The Brentwood Restaurant

Housed in the historic 1910 Queen Anne-style Essie May McCorsley House, the Brentwood Restaurant is considered the most haunted restaurant in South Carolina. The elegant dining room serves both living patrons and spectral observers.

The Brentwood Restaurant occupies a Victorian-style house built in 1910 by Clarence and Essie Bessent-McCorsley in the small fishing village of Little River, South Carolina. After Clarence passed away in the late 1940s, Essie -- a resourceful woman who had raised their children in the house -- began renting rooms to visiting fishermen for one dollar per night, with an extra fifty cents for a hearty breakfast. She ran the boarding house for decades, becoming a beloved fixture of Little River life. In the 1970s, when she finally agreed to sell the property, she insisted that the new owners relocate the entire house across Highway 17 at her expense rather than see it demolished. Essie passed away shortly after the move was completed, but many believe she never truly left.

Paranormal investigator Stephen Lancaster, who studied the property over the course of a year, called the Brentwood the most haunted location along the Grand Strand and a Holy Grail of haunted spaces. The primary ghost is believed to be Essie herself, whose spirit appears to still watch over the home she loved. The most commonly reported apparition is a Shadow Figure -- a dark, fast-moving silhouette that has been sighted repeatedly at the stairwell and in the second-floor dining room. The shadow has been seen passing by the upstairs bathroom into the front room and, on recent occasions, moving directly through the upstairs fireplace as if the wall were not there.

Kitchen equipment has mysteriously activated without anyone touching it. Inexplicable shadows drift through the bar and dining room. A glass once fell from the bar and shattered at the precise moment an old photograph was moved in the men's restroom. Witnesses have reported seeing a face staring from the upstairs window when the entire upper floor was confirmed empty. Floating orbs of light appear in digital photographs taken throughout the house, and disembodied sighing voices have been heard within the walls. Patrons have been mysteriously locked in the bathroom by doors that staff insist cannot lock on their own. The activity has been intense enough that some employees have quit rather than continue working in the building.

During a formal paranormal investigation using a psychic medium, the entity identified herself through the initials E.M. -- matching both the current owner at the time, Eric Masson, and the original owner, Essie McCorsley. The psychic also identified the letter C, believed to represent Clarence, Essie's husband, who was sensed as always watching over the property. A third spirit, identified as Mary Platt -- a subsequent owner with whom Essie apparently had conflict -- was also detected. Perhaps most compellingly, Essie's death date of October 15th coincided with the date the Massons closed on their sale of the restaurant, and the two streets nearest to the house's original location are named McCorsley and Bessent -- Essie's married and maiden names -- forming a crossroads that seems to bind her memory to the land.

Today the Brentwood Restaurant operates as a Lowcountry-inspired French cuisine bistro under owner Johnson Lewis. The restaurant embraces its supernatural reputation, offering a three-course Ghost Dinner and Tour on select Tuesdays and Thursdays throughout the year, where guests enjoy a meal in the haunted dining room followed by a guided tour of the most active areas. Whether Essie McCorsley truly watches over her relocated home or the shadows that dart through the fireplace have some more mundane explanation, the Brentwood remains one of the most reliably haunted restaurants in the American South -- a place where the former owner appears to have kept her bed-and-breakfast hospitality running well beyond the grave.