Online Ridgeland ‘reporter’ takes on Florence the ‘wind heifer.’ The ‘wind heifer’ loses

Haley Langford created her own storm last week during Hurricane Florence’s threat to the South Carolina Lowcountry.

She went viral on Facebook.

Or, as viral as you can get while filming yourself in ponytails and an exaggerated Southern accent doing “weather reports” in your grandmother’s 1980s wardrobe. And on location by the Ridgeland town gopher tortoise statue, not a wind-blasted boardwalk or even a Harbour Town Lighthouse.

All for a storm that never materialized here.

But Haley, 23, is a natural-born ham, a polished class clown, a spring college graduate who is full-time caregiver for her beloved grandmother who can no longer walk but has a closet full of colorful windbreaker suits that seemed to be calling Haley’s name.

On Wednesday — which was Day 3 of the hurricane threat — Haley went out in the backyard on 2nd Avenue with her iPhone 8 Plus in one hand and her Grandma’s heavy-duty Palmetto Electric Cooperative flashlight in the other and filmed a “weather report” as a character who has no name wearing a Hawaiian print shirt.

It was all off-the-cuff, she said. One take.

She put it on her personal Facebook page. A friend asked her to open up her page so she could share it. Within a couple of hours, it had 1,000 views. By the end of the day, it had been shared more than 100 times. By the end of the week, it had been viewed 31,000 times.

The post went up at noon. And Haley had promised on camera that she’d be back with a 5 o’clock update. Her gig was on.

In two more reports that day, and at least one each day through Saturday, Haley dragged out more of Grandma’s clothes — purple windbreakers, oversized glasses and a long string of pearls — and did updates on location from Ridgeland, Port Royal and a dock on the Chechessee Creek at the home of her father, Timmy Langford.

She referred to the storm as a “wind heifer” and advised her Facebook friends how to put their hurricane Crocs into four-wheel-drive mode, and said she would leave only when the fiddler crabs evacuated.

She had Bluetooth earbuds sticking out of both ears, serving as her microphone, but some viewers wondered if they were cigarettes or whether Haley was smoking what she had rolled up in her ears.

Comments came from as far away as China. She got several marriage proposals.

One commenter said: “Girl — my cousin in Albuquerque NM has been watching your videos and loving them! Thank you for the laughter! You’ve helped to break up the monotony of the days running together!”

Another wrote: “Thanks Haley for all the laughs. I have not laughed like that in a long time and didn’t realize how much I needed that until you came along. Thanks a million. You are certainly one of a kind. Keep people smiling sweetie.”

When Facebook advised Haley on Saturday night that 50,000 people had “liked” her posts, she wrote:

“Y’all. This all started out with me hoping to give a few people a laugh, and maybe take away some of the tension and stress people felt about the storm. I never imagined that my silly self would make 50 people laugh, much less 50,000.”

Ridgeland

Everybody in Ridgeland calls Haley’s Grandma “Miss Ellen.” Haley and her cousins call her “Dumpy.”

Miss Ellen is Ellen Langford, who owned a real estate company and served on Ridgeland Town Council so long they named a park downtown for her — the one with a fountain used at Davant Plantation in the Julie Roberts movie, “Something to Talk About.”

Miss Ellen’s late husband, John, was the town pharmacist for many years.

Dumpy gave Haley John’s 1956 University of South Carolina class ring when she graduated salutatorian of the class of 2013 at Step of Faith Christian Academy at the Great Swamp Baptist Church on Tarboro Road. Haley started there in kindergarten.

They have video of her hamming it up as a kid. She went through a go-cart racing phase, and gave herself a Harley-Davidson Sportster for graduating this May from Liberty University in Virginia with a degree in international relations and a minor in theology. She wants to get back up there for a master’s of divinity degree in theology.

“But I’m going to stick with her,” Haley said of her grandmother Monday as we chatted at the dining room table of her grandmother’s house. Miss Ellen was in the next room sleeping, hooked to oxygen.

“It’s a very emotionally and physically demanding job,” Haley said of bathing, lifting, changing and wound-dressing one of her life’s pillars. “But I don’t regret it at all.”

She credits Miss Ellen for her own sense of humor, which she calls “wholesome sarcasm.” Miss Ellen was a Malphrus, born in the era when families entertained themselves with their own antics or their storytelling or singing.

Maybe that’s why Haley went viral. It’s all natural. She’s channeling a real place. No fake leaning into the wind. No “Florida Man” showing up shirtless to wave a flag in the wind.

Instead, Haley tapped into generations of simple living in rural Jasper County, where you don’t have to have much — but family and friends.

The flash of attention doesn’t surprise Haley’s mother, Linda Reynolds Langford.

“She always been able to make people laugh,” she said. “Haley always wanted to make things lighter, even in a bad situation. She’s got a great heart.”

What’s next?

Everyone thought Haley was going to be a lawyer.

In fact, she said she wanted to be a JAG lawyer, helping families.

She still wants to be a U.S. Marine Corps officer, as a Reservist. And she wants to work full time at a church, working with women, college students or young couples.

But she’s followed Christian comedians since she was a young teen — Chonda Pierce, John Crist, Tim Hawkins — and maybe she’ll try that.

She’s been contacted about doing something with Ridgeland’s annual Gopher Hill Festival the first week in October.

She plans to keep up some video performances on her Facebook page, perhaps riffing on the news in a weekly video filmed in different costumes from Grandma’s closet.

She’s in the generation of the selfie, Snapchat and YouTube. She’s not afraid of the camera.

“I’ve just got this little box I can go into inside my head,” she said. “It keeps me comfortable. I’m not thinking about how many people are watching. I can chuckle at my own self and be my own critic. I may look like a complete buffoon, but I don’t care. It made people laugh, and that’s all that matters.”

Holly Bounds, a popular local television anchor, told me Tuesday she had not seen Haley’s videos, but said timing was her greatest asset.

“There was so much tension,” Bounds said. “People had a lot of time on their hands, and they needed something lighthearted. This could be her ticket.”

On Sunday, Haley created a Facebook page just for the new character. It’s called Hale McClaine — Local News and Weather. Hale is a takeoff on her name and the weather. McClaine is her middle name.

On Monday morning, local radio legend Monty Jett interviewed her on 107.9 FM.

And on Monday, Haley set up a fundraiser for people in North Carolina stricken by Hurricane Florence.

She’ll be selling $20 T-shirts with her character on it and #windheifer2018. Earl and Anna Pope at Allprint Custom Tees & Hydrographics in Ridgeland is providing them at cost, she said, and sponsors are paying $100 to have their logo on the back. They can be purchased through her Facebook page.

“I want to work with first responders and go direct to the people, to help a family or a church,” she said.

“It’s not a large fund. I just want us to say, ‘We were spared, but, hey, this is from our community.”

This story was originally published September 18, 2018 at 3:34 PM.