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    Haunted Charleston
    Haunted Charleston
    Haunted Charleston
    Ebook131 pages1 hour

    Haunted Charleston

    By Ed Macy, Geordie Buxton, Glenna Ellen McKenzie and Julie Scofield

    2.5/5

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    About this ebook

    True stories of the spookiest sites in this beautiful South Carolina city—includes photos!
     
    On the historic streets of Charleston, true life is sometimes stranger than fiction. In this book, Ed Macy and Geordie Buxton share stories of the paranormal in ghastly and sometimes dreadful detail. Combing through the oft-forgotten enclaves of the Holy City, they bring readers face to face with:
     
    • The orphans who haunt a dorm at the College of Charleston
    • A Citadel cadet who haunts a local hotel
    • The specter of William Drayton at Drayton Hall Plantation
    • And more!
     
    Enriched by historic background information and specific details that are often lost in ghost stories, this collection sparks curiosity about what might still be lurking in the alleyways of Charleston’s storied streets.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMay 1, 2005
    ISBN9781614233213
    Haunted Charleston
    Author

    Ed Macy

    Ed Macy left the British Army in January 2008, after twenty-three years’ service. He had amassed a total of 3,930 helicopter flying hours, 645 of them inside an Apache. Ed was awarded the Military Cross for his courage during the Jugroom Fort rescue in Helmand Province, Afghanistan – one of the first ever in Army Air Corps’ history. ‘Apache’ is his first book. He hopes it won’t be his last.

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      Book preview

      Haunted Charleston - Ed Macy

      INTRODUCTION

      This book covers new territory involving Charleston’s ghosts—literally and figuratively. Few of these stories have ever been published, and they take place away from the average postcard shots of the city: the moss- and ivy-strewn campus of the College of Charleston, the imposing fortress of the original Citadel, and the neighborhoods that once lay near the boundary of the city. These stories and essays are more grim and morbid than the stories that have been published previously about the Holy City’s ghosts. In many cases, they are more tragic because of the age or the number of people involved. That is the face of history, and I cannot as a writer presume to make these stories more digestible. I must tell them as they happened and let the reader make his or her own decisions on how to accept them.

      There is only one essential ingredient in a ghost story: death. Immediately upon discovering this, one realizes the topic at hand is inherently morbid. It is this high-speed train wreck fascination that keeps the reader or the listener attentive, alert and somewhat (hopefully) uneasy. Ghost stories exist not to fill the public’s desire for morbidity or gore. They exist because these real events happened to very real people. These were living beings who died in wars, in pistol duels and in acts of God and Mother Nature. The dramatic suspense does not need to be embellished, because these things actually occurred.

      Embellishment can and does thrive in ghost legends, however. These are the stories wrought from the human desire to become a slave to the storyteller. Often, but not always, these are tales of real events that have been padded or twisted to take on a whole new life. They can become part of the cultural subconscious. As a storyteller, I am not opposed to ghost legends. I simply feel they should remain in their proper category, and not passed off as ghost stories.

      Unfortunately, this genre has already been victim to endless stereotyping and cliché bombardments. The concept of the ghost as a chain-rattling, sheet-draped phantom is infuriatingly ingrained in our cultural heritage. The American Halloween culture did for ghosts what the Book of Genesis did for the snake: both cast their subjects in a light to be feared and even despised, when in fact there is no real justification for this.

      Another element of stereotyping involves the ever-familiar famous ghost. I once heard a carriage tour guide tell a group of gullible tourists that General Robert E. Lee haunted the Mills House Hotel on Meeting Street. Now, granted, I do not know everything that went on in Lee’s personal life during his short stay at the hotel in the beginning months of the Civil War. But I can almost guarantee that nothing happened here to rival the emotion and psychic trauma the man endured years later on the battlefields of Virginia, Appomattox Courthouse or Arlington, his mansion-turned-cemetery. My point is that every city has a famous ghost. It is an epidemic we must endure, as the ghost genre gets more popular and more commercialized. People love to put the famous name to the not-so-famous ghost. Fame and notoriety sell. It’s been proven.

      This book contains ghost stories based on real history and specific details. There are no elements of mystery, intrigue or romance embellished to make for a more frightening story. Truth is stranger than fiction, meaning the natural and historical drama in these stories provides wonder. The specific details provide the almost shocking realism. Today’s reader demands more than ambiguous, question-marked rhetoric, i.e.: and some believe the ghost still haunts the manor to this day. Do you?

      There are many books that will provide readers with a false sense of mystery and adventure. The stories in these books are set in obscure, out-of-the-way locales, some of which do not even exist anymore. It may have worked in the early 1960s, but today’s reader is far more jaded. They expect the details wrought from great scrutiny. John Bennett’s Doctor to the Dead, while highly entertaining, is in a completely different genre. It focuses on cultural superstitions and orally translated folk-tales.

      Haunted Charleston provides the significant dates, locations and names of these stories. We also range the readers’ senses in describing how the ghosts are experienced. All of our settings are real, extant and can be seen by the reader upon visiting Charleston.

      I have been asked numerous times by television producers why Charleston has so many ghosts. For the first few naïve years, my standard reply was it’s an old city that has seen a lot of death…. Granted, this is true, but it could also be said for hundreds of communities on this continent. If asked today, I try to answer more philosophically. I now tell interested parties that the spirit world crystallizes around objects of familiarity. By law and common sense, Charleston has entire neighborhoods that have never changed physically. Not just the exteriors of the structures, preserved for the sake of historic importance and tourism, but even small details inside: doorknobs, light fixtures and, unfortunately in some, plumbing and electrical wiring. This city has changed dramatically in a cultural and social sense. The smell and view and placement of property, however, would look the same to a person who died two hundred years ago.

      In my opinion, ghosts are a phenomenon much like fog or humidity, only harder to explain. Ghosts are images emblazoned onto spatial property because of some tragic emotional or psychological experience, or the classic unfinished business. Not having a background in science, I cannot give any better definition, save for the following stories …

      THE COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON

      THE ORPHAN POLTERGEISTS

      The poltergeists that haunt the College of Charleston’s Joseph E. Berry dormitory are as mischievous as they are mysterious. This building was once the site of The Charleston Orphan House, which, in October of 1918, faced one of the greatest challenges of its time. The Spanish Influenza epidemic had infected over two hundred orphans with the flu and many were near death. Miss Lesesne, the superintendent, who was already short-handed in nursing and supplies because of the wartime decline in charitable donations, called in every staff member she could find to keep the sick children from passing away. More young lives were at stake than during the great earthquake of 1886, the diphtheria epidemic of 1908 or the starvation earlier in the century resulting in geophagia, or eating dirt.

      For the children who were immune or spared from the Spanish Influenza, large open play yards were always accessible without the reviewing eye of staff disciplinarians, who were overwhelmed with tending to the sick. The frantic time was a great vacation away from the routine discipline of The Door, or Miss Dorine Blackman.

      Small in stature but big in heart, Miss Blackman was raised in the nineteenth century and spent many years in the sewing department of the orphanage before eventually becoming the superintendent after Miss Lesesne died at her post. She was given the nickname The Door because when matrons sent misbehaving children

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