Longstreet Theatre

Home to the USC Theatre department, Longstreet Theatre spent part of its early life as a Civil War hospital. The current green room was the morgue. The actors who rehearse there know it.

Longstreet Theatre is one of the most haunted buildings on the University of South Carolina campus, and its reputation comes from a genuinely dark history stretching back to the Civil War. Originally known as College Hall, the Greek Revival structure was finished in 1855 at a cost of $34,000 -- well over its $24,000 budget -- after architect Jacob Graves designed it as a chapel and auditorium. The building had problems from the start: 400,000 bricks were lost in a Congaree River flood during construction, and the acoustics turned out so bad it never worked for its intended purpose. When war came, most students enlisted, South Carolina College closed, and the building became a 300-bed military hospital serving both Confederate and Union soldiers. The brick catacombs beneath the front steps became the morgue, where soldiers' bodies were stored in the underground chambers. According to Historic Columbia, this hospital use may have saved the building from destruction during Sherman's burning of Columbia on February 17-18, 1865.

After the war, the building cycled through uses as a U.S. Army arsenal and armory (1870-1887), science classrooms (1888), and a gymnasium (1893 onward). In the 1970s, theatre designer George Izenhour oversaw its conversion into a 312-seat arena-style theatre, solving the century-old acoustics problem with an inverted dome of plaster suspended from the ceiling. The first production, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, was staged in 1977, and the building was renamed for Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, the college's eighth president.

The activity centers on the former morgue -- now the theatre's three-chamber green room -- where the original shutter doors that once provided ventilation for the dead are still visible on either side. Visitors and theatre students feel persistent temperature drops, a deep unease, and the sensation of being watched in this space. Throughout the building, doors slam when nobody's nearby, floors creak with invisible footsteps late at night, and the elevator opens entirely on its own. Full-body figures have been seen after dark, believed to be Civil War soldiers who don't seem to know their hospital closed over 160 years ago.

Professor Ann Dreher, who taught theatre at USC for 33 years, was one of the building's most outspoken witnesses. She told WIS-TV in 2008 that through the years, many people had seen and heard strange things in the theatre, and that she herself had sensed vibrations within the space. Dreher was firm about the presence of ghosts, declaring there were "ghosts aplenty from the 19th century." She reassured students with characteristic humor that they were "real friendly -- unless you were a Yankee." University archivist Elizabeth West added that the building's history as a place where people were sick, injured, and dying made it the likeliest spot on campus for hauntings.

One of the most unsettling accounts comes from a department secretary who was walking out the door facing Sumter Street from the catacomb area when she was shoved by an unseen force and tumbled all the way down the steps -- a significant fall given the platform design at the top. USCPD officer Eric Grabski confirmed to Garnet and Black Magazine in 2024 that officers on patrol would describe "a cold feeling around the steps of Longstreet Theatre," and that one officer claimed to see what he thought were ghostly figures in that same area. Theatre students have become so convinced that many refuse to be in the building alone after dark, keeping an informal buddy system for late-night rehearsals.

Longstreet Theatre is also connected to one of USC's most enduring urban legends: the Third Eye Man. On the night of November 12, 1949, student Christopher Nichols reported a strange man in bright silver clothing opening a manhole cover at the corner of Sumter and Greene Streets, directly opposite the theatre. Nearly six months later, on April 7, 1950, a university police officer allegedly found a silver-dressed figure hunched over two mutilated chickens at Longstreet's loading dock. When the officer shined his flashlight, the figure turned to reveal a third eye on his forehead before fleeing into the underground tunnels. While archivist West has noted that some elements of this story may have come from a 1990s creative writing class, the legend remains deeply tied to the building.

Today Longstreet Theatre serves USC's Department of Theatre and Dance and hosts stops on the university's annual ghost tours. In 2025, USC professor Lauren Wilson premiered The Seeing Place, an original play inspired by the theatre's haunted reputation and its Civil War hospital history. The production team keeps a ghost light -- a single bulb left burning on an otherwise dark stage -- following the theatrical tradition of keeping ghosts company. The building received a preservation award from Historic Columbia in 2024 and remains on the National Register of Historic Places.