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Haunted attractions, scream parks and ghost tours in Charleston, SC. Each listing’s name, address, phone and website come from the business’s Google Business Profile and were checked against its own website. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check the business’s site before you go. Historic haunted places on this page are folklore, credited to the source site named on each place.
8 listings shown.
Haunted place
Across from where pirate Stede Bonnet's men were hanged in 1718. Room 10 has a polite 'gentleman ghost' who vanishes when asked, and a headless soldier is said to roam.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Ghost tour 🎃 OPEN TONIGHT
Ghost tour 🎃 OPEN TONIGHT
Haunted place
Built in 1853 and a refuge for Confederate soldiers in the Civil War. Guests report a soldier in the halls, whispers, cold spots and footsteps in empty corridors.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Haunted place
Built in 1802 and used until 1939, it held pirates, Civil War prisoners and Lavinia Fisher. Tour guides report visitors feeling touched inside.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Haunted place
Called Bloody Alley for its duels. Dr. Joseph Brown Ladd, killed in a 1786 duel, is said to whistle as he walks, amid phantom footsteps and clashing swords.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Haunted place
Sue Howard Hardy, who died in 1888 soon after losing her baby, is said to mourn at her child's grave in the churchyard amid strange mists.
This story is folklore told about a real place. It is not presented as documented fact.
Ghost tour 🎃 OPEN TONIGHT
Charleston was founded in 1670 and moved to its present peninsula site, between the Ashley and Cooper Rivers, in 1680 — the spine of Ghost City Tours' researched account of why the city is haunted, and a matter of documented record. What followed, that account lays out, was three and a half centuries of concentrated trauma on one small peninsula: wars, the transatlantic slave trade, fires, earthquakes and epidemic disease, each generation building on what the previous one lost.
The Revolutionary War gave Charleston one of its darkest chapters. The British laid siege in 1780 and the American garrison surrendered — the largest surrender of American troops until the Civil War, per Ghost City Tours. Prison ships in the harbour became, in the same account, "floating death chambers" where disease and starvation killed captives, and the Exchange and Provost Dungeon held patriots in its dark, airless basement. The Civil War began here: the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, and the bombardment of Charleston lasted 587 days, with military hospitals full of wounded men and cemeteries overwhelmed.
Disease did as much as war. Ghost City Tours records yellow fever epidemics in 1706, 1748 and a catastrophic outbreak in 1854, with the dead buried wherever space allowed — church graveyards, private gardens, trenches — some sites forgotten within a generation. Fire did the rest: the Great Fire of 1740, the fire of 1778, and the Great Fire of 1838, which destroyed over 1,000 buildings.
And one building concentrates it all. The Old City Jail was built in 1802 on Magazine Street and operated for over 150 years, holding pirates, murderers and Civil War prisoners in cramped, deliberately punishing conditions, with executions carried out on the grounds — Ghost City Tours' account again, and the documented foundation under two of the three attractions below.
Folklore, clearly labelled: tour guides say Lavinia Fisher, held in the Old City Jail and hanged with her husband John in 1820, still haunts the jail — in the wedding dress she is said to have insisted on wearing to the gallows. Livability's guide to Charleston's haunted history tells the fuller legend: that at the Six Mile House inn she ran with John, guests were served tea poisoned with oleander and never checked out. Livability presents the tea story as legend — "legend has it" are its words — and the documented part is narrower: she was held in the Old City Jail in 1820, could not be convicted of murder for lack of evidence, and was sentenced to hang for highway robbery.
At the Old Exchange & Provost Dungeon, guests have claimed to see ghosts in the hallways and to hear the screams of long-dead prisoners, The Jasper's account reports — including, in local telling, pirates such as Stede Bonnet, who was held in the prison below the site in the 1700s. At the Dock Street Theatre, accounts passed down through generations say Nettie Dickerson was struck by lightning on the balcony of the Planter's Hotel that once stood on the site, and that a woman in period clothing is still seen on its upper floors. Reported, all of it — folklore laid over documented ground.
Hountix lists 8 places in Charleston, SC. Seasonal attractions keep their own open dates, so check each business's own site before you go.
Ghost City Tours brings an unusually explicit method to Charleston: its own haunted-Charleston research states that its guides work from court records, newspaper archives, military documents and personal diaries, "separating folklore from documented events." Its Charleston page is the backbone of the city story above — and its account of the
The documented jail, per that account: built in 1802 on Magazine Street, operating for over 150 years, holding pirates, murderers, Civil War prisoners of war and common criminals in cramped, dark, poorly ventilated cells where disease spread rapidly; executions were carried out on the grounds. Among its most famous inmates, the company recounts, were Lavinia and John Fisher, who operated an inn north of Charleston where they allegedly — the company's word — poisoned and robbed travellers; both were convicted and hanged in 1820.
The reported layer is equally specific, and reported is the word: shadow figures moving through corridors, cell doors opening and closing on their own, and EVP recordings that investigators say capture voices in accents from different historical periods, with the upper floors — where the most violent prisoners were kept — producing the most intense reports. None of that is asserted here as fact; it is the activity the company says is documented by investigators at the site.
For a Hountix reader, the practical point is the overlap: two Charleston operators — this one and Bulldog Tours — build tours on the same jail and the same Fisher story, with different voices. Tickets, schedules and meeting points are on the company's own Charleston page, linked from its listing; confirm current details there.
The Original Ghostwalk of Charleston sells the district rather than a single building: a walking route through the historic district whose classic stops, in Charleston telling, include the Old Exchange & Provost Dungeon. research and kept visible here: the company's exact current stop list was not published in the material gathered, so the dungeon's place on What follows is the documented and legendary story of that building, which is reason enough the route is built around places like it.
The documented ground, from The Jasper's account of the building: before the Old Exchange stood on the site, it belonged to the Half-Moon Battery, a centre for trade that held a prison underneath — and pirates who threatened the colonists in the 1700s, Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet among them in the account, were kept locked away in that dungeon. The Exchange built over it served as commercial exchange, post office, city hall and custom house; in the 20th century the Daughters of the American Revolution saved it for preservation, and it became a historical museum in the 1980s. Ghost City Tours' research adds the Revolutionary layer: patriots imprisoned in the basement suffered disease, malnutrition and uncertainty of execution.
The legend layer, reported by The Jasper as claims: guests say they have glimpsed ghosts in the hallways, heard the shocking screams of long-dead dungeon prisoners, seen dancing orbs and felt chilling cold breezes attributed to the pirates trapped below street level. "Some locals will say it's a fable," The Jasper concludes — which is the correct label, and the one this page keeps. Tickets and the current route are on the company's own site, ghostwalk.net.