Battery Carriage House Inn

Room 8 at the Battery Carriage House Inn in Charleston has a headless torso in a gray Confederate jacket that floats beside guests' beds at night. Room 10 has a polite ghost in formal attire who bows before leaving through the wall, believed to be a heartbroken young man who fell from the roof in his best suit.

In 1993, a self-described skeptic staying in Room 8 woke up to find a headless torso floating beside his bed. No head, no arms, just the remnants of what felt like a gray Confederate jacket. Instead of screaming or running, the man reached out and touched it. The area around the figure was extremely cold. Then it growled at him, a sound he described as animalistic, and vanished with a moan. He stopped being a skeptic.

Room 8 at the Battery Carriage House Inn, 20 South Battery in Charleston, has collected stories like that for decades. The headless figure appears beside the bed in the middle of the night, always the same: a torso with no head and no arms, wearing what guests feel is Confederate gray. The leading theory ties it to a young soldier who was blown apart when Confederate troops destroyed ammunition stores near the property to keep them from Union forces. A competing theory reaches further back, to the pirate executions that once took place from the trees at White Point Garden across the street.

Room 10 has a different ghost entirely. Staff call him the Gentleman Ghost, and the backstory is a love story that ended badly. A young man from a well-to-do Charleston family fell in love at eighteen. His parents disapproved and sent him away to school. While he was gone, the girl married someone else. When he came back to Charleston and found out, he dressed in his best suit and fell from the top of the house into the garden below. His ghost appears in formal attire, tall and slender, sometimes carrying a faint scent guests compare to Old Spice cologne. Twin sisters celebrating their birthday in Room 10 watched a figure come through the wall, lie down on the bed beside them, rise, bow politely, and leave back through the same wall. The ghost seems drawn to women and has been spotted lying on the bed or gently touching sleeping guests' hair. One woman spent an entire night reading the Bible after a persistent encounter, clutching it when she finally fell asleep.

The house at 20 South Battery was built in 1843 by Samuel Stevens, a commercial agent for plantation owners who bought the lot for $4,500. John Blacklock, a Charleston merchant, purchased it just before the Civil War. In 1870, Yankee Colonel Richard Lathers bought the property and transformed the modest single house into a palatial mansion, adding a two-story wing, a ballroom over the passageway, and a mansard fourth floor that served as his personal library. Lathers used the home to host reconciliation gatherings between Southern and Northern leaders, once inviting the Governor of New York and the editor of the New York Evening Post to the same party. Disappointed by his failure to fully mend the divide, he sold the house in 1874 and went back to New York.

The Pringle family owned the property through the early twentieth century, and in 1920, Susan Pringle Frost founded the Preservation Society of Charleston in the ballroom. The Pringles eventually converted the rear of the property into a motorcourt for tourists, which became the Battery Carriage House Inn.

Room 3 has generated its own reports. A married couple watched their cell phone make loud, unusual noises despite being powered off with no signal. Floating orbs appeared on two consecutive nights, with more the second evening. A visiting psychic confirmed multiple spirits and asked them to leave. The couple slept peacefully on their third night.

The inn has been featured on SC ETV's Ghosts and Legends series. Guests can request Room 8 or Room 10 by name when booking, though the inn makes no promises about what shows up after the lights go off.