Circular Congregational Church Graveyard
Founded around 1681 by Charleston's original English Congregationalists, Scots Presbyterians, and French Huguenots, the Circular Congregational Church surrounds the city's oldest burial ground, with surviving markers dating to 1695 and weathered slates tracing colonial death art from winged skulls to portrait busts. Beneath roughly 500 remaining stones lie far more bodies than markers — hundreds named only in church records, alongside Revolutionary War dead and victims of the fevers that swept the port city. A British cannonball once burst among the graves during a 1780 Sunday service, and the crowded, sunken ground has long carried an uneasy reputation. Visitors and ghost-tour groups report phantom footsteps and whispered voices among the tombstones, sudden cold spots, and faded forms — most famously a mourning woman in black and a Confederate soldier keeping watch near dawn — that dissolve when approached. Whether memory or imagination, the old churchyard remains one of Charleston's most enduringly told haunted places.
📍 150 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC 29401, Charleston, SC · Get directions