Hampton-Preston Mansion

In 1982, every candle in the sitting room reignited on its own after a docent locked up and set the alarm at this 1818 Columbia mansion. A woman in a gray dress stands on the main staircase, and children's laughter echoes from the empty third floor.

During the 1982 Christmas season, a docent at the Hampton-Preston Mansion finished a candlelight tour, blew out every candle in the sitting room, locked the house, and set the security alarm. From outside, she looked back and saw flickering light in the windows. Every candle in the sitting room was burning again. Police arrived and confirmed the house was still locked, the alarm still armed. Nobody had gone inside.

The mansion at 1615 Blanding Street in Columbia was built in 1818 by Ainsley Hall, a wealthy merchant. Wade Hampton I, a War of 1812 general and one of the richest cotton planters in the antebellum South, purchased it a few years later. The Hampton family expanded and furnished the house in the style you'd expect from people with that kind of money. It later passed to the Preston family through marriage. During the Civil War, Union troops occupied Columbia in 1865, and the mansion survived Sherman's burning of the city, though the family lost nearly everything else.

Historic Columbia operates the house today as a museum with tours of the restored rooms and gardens. The ghost activity centers on a few recurring encounters that docents and staff have described over the years.

The most frequently seen figure is a woman in an old-fashioned gray dress, spotted standing on the stairs in the main hallway. She doesn't interact with anyone. She just stands there. One photograph taken during the daytime, right before a storm, appears to show a translucent woman beneath the staircase.

Children are the other presence. Docents and visiting schoolchildren hear them playing on the third floor and running across the grounds, laughing and shouting. The sounds are distinct enough that people go looking for the source. Nobody is ever there.

Docents who work after hours describe a feeling of being watched that settles over the house when the visitors leave. Some have asked to be reassigned to daytime shifts. The 1982 candle incident is the one that gets retold most, partly because it has a specific date, a specific witness, and a verifiable security system that should have caught any intruder.