Meet the TikTok famous mermaid making waves in the Myrtle Beach, SC area
Haley Mermaid treats each kid that comes into Pirate’s Table Calabash Seafood Buffet like magical royalty.
As a professional mermaid, she meets children at the restaurant, located near the intersection of Highway 544 and U.S. 17 Business.
Haley, who asked to use her stage name for privacy, given her massive social media following, didn’t expect the parents of one girl to start crying as she talked with the child two years ago.
She later learned that the girl was in foster care and in the months she had been with her foster parents, hadn’t spoken at all.
The child “opened up to me and felt really special that [she] trusted me enough to speak to me,” the 26-year-old said.
As a professional mermaid, Haley Mermaid brings aquatic joy to the Myrtle Beach area through her live performances, custom tail making and TikTok videos for an audience of 2.6 million followers.
Bringing mer-magic to Myrtle Beach
As soon as kids walk into the Pirate’s Table, they’re drawn to Haley.
“It’s a mermaid! A real one!” exclaimed a preschooler in a polo shirt one recent summer Friday. Children crowd by the netting surrounding the pool at the center of the restaurant. Haley speaks to each of them, asking questions, taking photos for “Insta-clam” and performing mermaid tricks like swimming through hoops.
Kids are tough interrogators, which is why Haley has answers to all their questions. She asked the kids how old they were and she responded, “I’m 260 years old. Mermaids live a long time because we’re magical, like unicorns.”
Handing plastic beads to children, she said, “The pirates who work here give them to us.” When she learned kids were visiting from Ohio or Kentucky, Haley said, “That’s a long swim.” She said she lives in the ocean and travels through a tunnel to visit Pirate’s Table.
While some professional mermaids craft entirely different personalities while in character, to Haley “it’s just me, but as a mermaid,” she said. “Like my true form, the form I would have sold my soul to have as a child.”
Growing up on a farm near Spartanburg, “every memory of being little was loving mermaids,” Haley added.
She tried everything to grow a mermaid tail, from floating in a lake under a full moon to making potions off of YouTube.
When she got her first mermaid fin at 11 years old, “It was like flying. It was indescribable joy,” Haley said.
She started taking paid gigs at 17 years old, posing for photos as the Little Mermaid at a school dance.
Five years ago, Haley moved to Myrtle Beach to work at Pirate’s Table, where she and around five other mermaids take turns performing. While some people now come to Pirate’s Table specifically to see Haley, she doesn’t get in the restaurant’s pool every day. The buffet, which has featured mermaids for 20 years, is one of the few regular gigs for mermaids.
There are about three members of the professional mermaid community in Myrtle Beach.
“The professionals dedicate literally their whole life, like we sweat mermaids,” Haley said.
Mermaids share tips and warn about “mer-verts” or predators. The mermaid community was featured in the 2023 Netflix docuseries MerPeople.
Haley has an audience of 2.6 million followers on TikTok, where her account is @HaleyMermaid. She started it in 2019 at the encouragement of Pirate’s Table visitors.
“One video went viral, and then another went viral, and then just grew out of control,” Haley said.
She posts mermaid versions of popular TikTok trends along with footage of her swimming, day-in-the-life videos and answers to questions about being a professional mermaid.
Shello from the tail-making studio
Haley’s Socastee home, which she shares with her husband and seven reptiles, is filled with mermaid items, from bolts of fabric for tails to drawings from kids.
In two spare rooms, Haley handcrafts tails, tops and mermaid accessories. Her custom tails run from $500-700 for basic tails up to $3,000 for more realistic ones.
The tail-making process is a tedious 8 to 10-week endeavor. She gets measurements from clients who sign a waver saying if they die in the tail, it’s not Haley’s fault. Then, she pours body safe silicone into hand-sculpted molds. Haley inserts a specialized monofin at the bottom and stitches the sides together on a 60-year-old industrial machine named Bobby. Haley began making tails on her mom’s sewing machine at 11 years old and went on to study costume design in college.
The mermaid world is expensive and Haley knows how many dollars each element costs: $250 for a gallon bucket of silicone, $40 for a tube of glue, up to $300 for the fin insert.
A lot of mermaid work is seasonal and “a full-time hustle for part-time money,” so Haley has a variety of jobs to make ends meet. She performs as a mermaid at one to two birthday parties a week in the summer and works a “human job” at Olive Garden in the winter.
Currently she is saving $5,000 for a 1,000 gallon tank so she can do family-friendly mermaid live-streams year-round.
Past the lamps shaped like sea urchins and anemones and tails hanging to dry after a performance, Haley points out a photo on her refrigerator. It’s two-year-old Haley with Ariel at Disneyland.
“I would like to meet ‘98 Ariel … like you made a professional mermaid,” Haley mused.
“It’s insane to me that this is my life. I get paid to make people happy and make my own dreams come true at the same time.”
“Now I’m that picture on people’s fridge.”
Pirate’s Table Calabash Seafood Buffet
Location: 1100 Water Ave., Surfside Beach
Adult: $48.99. Child: $22.99. Kids under 5 eat free with an adult meal.
Mermaids swim in the pool from open to close and seeing them is included in the buffet price.
This story was originally published July 7, 2023 at 6:00 AM.
