Goliath's Daughter: The 6'8 Giant Slave Woman Who Crushed Her Master's Skull with Her Bare HandsOn the 14th of August 1827, Josiah Crane, a plantation owner in the rice fields around Charleston, South Carolina, was found dead in his library. His skull was so badly broken that doctors who looked at the body said there were bone fragments stuck in the mahogany desk 6 ft away. The corer's report, which is still kept in the Charleston County archives, said that the injuries were consistent with being squeezed by hands that were much bigger and stronger than normal human hands. The only person who might have done it was a woman who was 6'8 tall, weighed more than 240 lb of solid muscle, and had disappeared into the night in August without a trace. Local historians have been arguing for almost 200 years about whether Sarah Drummond really lived or if she was just a story made up out of fear and guilt. But the medical records, sale documents, and eyewitness accounts point to something much worse. That she was real and that what happened in that library was the end of a horror that had been building for years. Before we go on with the story of Sarah Drummond and the night that shocked Charleston society into a silence that lasted for generations, I want to ask you something. If you love real historical mysteries that make it hard to tell what's real and what's scary legend, hit the subscribe button right now and leave a comment telling me what city or state you're in. I read all of them and I'm glad that these long-lost American stories are getting out to people all over the country. Let's go back to the beginning of this nightmare. Now, money is what starts the story of Sarah Drummond, not violence. In the spring of 1,823, the port of Charleston was having one of its busiest trading seasons in decades. Every week, ships from the Caribbean, West Africa, and Virginia's tobacco growing areas brought people to be sold at the markets on Charmer Street and Gadston's Wararf. Charleston was more than just a port city. It was the center of the domestic slave trade in the American South. People made money by buying and selling people as easily as they did cotton bales or rice barrels. The rice plantations near Charleston were especially cruel places to work. Rice farming was different from cotton farming because workers had to stand in water for hours at a time in swamps full of mosquitoes that carry malaria, snakes that bite, and alligators. The number of enslaved workers who died on rice plantations was shocking. Some estimates from the past say that almost 30% of enslaved people who worked in the rice fields died within their first year. The work was so dangerous, tiring, and deadly that plantation owners had to keep buying new workers to take the place of those who had died. This made the economy bad. Slave traders searched the southern states for strong, healthy workers who could handle the harsh conditions of the rice swamps. Sometimes they found something unusual that would sell for a lot of money. Caleb Rutherford, a slave trader, came to Charleston in March 1823 with a coff of 37 people he had bought in Virginia and North Carolina. There was a young woman, maybe 19 or 20 years old, who stood out right away because she was so big. Records from the auction house say that she was about 7t tall and had a body type that was very wide and muscular. People who were there said that she had to duck to get through doorways and that her hands were so big that they could wrap all the way around a man's head. The auction papers said that her name was Sarah. It was common for the first sale papers not to have a last name. She was born on a small farm in Piedmont, North Carolina to a woman who was enslaved and whose name has been lost to history. It looks like Sarah had a condition that modern medicine would call pituitary gigantism. This is a rare disorder caused by too much growth hormone, which is usually caused by a benign tumor on the pituitary gland. But in the 1,820 seconds, people didn't know this about medicine. People who saw Sarah thought she was just a strange person, a curiosity, and maybe even a very valuable one. It was a hot Tuesday morning in late March when the auction took place. There were a lot of planters, merchants, and people who were just curious about the giant woman at the auction house on Chelma Street. When Sarah was brought up to the platform with her wrists and ankles still chained, the crowd started to murmur. She was almost a full head taller than the auctioneer, a fat man named James Vanderhorst. Vanderhorst had run thousands of these sales, but later told friends that he had never seen anything like her before. The bid started at $400, which was already a lot of money. It quickly rose to $800, then $1,000. Planters yelled their offers, each trying to outbid the other. They saw Sarah not just as a worker, but as a show, someone who could draw visitors and be shown off. A man standing near the back of the room made the winning bid. He was Josiah Crane, and he paid Sarah Drummond $1,300. That year, it was one of the most expensive prices ever paid for a single enslaved person at a Charleston auction. Crane was a rice planter who owned Marsh Bend, a midsize plantation about 18 mi southwest of Charleston. It was in the Low Country which was full of tidal swamps and winding rivers. He was 42 years old, a widowerower, and other planters knew him as a strict boss who didn't put up with what he called softness when it came to managing enslaved workers. Witnesses said that Sarah didn't make a sound as she was led away from the auction block. Her wrists were tied with Crane's property mark burned into a leather collar around her neck. She didn't cry or fight back. She just stared straight ahead with dark, unreadable eyes. Her huge body moved with a strange, quiet grace. Even though she was chained up, no one at that auction could have known what they had just seen. They had no idea they were watching the start of a story that would end in blood, mystery, and a legend that would haunt the Low Country for generations. But they might have had a feeling something was wrong because according to the records, while Crane was taking Sarah to his wagon for the trip to Marshbend, an old woman in the crowd, a free black woman who sold flowers near the market was heard to say, "That man just bought his own death." Marshbend Plantation had all the things that made the Low Country famous and all the things that made it a living hell for the people who had to work there. The main house was a two-story Georgian style building with white columns and a large porch that looked out over the rice fields that.