Longstreet Theatre

Longstreet Theatre at the University of South Carolina was built in 1855 as a chapel, served as a Confederate field hospital with a basement morgue during the Civil War, and is now haunted by slamming doors, a humming woman, and the infamous "Third Eye Man" spotted in 1950 near the loading dock with two dead chickens.

On April 7, 1950, a University of South Carolina police officer found a man in a silver suit standing over two dead chickens near the loading dock of Longstreet Theatre. When the officer hit him with a flashlight beam, the figure turned. There was a third eye in the middle of his forehead. The "Third Eye Man" became campus legend, and students still tell the story about the tunnels beneath the building where he supposedly lurks with a lead pipe.

The theatre sits on the USC campus in Columbia, and its history is stacked in layers that keep getting darker the further down you go. The Classical Revival building went up in 1855 as a chapel and auditorium. It served as an armory. A classroom building. A gymnasium. Most significantly, during the Civil War, it was a Confederate field hospital with a morgue in the basement. The space underneath the front steps, now a sitting lounge for theatre students, is where the dead were kept. Shutter doors on either side provided ventilation. The building was named for Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, a former USC president who was both a distinguished scholar and an aggressive defender of slavery. His nephew was General James Longstreet of Gettysburg.

The theatre department moved in during the 1970s, and the reports started almost immediately. Ann C. Dreher, a USC Theatre professor, has described the nightly phenomena: doors slamming on their own, floorboards creaking with no weight on them, the elevator opening to empty hallways. People who work late in the building hear a woman humming and, on occasion, talking. There is no woman.

Officer Eric Grabski, who patrolled the campus, described "a kind of a cold feeling around the steps of Longstreet Theatre." He said one officer "would see images or what he thought were maybe some kind of ghostly figures around that point." The steps sit directly above the old morgue.

The green room carries the worst reputation. Actors and crew who stay late for rehearsals describe an oppressive weight, a sense of being crowded by people who aren't visible. The room occupies space that was once part of the hospital where Confederate wounded waited for surgery or death. Most of the building was constructed using enslaved labor, a fact that USC's own historians have documented.

In 2025, USC Theatre professor Lauren Wilson staged an original play called "The Seeing Place," a ghost story inspired by the building's layered past. Wilson was careful to note that her fictional Longstreet was "a greatly exaggerated version of the actual building." The real one, she said, is well-maintained. But the building's history is not exaggerated. A chapel became a hospital became a morgue became a gymnasium became a theatre, and something from one of those earlier versions seems to have stayed behind.