Shark Attacks in South Carolina

Why South Carolina records so many bites and so few serious ones

Three features of the South Carolina coast explain the shape of its record. The first is the water: the shelf is wide and shallow, the big rivers of the Lowcountry pour tannin-stained fresh water into the sea, and summer temperatures in the surf reach the high twenties Celsius. That is exactly what juvenile blacktips, spinners, sandbars, bonnetheads and Atlantic sharpnose sharks want, and the sounds and estuaries between the barrier islands are recognised nursery grounds for several of them. The second is bait. Menhaden, mullet and anchovies school through the surf zone all summer, and the small sharks that follow them hunt in water that is often less than a metre deep and too murky to see a human foot in. The third is people: the Grand Strand around Myrtle Beach, the Charleston beaches, and Hilton Head Island together receive tens of millions of visitors a year, most of them in the same three months that the sharks are inshore.

Put those together and you get a record that is long but shallow. Of the 177 entries, 117 fall in June, July or August, and the injury column is dominated by punctures and lacerations to feet, ankles, calves and hands. Sixteen entries are explicitly described as minor, and many more are a single bite that needed stitches. The ten fatal cases tell a different story: most are old and most are not bathers. Six of the ten are from before 1900, three of those are people who fell or were thrown from vessels, and only three fatal entries in the whole file, in 1817, 1853 and 1960, describe a swimmer. The single fatality of the modern era, a surfer at Folly Beach in September 2005, is the exception that proves the pattern.

The trend over time is upward, and it is a trend in people rather than sharks. The decade chart climbs from single figures before 1980 to 15 entries in the 1990s, 34 in the 2000s and 49 in the 2010s, tracking the growth of coastal tourism and the improvement in reporting. The 2020s stand at 14 entries through July 2026, with none fatal, which is well below the pace of the previous decade.

Where along the South Carolina coast the incidents cluster

Every South Carolina row in the database names a beach, a town or a stretch of water, and most of the modern rows carry a county, so the geography below is read directly from the table rather than inferred from habitat. Two counties hold most of the file: Horry County, the Grand Strand, with 43 rows and no deaths, and Charleston County with 40 rows, whose 4 fatal entries are all from the harbour between 1817 and 1853. Beaufort County, essentially Hilton Head and its islands, has 25 rows with none fatal, Georgetown County 10, and Colleton and Jasper one each. By beach, Myrtle Beach leads with 24 rows, Isle of Palms has 18, Folly Beach 10, and Hilton Head Island, North Myrtle Beach, Sullivan's Island and Pawleys Island between four and five apiece.

• Myrtle Beach and the Grand Strand, Horry CountyForty-three rows carry the county name, the latest a swimmer with non-life-threatening injuries at Myrtle Beach on 18 September 2023, and not one is fatal. Myrtle Beach itself accounts for 24, and its busiest day was 14 June 2012, when four swimmers were bitten: a foot and hand and a calf, both queried as small blacktips, a right foot lacerated by a blacktip, and a minor injury with shark involvement not confirmed; a boogie boarder had a severe foot laceration on 2 June that year and a wader's foot cut on 19 June turned out to be a stingray. On 15 August 2022 two more bathers were bitten within the city limits, one with multiple lacerations to the right forearm from a blacktip. Other Myrtle Beach rows include a ten-year-old lying in two feet of water on the Grand Strand in August 1999 whose ear, scalp, back, arm and shoulder were cut by a 6-foot shark, a seventeen-year-old north of Apache Pier whose left knee and leg were bitten by an 8-foot shark in September 2004, a blacktip that bit a calf in July 1997 and another that bit a foot at Ocean Lakes Campground in August 1995. North Myrtle Beach has five rows between 1975 and 2016, Garden City Beach three from 1995 to 2007, and Surfside (a heel in August 2014), Cherry Grove (a foot in June 2008), Windy Hill and Waites Island one or two each. The county's provoked rows are anglers: hooked sharks at Windy Hill Beach in 1955 and Little River Beach in 1960, and an 8-foot, 600-pound shark inside a net at Atlantic Beach in September 1960.
• Isle of Palms, Sullivan's Island and Kiawah, Charleston CountyIsle of Palms has 18 rows, none fatal, and the newest is a 24-year-old swimmer with minor injuries to the right knee on 14 May 2023. The pattern is textbook: a wader with three puncture wounds on each side of her left hand from a 2-foot shark off 21st Avenue in June 2001, a fifteen-year-old who stepped on a 7-foot shark and had an ankle lacerated in September 2003, two bathers bitten on 9 August 2007, lacerations to a hand from a 4.5-to-5-foot shark in June 2008, a 4-foot shark that cut a lower leg in July 2010, a body surfer's right hand in July 2014, a twelve-year-old at the county park with shallow lacerations from a 4-to-5-foot shark in June 2015, a ten-year-old boogie boarder in May 2018 and a foot bitten in September 2019. Sullivan's Island has four rows, from an 8-foot shark that severed a swimmer's toes in July 1912 to a 6-foot shark's foot laceration in May 2015 and a minor injury from a 3-to-4-foot shark in June 2016, plus a chest laceration at the harbour entrance in 1941 and a foot and ankle bitten at Fort Moultrie in 1929. Kiawah Island has three, in 2005, 2006 and 2013, all to feet and lower legs of swimmers and boogie boarders. Awendaw supplies a 2017 provoked case, a hand bitten while touching a hooked 3-foot shark, and Stono Inlet a spearfisher whose swim fin and knee were bitten by a 13-foot shark in July 1968.
• Folly Beach and Folly IslandTen rows carry the Folly Beach name and one of them is the state's only modern death, a surfer killed on 11 September 2005; the latest is a twelve-year-old surfer with an injury to the right foot and ankle on 30 August 2020. In between are the most serious non-fatal injury in the modern file, a ten-year-old playing in knee-deep water on 19 July 1985 who lost two-thirds of the left calf to a tiger shark estimated at 8 to 9 feet; an 8-foot bull shark that became tangled in a ten-year-old surfer's leash in August 2013 without hurting him; a boogie boarder's leg and foot lacerated by a 4-to-5-foot shark in August 2014; a surfer's left foot bitten in April 2017; a surfboard damaged in June 2016, more likely by debris than by the 8-foot shark first blamed; a man bitten on the arm while killing a shark in 1966; and two bathers standing in the surf on 13 July 1940, one bitten on the ankle and the other struck by the shark a moment before. Folly Island adds three older rows: a bather's knee and leg bitten by a 6.5-foot mako in July 1924, identified from a tooth fragment in the kneecap, multiple thigh and hip lacerations in August 1925 and a calf bitten in June 1933, the same month a bather sitting in three feet of water at the north end of Morris Island was bitten by what was thought to be an 8-foot lemon shark.
• Hilton Head Island and Beaufort CountyTwenty-five rows carry the county name and none is fatal; the latest is a 60-year-old boogie boarder at Sea Pines Beach with an injured right foot from an 8-foot shark on 21 July 2023, and two June 2025 rows at Hilton Head Island sit above it, a twelve-year-old at Beach Marker 24 on 17 June and a swimmer at Coligny Beach on 22 June, each with a laceration to the lower right leg from a small shark. The busiest year was 2017, when the island logged five entries between 18 June and 10 August, among them a fourteen-year-old at Burkes Beach whose leg was bitten by a 4-to-5-foot bull shark and a thirteen-year-old at Sea Pines Resort with minor cuts from a possible juvenile blacktip. A ten-year-old swimmer suffered a severe bite to the right forearm on 13 May 2018, a seven-year-old standing in an inner tube was bitten on the foot by a 3-to-4-foot bull shark in October 2014, and Coligny Beach has three rows of its own between 2001 and 2014. Beyond the island, Hunting Island State Park, St. Helena Island, Fripp Island and Palmetto Dunes each contribute small bites to feet and calves, an 87-year-old wader at Palmetto Dunes among them in 1985, and a swimmer at North Forest Beach was bitten on the abdomen and hand in September 1994. The county's oldest rows are two waders at Hilton Head in the summer of 1962.
• Pawleys Island, Murrells Inlet and Georgetown CountyTen county rows, none fatal, the latest from 2017. Pawleys Island has four, three of them in the summer of 1995, and the most serious injury in the whole state file outside the fatal list: a wader in August 1961 whose right arm was bitten and whose left leg was bitten and surgically amputated, attributed to a white shark. DeBordieu has a body boarder's foot bitten by a 5-to-6-foot spinner or bull shark in July 2006 and a minor thigh bite in July 2017, Litchfield Beach a right foot in July 2008, and Murrells Inlet a fifteen-year-old surfer with injuries to the calf, arm and hand from a 4-foot shark in August 2015 and the newest entry in the database, a swimmer bitten just above the ankle by an unknown small shark on 29 July 2026. In Winyah Bay a 12-foot shark grabbed a boat's anchor in July 1987.
• Charleston Harbor, the Battery and the city's old recordWhere the deaths are. Four rows sit in Charleston Harbor and three are fatal: a swimmer in June 1817, a man thrown overboard and treading water while awaiting rescue in July 1840, said to have been taken by a 25-foot shark, and a swimmer in July 1853 attributed to a pregnant tiger shark; the fourth is a swimmer who disappeared in 1847. A man who fell into the water at Charleston in September 1810 and a man wading ashore from a capsized vessel at Mount Pleasant in 1852 are also fatal, as are a 1913 entry at Charleston with no activity recorded and a passenger who fell overboard from the steamship Rio Grande off Charleston in October 1911. The remaining Charleston rows are survivable and mostly old, from a bather's right foot at Magwoods Wharf in 1837 and a foot and calf in 1896 to an angler's forearm from a boated shark in 1959 and a swimmer's minor injury in 2009. Off the coast, the Y-73 ledge reef produced the only modern diving entry, a 65-year-old spearfisher bitten on the left arm by a 3-metre sandbar shark on 2 May 2024.
• Creeks, sounds and the open seaThe rest of the file is scattered along the Lowcountry's inland water and offshore: a swimmer in Parris Island's waters killed in August 1960, the last fatal bathing case; a seine fisherman's hand lacerated by a white shark in Ramshorn Creek in 1898; a swimmer beside a launch in Calibogue Sound bitten on the arm in June 1917; a boy floating in the Oketee River in Jasper County with an abraded abdomen and lacerated thigh in July 1949; an unconfirmed foot injury at Edisto Beach in Colleton County in July 2015; human remains recovered from a tiger shark at Daws Island in the Broad River in May 1982; and the vessel entries, the 1943 torpedoing of the freighter Libertad off Charleston, a 1978 boat explosion in which a survivor's foot was bumped by a shark, a 2005 sea disaster off Sullivan's Island and a 14-foot female white shark that bit a boat 16 miles off Hilton Head in February 2017.

The full South Carolina record

Everything below is generated from the SharkSider database, which merges the International Shark Attack File, the Global Shark Attack File and verified local reports and is updated every week. The ten fatal rows are shaded red. The summary counts all 177 entries; 160 of them are from 1900 onwards and feed the decade chart, while the 17 cases dated 1803 to 1898 appear in the collapsed groups at the end of the table.

• Recorded incidents177 (160 since 1900)
• Fatal10
• Years covered1803–2026
• Since 200097 incidents, 1 fatal
• Most common activitySwimming & wading
• Most identified sharkBlacktip shark

The most recent incidents

• 29 July 2026 · Murrells Inlet, South CarolinaSwimming — Bite just above the ankleShark: Unknown small shark · not fatal
• 22 June 2025 · Coligny Beach Hilton Head Island, South CarolinaSwimming — Laceration to lower right legShark: Small shark · not fatal
• 17 June 2025 · Beach Marker 24 Hilton Head Island, South CarolinaSwimming — Laceration to lower right legShark not identified · not fatal
• 2 May 2024 · Y-73' Ledge reef Chareston Coast, South CarolinaSpearfishing — Bitten on left armShark: 3m Sandbar shark · not fatal
• 18 September 2023 · Myrtle Beach, Horry County, South CarolinaSwimming — Non-lifethreatening injuriesShark not identified · not fatal
• 21 July 2023 · Sea Pines Beach, Hilton Head Island, Beaufort County, South CarolinaBoogie boarding — Right foot injuredShark: 8' shark · not fatal

Every recorded incident

Reading this table well means knowing what is in it besides bites. First, 20 entries carry a note that shark involvement was not confirmed or that no shark was involved at all: the 2012 Myrtle Beach foot laceration that turned out to be a stingray, the 2017 arm injury caused by a fishing hook, a 2020 Myrtle Beach arm injury attributed to a fish, a 2016 Folly Beach surfboard more likely damaged by debris, and several old Charleston cases in which remains were found inside a shark without proof that the shark caused the death. Second, 11 entries are provoked, ten of them people bitten while handling hooked, netted, boated or captive sharks between 1952 and 2017, plus a Myrtle Beach surfer in July 1995 who jumped off his board onto one. Third, a run of boat cases sits alongside the beach entries: a shark that grabbed an anchor in Winyah Bay in 1987, the 1978 boat explosion in which a survivor's foot was bumped by a shark feeding on a drowned passenger, and the 1943 Libertad sinking, which the database holds as a single non-fatal row for the one crewman bitten and rescued even though the note records that ten of the eighteen survivors were taken by sharks. Finally, the species column is empty in 82 rows and hedged in many more, so the blacktip count of 5 is a floor, not a ceiling.

The sharks behind South Carolina's bites

Blacktip shark. The most identified species in the file, named in 5 entries, including the August 2022 Myrtle Beach case with multiple lacerations to a forearm, a 2021 bite on Hilton Head Island and the 14 June 2012 Myrtle Beach foot laceration, and suspected in several more. Blacktips arrive inshore in late spring, feed on schooling fish in the surf and make the fast, mistaken grab at a foot or hand that produces most South Carolina injuries. They are easily confused with the spinner shark, which behaves the same way and is probably behind some of the unidentified entries.

Bull shark. Named in 3 entries, including the June 2017 Burkes Beach leg bite by a bull of four to five feet, the October 2014 bite on a child in an inner tube at Hilton Head and the 2013 Folly Beach case in which an eight-foot bull became tangled in a surfer's leash without injuring him. Bull sharks use the state's sounds and rivers and are the species most capable of a serious injury in shallow water.

White shark. Also 3 entries, none of them fatal: an 1898 seine fisherman in Ramshorn Creek with a lacerated hand, a wader at Pawleys Island in 1961 whose arm was bitten and whose leg had to be amputated, and the 14-foot female that bit a shark-tagging boat 16 miles off Hilton Head in February 2017. Great whites pass South Carolina in winter and spring on their migration and are almost never in the bathing zone in summer.

Tiger shark. Two entries, and the most severe injuries in the file: the 1853 fatal attack on a swimmer in Charleston Harbor, attributed to a pregnant tiger, and the 1985 Folly Beach case in which a child playing in knee-deep water lost two-thirds of a calf to a tiger shark estimated at eight to nine feet. A 1982 entry also records human remains recovered from a tiger shark at Daws Island, with shark involvement before death unconfirmed.

Sandbar, sand sharks and the rest. A 3-metre sandbar shark bit a spearfisher's left arm on the Y-73 ledge reef off Charleston in May 2024, the only entry that names the species outright; sandbars are also offered as possibilities in the 2002 and 2005 Myrtle Beach cases. "Sand shark" appears twice, in 1988 and 1991, and refers to the sand tiger; the 1933 Morris Island knee and leg bite was attributed to an eight-foot lemon shark after two lemons were caught nearby; the 1924 Folly Island bite was pinned on a mako by a tooth fragment recovered from the kneecap; and a 2006 ankle bite at Singleton Beach on Hilton Head was blamed on a 1.2-metre angel shark. Our guide to the sharks of South Carolina covers all of these and the many harmless species alongside them.

Practical rules drawn from the South Carolina record

Because the record is so consistent, the precautions are simple. Almost every modern entry is a bite from a small shark, in shallow murky water, in summer, on a person who was standing, wading, swimming or boarding within a few metres of the beach.

• Get out of the water when bait is running. Jumping mullet, diving pelicans and terns, or a dark patch of menhaden in the surf mean sharks are feeding. The 2017 file, the busiest year with 11 entries, five of them on Hilton Head, is full of exactly this situation, and the four Myrtle Beach bites of 14 June 2012 happened on a single day of bait in the surf.
• Avoid dawn, dusk and the turbid water beside inlets and piers. Blacktips and bull sharks hunt by scent and vibration in low visibility, and inlets concentrate both bait and sharks.
• Keep hands and feet still and visible. The injury column is a catalogue of splashing feet and dangling hands mistaken for fish. Boogie boarders, who account for a large share of the recent entries at Isle of Palms, Folly Beach and Hilton Head, are especially exposed.
• Leave jewellery on the beach and do not swim near people fishing. Flash and bait are the two things most likely to draw a strike, and 11 of the entries are provoked cases, mostly people bitten by sharks they had hooked, netted or were handling.
• Anglers: never handle a live shark casually. The provoked cases from 1952 to 2017 are fingers, thumbs, arms and hands bitten while unhooking or landing sharks, from Seabrook Beach to Awendaw.
• Heed lifeguards and purple flags. Many South Carolina beaches fly a purple flag for dangerous marine life; it is raised when sharks or large schools of bait are sighted.

If a shark does bite, the record shows that most people walk out of the water and recover fully. Our guide on how to survive a shark attack covers the essentials: control bleeding immediately, get to the sand, and, if a large shark persists, strike at the eyes and gills.

South Carolina against Florida, the Carolinas and the world

The International Shark Attack File confirms roughly 60 to 80 unprovoked bites worldwide in a typical year, and the United States supplies about half of them. Within the US, Florida is in a league of its own, with several hundred more entries than any other state; South Carolina and North Carolina sit in the group behind it alongside Hawaii and California, typically logging a handful of bites each in a busy summer and none in a quiet one. The whole state contributes perhaps one to five ISAF cases a year.

What distinguishes South Carolina from Florida is not the type of incident, which is nearly identical, but the severity. Florida's Volusia County blacktip bites and South Carolina's Grand Strand bites are the same phenomenon; the difference is that Florida also has a longer list of fatal cases from bull sharks, tiger sharks and offshore accidents. South Carolina's one fatality in the last 60 years, against 97 entries since 2000, gives a fatality rate around one percent, among the lowest of any place with a comparable number of incidents. Against the ordinary hazards of the same beaches, rip currents, lightning and drowning, sharks remain a footnote. The national picture is on our shark attacks in the USA page, and every country we track is on the shark attacks overview.

Shark attacks in the neighbouring states

The same blacktip-and-bull-shark pattern runs north into North Carolina, whose Outer Banks add a few more serious cases, and south into Georgia, which has far fewer beaches and a much shorter file. Virginia and Maryland show how quickly the numbers fall away as the water cools. The species themselves are covered in our South Carolina sharks guide, linked in the species section above.

Written and reviewed by

SharkSider Editorial Team

A small team focused on researching sharks and making marine biology easy to understand. Every page is reviewed against current species records and the SharkSider attack database, and updated when new incidents or research appear.

Published September 16, 2023 · Last updated September 22, 2026 · 177 records for South Carolina in the SharkSider attack database (10 fatal), updated weekly.