Oakwood Cemetery

Spartanburg's oldest cemetery, locally called "Hell's Gate," is home to the ghost of a bride buried in her wedding dress, a phantom boy who asks visitors to play near the hill where he died, and a potter's field where 100+ relocated graves may have triggered decades of strange activity. In 2012, someone pried open a coffin and stole a skull, only to return it a month later.

In 2012, the caretaker at Oakwood Cemetery found a grave pried open and a skull missing. The concrete vault had been cracked, the casket forced apart, and the head removed from the body. Nothing else was taken. About a month later, someone returned it.

That kind of thing probably shouldn't surprise anyone familiar with this place. Locals have called the back section of Oakwood "Hell's Gate" for generations, and the name fits. The potter's field sits at the bottom of a hill behind the main grounds, where prisoners, orphans, and people too poor for a proper burial were buried in unmarked or barely marked graves. Spartanburg established the cemetery in 1883, and by 1914 the city had dug up more than 100 graves from another part of town and relocated them here to clear land for development. A lot of people think that relocation is when things started going wrong.

The most famous ghost is a woman in a white wedding dress. The story goes that a young bride died on her wedding day and was buried in the gown she never got to walk down the aisle in. Visitors see her moving between headstones on foggy nights, the dress trailing behind her as if she's still making that walk. She tends to appear wrapped in a thin mist, and people near her describe a sudden wave of cold air and a deep, heavy sadness that hits without warning.

Then there's the boy near Potter's Field. He fell to his death off the steep hill while his mother was visiting another grave. Multiple visitors over the years have described the same encounter: a young boy approaches them holding a ball, asks them to play, and fades before they can answer. The accounts are oddly specific and similar, even from people who'd never heard the story before visiting.

Electronics are a problem here. Fully charged phones die within minutes. Cameras shut off. Experienced investigators from True Light Paranormal, a Spartanburg-based group, say their equipment drains faster at Oakwood than anywhere else they've worked. "I've caught a lot of paranormal activity in there, we've had all kinds of stuff happen," investigator Laurie Fowler told South Carolina ETV in 2019. Steven McBee, another local investigator, put it simply: "I do not think the spirits are evil. I just think they're there."

The cemetery sits on 20 acres beside Converse College on Spartanburg's east side. It holds the founder of Converse College, Dexter Edgar Converse, along with concert pianist Carlos Moseley, World War II veterans, and generations of the city's doctors and business owners. The board of directors went bankrupt in 1941, leaving the grounds neglected for decades until Martha Chapman reformed the board in 1983 and personally oversaw the restoration.

But the well-tended front sections and the overgrown back hill feel like two different cemeteries. Up front, Victorian monuments and carved angels mark the plots of Spartanburg's prominent families. Down the hill in Potter's Field, wooden crosses lean sideways over graves with no names. Children's laughter drifts up from sections where young ones are buried, even when nobody is around. Visitors have photographed unexplained plumes of smoke with no source, and some describe the sensation of being watched so intensely they leave without finishing their walk.

The skull incident in 2012 was never fully explained. Some blame occult activity in the potter's field, which has drawn that kind of attention for years. Others think it was a prank gone wrong. Either way, someone had second thoughts. The skull came back.