Charleston doesn't need a haunted reputation. It earned one. Two hundred and fifty years of pirates, plagues, fires, earthquakes, duels, executions, and a civil war fought in its streets and harbor have left this city with more documented history per square mile than almost anywhere in America. The best ghost tours in Charleston are not a gimmick layered on top of that history. They are, when done well, one of the best ways to actually absorb it, walking the same streets, hea

Charleston is called the Holy City. It is also one of the most historically complex cities in America. Its beauty and its brutality are inseparable, built from the same economic engine, the same labor, the same centuries. Most visitors know about the slave markets. Fewer know about the Charleston Sugar House. That history has been easier to leave out. It had a sweet name. What happened inside was anything but. What Was the Sugar House? The building known as the Sugar House wa

The curtain comes down. The audience files out. The house lights go dark. At most theaters, that's where the story ends. At Dock Street Theatre on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina, the haunted history runs deeper than most visitors realize. Some of the performers apparently never got the note. America's first purpose-built theater has housed two centuries of live performance, survived fires and wars and economic collapse, and been rebuilt twice over. It has also, a

There is a building on Magazine Street that has been waiting for you. The Old City Jail Charleston, at 21 Magazine Street, has been waiting since 1802, when the City of Charleston constructed it to hold the people it wanted the rest of the city to forget. It held them for 137 years: pirates, murderers, debtors, Civil War prisoners of war, enslaved people accused of rebellion, and the woman who may or may not have been America's first female serial killer. It held them in cell

Lavinia Fisher, America's alleged first female serial killer. Uncover the real history behind the legend of the Six Mile Wayfarer House in Charleston, SC.