Jack's Review: While some Haunted History episodes focus on only a few haunted locales, Charleston gives the viewer a different experience by telling no fewer than eleven tales of the city's ghostly history. The pace doesn't do much for mood, but the stories feature a few interesting twists. I must say one thing, though: the depiction of the floating torso at the Carriage House Inn is the stuff of nightmares.
The special begins by telling the legend of a woman whose scalped hair became Spanish Moss.
The Battery (Whitepoint Gardens)
Spirits of pirates hung at the battery still haunt the battery, threatening those who have change jingling in their pockets.
The Old Exchange Building and Perroneau House
The Old Exchange Building was built on the site of the old Court of the Guard, where many pirates were imprisoned. Phenomena--including poltergeist activity and sourceless footsteps--seems focused in the dungeon area, which was where Colonel Issac Hayne was held before his execution in the late eighteenth century. On the way to the gallows, he passed the Perroneau House, where his sister lived. He promised to return to her. For the next eighty years, some--who hear footsteps approaching the room that was once Mrs. Perroneau's--believe he has kept that promise.
Thomas Rose House
Built in 1735, this home is now owned by the Church Street Foundation, an organization that preserves old homes. The spirit of a doctor who died after a duel in 1786 is still "sensed" and sometimes seen and heard whistling "an English showballad" on the steps. A little girl, thought to have lived there in the 1830s, has also been witnessed in the garden and on the second floor.
Old City Jail
Home to many horrible criminals, this prison was built in 1802. It was said for years--perhaps even still--to be haunted by Lavinia Fisher, a woman who, in life, was an innkeeper who robbed and murdered her guests.
Churches in Charleston
There are so many churches in Charleston that it is sometimes called the "Holy City." One such spirit is the Lady In White, which appears in the cemetery of an unnamed church.
St. Phillip's Church
St. Phillip's is the first Anglican church in the south, built in 1710. A June 10, 1987 photograph reveals what appears to be the transleucent image of a woman kneeling by one grave--the grave of a woman who died six days after giving birth to a stillborn baby. On the tenth day of June, 1888.
Dock Street Theatre
The first Dock Street Theatre was built in 1736 but burn down four years later. It was replaced, in the early nineteenth century, by the Planters' Hotel, which fell into ruin after the Civil War. The new Dock Street Theatre, built as part of a works project, opened in 1936. A male ghost, about 5'7" and dressed formally, is sometimes seen in the theater. It is thought to be possibly the spirit of actor Junius Brutus Booth (father of John Wilkes), who never played on the Dock Street stage but who "often" stayed in the Planters' Hotel. A woman, thought to be be a prostitute who died of a "botched abortion" in the 1830s, has also been seen seemingly walking on her knees on the second floor. Truth is, the floor was raised during the edifice's renovation in the 1930s; had it been the 1830s, she would have been walking on the floor.
1837 Bed and Breakfast
Located on Wentworth Street, this edifice was built in 1837 and changed into an inn in 1984. It is reportedly haunted by the ghost of a young slave named George who saw his parents sold away in 1843, then died trying to swim out to their departing boat in the harbor. George has been seen playing around the house, and shakes the bed in one room. He also has been known to turn lights on, use rocking chairs, and run away when he--and, sometimes, still-living people--hear the crack of a whip.
Charleston City Hall
The meetingplace of the Charleston City Council from its construction in 1802 until today. The spirit of the highly respected General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, supervisor of the southern assault on Fort Sumter, has been observed in the building.
Battery Carriage House Inn
In room eight of this inn, a man once woke from sleep around four in the morning to see a headless torso, dressed in the uniform of the South during the Civil War, floating at arm's length above his head. He reached out to touch it and felt the fabric of the uniform. As he did so, the apparition moaned, waking the man's wife. She screamed, and it disappeared. An apparition called the "gentleman ghost"--so called because he visits female guests, and if they "object," he leaves . . . through a wall. He is thought to be a man who graduated from Yale in the early twentieth century but committed suicide not long thereafter.
