Haunted Places in Charleston, SC
Explore 10 haunted places in Charleston, SC — haunted houses, inns, cemeteries and more, each with its ghost story, address, and sources.
- Aiken-Rhett HouseHouse · Charleston, SCBuilt around 1820 for Charleston merchant John Robinson and vastly expanded by Governor William Aiken Jr.
- Battery Carriage House InnInn · Charleston, SCTucked behind the 1843 Stevens-Lathers mansion on Charleston's Battery, this brick carriage house opened as an inn in 1970 under the Drayton-Hastie family and earned a reputation as the city's most haunted lodging.
- Circular Congregational Church GraveyardCemetery · Charleston, SCFounded 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.
- Dock Street TheatreTheater · Charleston, SCOpened in 1736 as the first building in America constructed expressly for theatrical performances, the original Dock Street Theatre burned in the Great Fire of 1740; the Planter's Hotel rose on the site in 1809 and became a celebrated stop for Lowcountry planters during racing season before the WPA rebuilt a working theatre inside its shell in the 1930s.
- Old City JailLandmark · Charleston, SCBuilt in 1802 on Magazine Street, the Old City Jail held some of Charleston's most notorious prisoners — pirates, Civil War captives, and runaway slaves — until it closed in 1939.
- Old Exchange and Provost DungeonLandmark · Charleston, SCBuilt between 1767 and 1771 atop the older Half Moon Battery, the Old Exchange served as Charleston's custom house, public market, and jail before the British turned its basement into a military prison during their 1780-1782 occupation.
- Poogan's PorchRestaurant · Charleston, SCBuilt as a private Victorian home in the late 1880s, the house at 72 Queen Street opened as Poogan's Porch in 1976, named for a neighborhood dog who lingered as its self-appointed greeter until his death in 1979.
- Sword Gate HouseHouse · Charleston, SCBuilt around 1803 and expanded over the following decades, the mansion at 32 Legare Street became home in 1819 to Madame Anne Talvande's exclusive French boarding school for young ladies, where the strict headmistress raised high masonry walls to keep her charges safely enclosed.
- The Pink HouseLandmark · Charleston, SCBuilt around 1712 from pinkish Bermuda coral stone, this narrow three-story house on cobblestoned Chalmers Street is among the oldest structures in Charleston and once served as a tavern, likely with a brothel above, for the sailors and pirates passing through the colonial port.
- Unitarian Church GraveyardCemetery · Charleston, SCBegun in 1772 and finally completed in 1787 after British troops quartered in it during the Revolution, the Unitarian Church in Charleston is the oldest Unitarian church in the South and a National Historic Landmark, its graveyard left deliberately wild because the congregation believes the dead should not be disturbed.