Fort Fisher

After enduring what some estimated as 100 shells per minute during the Civil War’s largest naval bombardment, Fort Fisher’s sand earthworks absorbed the punishment and kept standing. A century later, another resident would test the fort’s resilience: Robert Harrill, who hitchhiked 250 miles from a mental hospital in 1955 to live rent-free in an abandoned WWII bunker on the grounds. The 62-year-old became North Carolina’s second-most-popular tourist attraction, charging visitors spare change to hear his “School of Common Sense” philosophy while the ocean slowly claimed half the original fort.

He held the position for 17 years, receiving thousands of visitors a year, some of them celebrities, most of them just curious, all of them paying into a frying pan for the privilege of being told to live more simply by a man who slept in a bunker built to store ammunition. He died there in 1972, officially of natural causes, unofficially the subject of persistent rumors involving robbery and rednecks that were never resolved. The fort that outlasted 20,000 Union shells could not, in the end, do much to protect the man who moved into its wreckage, though a plaque now marks the bunker anyway.