The account given by Dr.

Hammond in 1955 includes the detail that the story of her “death” was “known to most of this south-central Carolina town’s older residents.” This is consistent with the kind of community oral history that carries remarkable events through generations — a story told by grandparents to grandchildren, embellished in the telling, simplified in some places and elaborated in others, until the living memory of it has been thoroughly mixed with the legend of it.

Jan Bondeson, in his 2001 book Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear, which drew on the 1955 Chronicle article and on accounts from South Carolina elders who had heard or attended the funeral, acknowledges the potential unreliability of the accounts he is drawing on.

He writes that it is “by no means unlikely that the story of her resurrection from the tomb was somewhat improved upon as it was told and retold.” This is a historian’s appropriate hedge — an acknowledgment that stories grow in the telling, that communities reshape their most remarkable tales over time, that the Essie Dunbar who emerged from the 1955 newspaper account and the subsequent retellings may be somewhat different from the Essie Dunbar who lived through whatever actually happened in 1915.