St. George, South Carolina Sunday, October 25, 2026 Complimentary

County Line Confidential

Dispatches from Dorchester County, South Carolina. Filed weekly. Not all of it true. None of it made up.

Why is Charleston so haunted?

Charleston is called haunted because it is old, because it has been hit by nearly everything a city can be hit by, and because the buildings where those things happened are still standing. The city was founded in 1670, suffered a magnitude 7 earthquake in 1886, buried its dead by the thousands in yellow fever epidemics from 1699 onward, and was where the Civil War began in 1861.

Those are the real answers. There is one more that nobody in Charleston gives.

It is old

English colonists landed on the Ashley River in 1670 and moved to the peninsula by 1681. Three and a half centuries is long enough for a great many people to die in one place.

Yellow fever and the 1700s epidemics

The first major yellow fever epidemic in 1699 killed about 15 percent of the town. Between 1706 and 1748 there were at least five more, possibly eight. The disease returned through the 1850s and killed about 200 people as late as 1871. Nobody knew mosquitoes carried it until 1900. Planters who could afford to left town every summer for the pinelands upriver, which is how Summerville came to exist.

Slavery

Charleston’s customs house processed about 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought into North America between 1700 and 1775, and about half of them until the trade ended in 1808. Roughly 30,000 people were landed at Gadsden’s Wharf alone. A city that calls itself haunted and does not say this first is leaving out the largest fact it has.

The Civil War

Confederate batteries opened fire on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. In December of that year a fire burned 164 acres of the city, including the cathedral and many of its best houses. The war that started in the harbor killed more Americans than any other, and the tours have never run short of material from it.

The 1886 earthquake

On the night of August 31, 1886, an earthquake now estimated at magnitude 6.9 to 7.3 struck with its epicenter northwest of the city, near Summerville. About 60 people died. Nearly every one of Charleston’s 8,000 buildings was damaged and roughly 2,000 were seriously damaged. The iron earthquake bolts you see on old brick walls downtown were put there afterward to hold them together. It remains the most damaging earthquake in the history of the eastern United States.

The buildings are still here

In 1931 Charleston passed the first historic district zoning ordinance in the country. The point was to keep gas stations out of antebellum neighborhoods. The effect is that the houses where the fevers, the fires and the war happened were never torn down. A ghost story needs a building. Charleston kept its buildings.

The tourism industry

The city gets about eight million visitors a year. As of October 2025, 22 downtown tour companies offered ghost tours and two more ran ghost carriage tours, according to city tourism officials. Bulldog Tours opened in 2001, when ghost tours were a Halloween business; they now run year-round and make up about 60 percent of that company’s sales. Most tours cost $20 to $30 a head. A reputation that profitable gets maintained. That is an observation, not a criticism.

The upriver answer

Here is the part the tours leave out. The earthquake’s epicenter was not in Charleston. It was upriver, in what is now Dorchester County. The planters fleeing fever went up the Ashley to Summerville and to the town of Dorchester, founded in the 1690s and abandoned after the Revolution. The bell tower is still there, without its bell. Charleston tells the stories. Dorchester County is where they come from. The county history lays it out, the map shows where to stand, and the dispatches begin with The Tower With No Bell.

Frequently asked questions

Q. Is Charleston really the most haunted city in America?

A. There is no way to measure it. Charleston, Savannah and New Orleans all make the claim. Charleston appears on Condé Nast Traveler’s list of the most haunted places in America and has 22 companies selling ghost tours, which is as close to a measurement as exists.

Q. When did ghost tours start in Charleston?

A. No single first date is documented. Bulldog Tours, one of the largest operators, opened in 2001, when ghost tours were mostly a seasonal Halloween product. They are now a year-round industry.

Q. What is the most haunted place in Charleston?

A. The Old City Jail is the most heavily toured, and only one company is permitted to take groups inside it. The answer upriver is the bell tower at Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, 300 State Park Road, Summerville, open daily for $3.

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