Cutepaigesummers

Paige Summers, born Nancy Ann Coursey, carried with her an air of contradiction. On one side, she was the Southern girl with a light drawl and a disarming smile, a woman whose roots dug deep into the soil of North Carolina. On the other, she was the carefully constructed persona of a bombshell, her body sculpted and displayed in glossy pages that turned her into an emblem of a certain kind of fame. She created her alter ego, Paige Summers, as if she were slipping into a more glamorous skin, something that could better handle the spotlight and everything it demanded of her.

Her career began in the mid-1990s, a time when adult modeling was both notorious and revered, depending on who you asked. Paige didn’t walk into it with naivety—there was a sharpness behind those big, blue eyes. She knew exactly what she was getting into, even as she adopted her stage name and signed her first contracts. The magazines she posed for, High Society and Cheri, were only stepping stones. The ultimate crown came when Penthouse chose her as their Pet of the Month in August 1996. This was just the beginning.

But it was 1998 that truly catapulted her. That year, she was selected as Penthouse Pet of the Year, the pinnacle of her industry’s acclaim. Suddenly, she wasn’t just another face, another body on a page—she was a queen among her peers, the chosen one for men’s fantasies. Kia Motors even handed her the keys to a brand-new Sportage SUV, a symbol of her new status, her new wealth. Half a million dollars a year, she claimed to earn—an astronomical sum for a girl from Morganton, North Carolina, but it seemed right for the persona of Paige Summers.

Fame, though, was a double-edged sword. The exposure it brought her was thrilling, yes, but also relentless. She appeared on The Howard Stern Show, her voice cool and easy, sparring with Stern’s jabs. It was a stage as much as her photo shoots, and she played her role to perfection. The Penthouse videos, those soft-focus, slow-motion tributes to her body, were another part of the game. They helped solidify her place in that rarefied circle of adult stars. But while the world knew Paige Summers, it was Nancy Coursey who traveled to far-off places like India and Australia, trying perhaps to outrun the weight of her own creation.

There was a split inside her, something that the glossy covers of magazines could never capture. For all the grandeur of her career, there was something almost fragile about Nancy. In private, she might’ve dreamed of something else, something quieter, something less public. She wasn’t always the seductive image she projected—there was a simplicity to her, a longing for normalcy that she might’ve hinted at during conversations with those close to her.

In 2003, with her career behind her, she moved back home to North Carolina, to Morganton, the town she had left behind when she first embarked on her journey. There, in a house near Lake James, she began to piece together a different life. She was set to marry a local pharmacist named Bracey Bobbitt, a man rooted in the kind of stability she seemed to be searching for. They were to wed in October, less than a month away from that fateful September morning.

It was her mother who found her on that morning of September 22, 2003. Paige Summers, the woman who had graced covers and lived in the glint of camera flashes, was gone. The cause—a lethal mix of painkillers—spoke to a silent struggle, one that fame, money, and even love couldn’t heal. The drugs, codeine and oxycodone, might have been prescribed, might have been for pain management, but they took something more than just the ache away that night. They took her life.

The town of Morganton grieved in a quiet way. They knew Nancy, after all. She was the girl who had gone off into the world and come back, the girl with so much promise and so many scars that no one really saw. At her funeral, people gathered at the Mountain Grove United Methodist Church Cemetery, where she was laid to rest. Her grave, now marked by a simple stone, doesn’t tell the story of Paige Summers, the icon. It doesn’t speak to the fame, the magazine covers, or the Howard Stern interviews. It simply holds Nancy Ann Coursey, a daughter, a fiancée, a woman who, for all her boldness, was just as human as anyone else.

Even now, her presence lingers in the world, if only in fragments. On social media platforms like TikTok, her memory gets resurrected every so often, a clip here, a mention there. Some see her as a relic of a bygone era of modeling, others as a symbol of the perils that can come with fame. But for those who knew her, or who followed her closely, she’s more than that. She’s a cautionary tale, a reminder that the image we present to the world can often be at odds with the person we are beneath the surface.

In life, she had been two women—Paige Summers, the unattainable fantasy, and Nancy Coursey, the Southern girl who never quite found her way back to solid ground. And though one outshined the other in the public’s eye, in death, it was Nancy who remained, a soul that slipped away quietly on the shores of Lake James, far from the flashing lights and polished lenses of her past.

Her legacy is complicated. For some, she will always be that ethereal beauty on the magazine cover, frozen in time at her peak. For others, she’s the story of a woman who chased fame and fortune, only to find that they came with a cost. And maybe, for a few, she’s simply remembered as the girl who, for all her public life, just wanted to come home.