Haunted Places Near Charleston SC: Upriver Day Trips

The haunted places near Charleston that are worth the drive are mostly upriver, in Dorchester County and the counties beside it, and most of them are ruins. This list stays within about an hour of the city, gives you the address, the hours, and the fee where there is one, and tells you plainly which places have a ghost story attached and which have only the ground. I have listed nothing I could not find in a public record.

Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, Summerville

The first inland town in the colony. Congregationalists from Dorchester, Massachusetts settled the north bank of the Ashley in 1696 or 1697; the state park and the state encyclopedia say 1697, other accounts say January 1696, so sources differ. St. George’s Anglican church was finished in 1719 and got its brick bell tower in 1751. Between 1757 and 1760 the colony built a fort of tabby, a concrete of lime, sand, and oyster shell. The British held the town from May 1780 until December 1781. After the war the people drifted to Summerville and took the bricks with them. What is left is the bell tower, the fort, and the stubs of a log wharf at low tide.

300 State Park Road, Summerville. Open daily, 9 to 6 during daylight saving time and 9 to 5 the rest of the year, closed Christmas. Three dollars for adults, a dollar for children 6 to 15. About twenty miles from Charleston. Dogs on a leash are fine. The tower has no bell. It has not had one for a long time, and the town has not needed it.

The Summerville Light, Sheep Island Road

The best-known ghost in the county is a lantern. Since at least the 1950s people have reported a light moving along an old logging tram road north of Summerville, on what is now Sheep Island Road, which locals renamed Light Road; a stretch is still signed Old Light Road. The story is that an engineer’s wife waited at the end of the line every night with a lantern for a husband killed in a train wreck, in some versions decapitated, and that one of them is still out there with it. In December 1974 the News and Courier was asked what caused it and could not find out.

In January 2025 a USGS seismologist, Susan Hough, published a paper in Seismological Research Letters arguing the Summerville Light is most readily explained by earthquake lights from quakes too small to feel. The sightings cluster near the accepted epicenter of the 1886 Charleston earthquake, where its foreshocks were concentrated, and within a few kilometers of three magnitude 3.5 to 4.4 earthquakes in 1959 and 1960. A local historian writing in the Journal Scene preferred swamp gas or headlights on 176 and 17-A.

There is nothing to visit. Sheep Island Road is lined with houses and apartments now.

Old White Meeting House Ruins and Cemetery, Summerville

The Dorchester settlers built a wooden meeting house in 1696 and replaced it with brick around 1700, naming it for the Rev. John White of Dorchester, England. It burned in the Revolution, was rebuilt in 1794, and served until the congregation moved into Summerville Presbyterian in 1831. The 1886 earthquake, centered a few miles away, knocked it to the ground. Partial walls and foundations stand in a cemetery that is still in use, with marked graves going back to the 1760s. It is on the National Register with the cemetery. On Dorchester Road, Summerville. No fee, no hours posted, and it is a working graveyard.

Indian Field Campground, St. George

Not haunted, by anyone’s account. Listed because of what it looks like. Ninety-nine wooden “tents,” rough cabins with no plumbing, stand in a circle about 690 feet across around an open-air tabernacle that seats a thousand. Methodists have met here since before 1810; the camp moved to the present ten acres in 1838 or 1848, depending on the source. The meeting runs the first week of October. The tents are privately owned and passed down in families, and the campground is on the National Register. Off U.S. 15 near St. George. Fifty-one weeks a year the circle is empty.

Francis Beidler Forest, Four Holes Swamp, Harleyville

The oldest things in the county are trees. Audubon’s sanctuary in Four Holes Swamp covers more than 18,000 acres, about 1,800 of them old-growth bald cypress and tupelo, some more than a thousand years old. A 1.75-mile boardwalk, built in 1977, takes you in and out. Four Holes is the Edisto’s largest tributary and has no single channel. National Natural Landmark, Ramsar wetland. 336 Sanctuary Road, Harleyville. Audubon posts hours and admission; the outer trails are open dawn to dusk.

Givhans Ferry State Park, Ridgeville

The Edisto, more than 250 miles of free-flowing blackwater, passes under limestone bluffs of old seabed here. Phillip Givhan ran a ferry across it on the Charleston-Augusta road. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the park in 1934, and four of their cabins stand on the bluff. 988 acres; a 1.5-mile bluff trail; the end of a 23-mile paddling trail from Colleton State Park. 746 Givhans Ferry Road, Ridgeville. Open 9 to 6, until 9 in daylight saving time. Six dollars for adults, $3.50 for children 6 to 15. About 35 miles from downtown Charleston. No ghost story that I can source. Plenty of river.

Old Sheldon Church Ruins, Yemassee

The one ruin on this list with a ghost story people will tell you. Prince William’s Parish Church was built between 1745 and 1753 under William Bull; the National Register calls it the first conscious attempt in America to build in the form of a Greek temple. The British under General Prevost burned it in 1779. It was rebuilt in 1826. Tradition says Sherman’s men burned it again on January 14, 1865; a letter from February 1866 says “Sheldon Church not burn’t,” only gutted inside, likely by neighbors stripping it for lumber. Governor Bull is buried inside the walls.

Old Sheldon Church Road, Yemassee, in northern Beaufort County, about seventeen miles north of Beaufort. The grounds are open in daylight at no charge; a fence went up around the walls in 2019 after vandalism. It is private property of St. Helena’s Church, which holds a service there once a year in spring. Do not climb on the walls.

A note on the Jacksonboro Light

Colleton County has its own lantern, the Jacksonboro Light, a preacher searching the tracks for a lost daughter. The Post and Courier noted it sits, like Summerville’s, beside a railroad and a fault. I have not stood on that road.

The dispatches from County Line Confidential walk most of this ground. The county map at /map/ puts every place here on one sheet. The county history at /history/ starts at Dorchester. For the bell tower, read /the-tower-with-no-bell/; for the river, /the-edisto-keeps-its-own/.

Haunted Places Near Charleston You Can Reach in a Day