to visit late at night.

The teens had “attempted to arouse the Hermit by calling,” but when he didn’t respond they left, according to the Aug. 12, 1970, edition of the Wilmington Morning Star. Harrill allegedly fired at the teens, who were between 14 and 18 years old, as they returned to their vehicles. Two teenagers were struck by the gunfire, but neither were admitted to the hospital.

“He was way out in the country. He was very far from the sheriff's department, which was in charge of enforcing the laws,” Edwards said. “It was probably 20, 25 miles from Wilmington down to Fort Fisher, and they got tired of being called down there all the time.” 

Theories of his demise

On the morning of June 4, 1972, five teenagers found Harrill. The boys ventured out to the bunker early in the morning to visit the Hermit. When they arrived, they found Harrill just inside the doorway to the bunker. One boy reached for Harrill’s toe to wake him, but it was cold.

The teens drove to Kure Beach to report what had happened. Deputies were called to the scene and shortly thereafter New Hanover County Coroner Robert Smith arrived.

Smith placed Harrill’s time of death around 11 p.m. the night before. Deputies speculated Harrill “fell where he lay,” according to the June 5, 1972, edition of the Morning Star. 

An initial autopsy was not performed on Harrill, Wright said, and police eventually ruled his death was caused by a heart attack.

But Wright and many others don’t believe the official story of what happened. They say Harrill was murdered, either intentionally or during the course of a prank gone wrong.

“In my opinion, there’s no way he had a heart attack,” Mastin said. A heavy plywood sheet covering the doorway proves someone else was there, Mastin said.

Harrill didn’t normally cover the bunker’s doorway with the plywood during the summer, Pickler said, because he wanted the sea breeze to come in.

Pickler was just a young, 30-year-old deputy when Harrill died. He’d only been with the department for a year at that point, and would leave in 1979. But when he arrived at the bunker on the warm June morning, the scene was contaminated, Pickler said. A crowd had gathered around the bunker and deputies had stepped throughout the scene disturbing evidence, he said.

Pickler pushed the department to do an autopsy on Harrill’s body, he said, but his superiors pushed back strongly. The sheriff’s office was tired of Harrill and their frustration influenced the investigation, Pickler said. Interviews with the boys who found Harrill were short, and deputies seemed all too eager to process the evidence and move on.

“I’m saying they were incompetent to the point that they did not conduct a proper investigation,” Pickler said.

The hastiness of the sheriff’s office investigation might’ve overlooked some potential evidence. Pickler and others report Harrill’s body had cuts on his arms, knees and a couple on his chest. He also was covered in sand.

Drag marks were found leading back to the bunker. Tire tracks were located nearby — it would be all but impossible to drive up to the bunker today, but the area was configured differently in 1972 — indicating a vehicle left the area quickly. A wingtip-style loafer, approximately size 12, according to Pickler, was found in the marsh near the bunker.

The sheriff’s office ignored this evidence, Pickler said, and neither the coroner nor the medical examiner noted any cuts or bruises on Harrill’s body. Pickler and Edwards allege the body was tampered with before the coroner or medical examiner performed their examinations.

Edwards later interviewed the medical examiner, who admitted it was unusual for a victim’s body to be cleaned up before his examination, which Harrill's was. He simply took the word of the sheriff’s office and coroner, Edwards said.

Harrill’s family also believes their loved one was murdered. Harrill’s son, George Edward Harrill, began a private investigation into his father’s death in 1977.

“I felt there had been foul play,” the younger Harrill told the Morning Star in November 1988. Harrill suspected someone tried to rob his father. After Harrill’s death, sheriff’s deputies and family members recovered more than $1,300 (roughly $8,991 today) scattered throughout the bunker.

Twelve years after Harrill’s death, his son exhumed his body so the state’s chief medical examiner could do an autopsy. The examination found nothing to indicate the death wasn’t caused by natural causes, but also was unable to determine a specific cause of death because of the 12 years of decomposition that had occurred.

The State Bureau of Investigation also reached an inconclusive result when it investigated Harrill's death. 

“(The investigator) said he believed that people went down there … and abused him to the point of death,” Edwards said. “He felt that the Hermit certainly did not die of natural causes.”

A spokesperson for the SBI confirmed the agency was involved in an investigation regarding Harrill, but declined to release any documents from the investigation to the StarNews, citing the state’s public record exemption for criminal investigations.

Despite the family’s belief, Smith, the county’s coroner, defended his determination that a heart attack caused Harrill’s death. H.G. Grohman, captain of the sheriff’s office’s detectives at the time of Harrill’s death and future New Hanover County sheriff, said there was no evidence to support the idea Harrill was murdered.

The once and future Hermit

Harrill’s body was returned to Shelby for burial after his death. But 17 years later his family decided to return the Hermit to his home. Approximately 40 people reportedly gathered to honor the Hermit of Fort Fisher when he was buried again in the old Newton family cemetery, according to a report of the ceremony in the Morning Star on June 5, 1989.

“I know he’d be very happy with this,” said George Harrill at the time. “I’m just happy to have him back.”

Visitors still bring offerings to Harrill's grave regularly, said Pastor Shawn Blackwelder with St. Paul's United Methodist Church. During a recent visit, Harrill's grave was unkempt, with poison ivy and other weeds growing on it. It was also covered with trinkets, including a red glass heart. A rusty old Coleman stove like the kind Harrill used sits next to his grave, as does a rusted frying pan filled with coins and even a few moldering dollar bills, set out for visitors just like the Hermit used to at his bunker.

As for the Hermit's bunker, it sits toward the end of the mile-long "Basin Trail" that begins in the parking lot of the North Carolina Aquarium at Fort Fisher's visitors' center and winds through both sand, boardwalks and maritime forest. It's a pleasant walk. Overgrown is the sandy "front yard" where Harrill used to entertain guests, and the bunker is much more tightly hemmed in by trees and brush than it was in 1972. 

In 1995, Edwards and The Hermit Society placed a plaque on the bunker. It reads, in part, "His death is unsolved (yet)."”