They Called Him ‘Devil’s White’… The Albino Slave Who sᴋɪɴɴᴇᴅ 9 Overseers Alive Georgia 1853 | HO!!!!

Along the swamp-choked corridor of the Ogeechee River in southeastern Georgia, between 1853 and 1854, nine white overseers vanished without a trace. No newspaper printed the story. No inquest was ever held. The county records of Burke County listed each man with the same terse explanation: relocated west.

But among the enslaved population, another story took root — one so horrifying that it could only survive in whispers. They spoke of a pale figure that moved through the cypress groves at night. A ghost-white man who hunted those who had once commanded the whip. They called him “Devil’s White.”

The Land of Cotton and Death

In the early 1850s, Burke County was a kingdom of contradiction — lush, fertile, and deadly. The Ogeechee’s swamps nourished sprawling rice plantations where enslaved men and women stood waist-deep in stagnant water from dawn to dusk, cutting and planting under the suffocating Georgia sun. Fever and cholera claimed dozens each year.

The Calhoun Plantation was one of the largest, its 3,000 acres stretching from riverbank to forest edge. Its owner, Jeremiah Calhoun, preferred Savannah society to the brutality of fieldwork, leaving the management of his estate to a man named Thomas Greer — a seasoned overseer infamous for his “discipline.”

Greer was the kind of man plantation owners valued most — efficient, cruel, and utterly without conscience. He ruled with the whip and pistol, extracting every ounce of labor from the enslaved under his control. By 1853, his name was synonymous with terror from Savannah to the South Carolina line.

And then came the man who would end him.

A Man Without Color

In October 1853, an enslaved man arrived at the Calhoun plantation under unusual circumstances. His transfer papers were bare: Male, 28, albino. Origin: Chatham County. Occupation: field hand.

His name was not recorded, but the enslaved called him Silas. His appearance was unlike anything they had ever seen — skin as pale as candle wax, eyes so light they seemed almost colorless, hair white as cotton. He burned in the sun, blistered in hours, yet endured his punishment in silence.

He had been sold four times in six years. Each sale was preceded by “disciplinary trouble.” One previous master described him as “resistant to correction.” Another wrote, “Displays no pain under punishment.”

Thomas Greer considered him a challenge — and soon, a problem.

Within three days of Silas’s arrival, Greer whipped him for failing to meet the field quota. Twenty lashes, delivered before the assembled slaves. Silas did not cry out. Did not beg. Did not move. He stood there bleeding and silent, his pale eyes fixed on some far horizon beyond Greer’s reach.

By nightfall, the quarters buzzed with unease. “He don’t feel pain like other men,” one worker whispered. Another replied, “No, he stores it.”

The Disappearances Begin

On January 7, 1854, Wade Parsons, one of Greer’s assistant overseers, vanished. His cabin was undisturbed — rifle still leaning by the door, food cold on the table. There were no signs of a struggle.

Three weeks later, Daniel Carmichael, Parsons’s replacement, disappeared the same way. Then two more in March. Their rifles were found stacked neatly against a cypress tree.

Greer searched the plantation and the surrounding swamps for days. Nothing. The men had simply evaporated.

When he questioned the enslaved population, no one spoke. Fear hung in the air like humidity before a storm. Even Greer, who prided himself on control, began to feel it slipping.

He doubled the patrols. He ordered nightly roll calls. He whipped twice as many men. But every measure of control only seemed to tighten the silence that surrounded him.

By the time Jeremiah Calhoun rode down from Savannah to inspect his estate in late March, four overseers were already gone.

The Albino in the Grove

One name kept surfacing in whispers: Silas.

An old field hand named Caesar told Greer he had seen the pale man walking into the cypress groves after dark. Sometimes carrying something heavy. Sometimes returning hours later, empty-handed.

Greer had Silas seized, stripped, and chained for interrogation. Over the course of three hours, he was whipped, burned, and beaten while Calhoun and the other overseers watched.

Silas did not scream. He did not curse. He did not plead.

He simply endured.

When they dragged his limp, blood-soaked body back to the quarters, even the most hardened overseers refused to meet his gaze.

That night, two more men — the ones who had helped torture him — disappeared.

By dawn, their rifles were found resting against the wall of the main house. Their hats still on the ground.

Into the Swamp

Greer was unraveling. He sent Calhoun’s secretary galloping to Savannah to beg for soldiers. Then, desperate for answers, he promised freedom to any enslaved person who revealed the truth.

Only one came forward — a sixteen-year-old named Caleb.

He claimed he had seen Silas carrying “bundles” into the swamp at night. Heavy ones.

Greer ordered Caleb to lead him there before dark. They set out — Greer, Caleb, and a guard named Patterson — following a narrow, half-flooded path between towering cypress trunks.

The air stank of rot. Insects screamed from every direction.

When they reached the clearing, they saw what no one could ever unsee.

The Shrine of Skins

At the center of the swamp clearing stood a wooden frame, eight feet high, built from cypress branches bound with leather strips. Hanging from it were nine human skins, flayed and cured like tanner’s hides — faces, hands, even hair still visible.

The missing overseers.

Their bodies were gone, but their skins swayed gently in the wind, the sunlight filtering through like gauze.

Greer recognized Wade Parsons by a scar on the arm. Another bore the tattoo of Robert Finch, an anchor from his days at sea.

The ground beneath them was smeared with dried blood and strange, precise cuts — the work of someone trained in tanning.

That’s when Caleb whispered, trembling, “He’s here.”

The Devil in the Trees

Silas stepped out from the shadows, bare-chested, his back a map of fresh wounds and pale scars. He held a long knife, its blade gleaming wet in the fading light.

“Put it down,” Greer ordered, raising his rifle. “Surrender now.”

Silas’s voice was calm, steady. “You already know why I did it.”

“Why?” Greer demanded.

“Because they thought pain was theirs to give. I just gave it back.”

Patterson fired — and missed. Silas moved faster than the eye could follow. One flash of steel, and the guard collapsed, throat opened.

Greer’s next shot went wild. He turned and ran, crashing through the swamp. Behind him, the water rippled, branches broke, but he never saw what followed. Only the whisper behind his ear before the knife found him:

“Did they say please?”

Judgment at Dawn

At sunrise, Silas returned.

He walked out of the cypress grove carrying a bundle wrapped in cloth. Two hundred enslaved men and women watched in silence as he crossed the clearing and stopped twenty feet from the Calhoun mansion.

Jeremiah Calhoun stood trembling on the porch, rifle in hand.

“I brought you something,” Silas said, and laid the bundle on the ground. Inside was Thomas Greer’s severed head — eyes open, mouth frozen mid-scream.

“This plantation lived on fear,” Silas said. “Now you know what it feels like.”

Calhoun raised his rifle but couldn’t fire. Behind Silas stood the people he had owned all his life — and for the first time, they did not look afraid.

Silas turned and walked back toward the swamp. He was never seen again.

The Legend of Devil’s White

By the time federal troops arrived days later, the Calhoun plantation was finished. The cypress clearing was found exactly as Caleb had described — the skins still hanging, the air thick with decay.

The soldiers burned the frame and buried what they could find. Calhoun tried to sell the estate, but no overseer would take the job. Within a year, the plantation was abandoned.

Rumors spread across Georgia: that an albino slave had killed nine white men; that he had vanished into the swamp; that at night, under the moss-draped trees, pale eyes could still be seen watching from the dark.

A century later, a historian discovered a forgotten bill of sale from 1853 describing a transfer from Chatham County. The enslaved man sold to Jeremiah Calhoun had been trained as a tanner — a craftsman skilled in curing animal hides.

That single detail gave the legend its final, terrible truth.

The Monster They Made

In the decades after emancipation, former slaves of Burke County still spoke of him — some as a man, others as a spirit.

“Devil’s White wasn’t no devil,” one elderly woman told interviewers in 1903. “He was what we needed him to be — the fear they gave us, turned back on them.”

Whether Silas died in those swamps or escaped to freedom remains unknown. But his story endures — a nightmare born of a nightmare, a man forged by the very cruelty meant to break him.

In the records of Burke County, the overseers’ names are still listed as relocated.

In the memories of those who suffered under them, they were something else entirely — the skins that hung in the cypress grove when the devil turned white.