In Brief
Oakwood Cemetery in Spartanburg has a back hill locals call Hell's Gate, and a woman in white who drifts its leaning markers. It's ranked the most haunted cemetery in South Carolina — and in 2012, someone dug up a grave there and stole the head inside.
The Full Story
Oakwood Cemetery in Spartanburg, South Carolina has a back hill the locals call Hell's Gate, and the figure people report there most often is a woman in white — a pale shape shrouded in mist, drifting between the leaning markers. She is the best-known ghost in a cemetery often ranked the most haunted in the state.
The reports don't end with her. Visitors describe children's laughter with no children anywhere, and glowing orbs floating low among the headstones. Investigators who spend nights on the grounds say their gear simply quits on them — cameras drain, cell phones go dark. "I've had equipment go dead on me, cell phones don't work, and I've caught orbs," Laurie Fowler, a local paranormal investigator, told South Carolina ETV in 2019. Another investigator, Steven McBee of a group called True Light Paranormal, is calm about it: "I do not think the spirits are evil, I just think they're there."
The cemetery has two faces. The front, laid out in 1883, holds the Victorian monuments of Spartanburg's prominent dead — carved angels, family plots, the grave of Dexter Edgar Converse, who founded the college that still carries his name. Walk toward the back and the ground changes. It goes overgrown, the markers tilt, and the story goes that this was a pauper's field, where prisoners and orphans and the poor were buried out of sight. The Hell's Gate name belongs to that hill, not the tended front.
The neglect wasn't only in the ghost stories. The cemetery's board went bankrupt in 1941, and the grounds sat untended for decades, graves and monuments left to the weather, until a woman named Martha Chapman reformed the board in 1983 and began cleaning the place up largely by hand. The front came back. The back hill never fully did.
Something here reads as unsettled, and one local account blames the arithmetic of the ground itself. More than 100 graves were relocated to Oakwood from another cemetery, and a local author pins the hauntings on those disturbed dead — souls moved from where they were laid, and restless about it.
That got harder to wave off on the morning of Monday, March 28, 2012. Someone had torn down part of a cinder-block retaining wall behind the cemetery, dug away the dirt, and cut out a section of a concrete burial vault. They pried open one end of the metal casket inside, took the head of the person buried there — a person who had died back in 1967 — and knocked the headstone over. Nothing else on the grounds was touched. The police made no arrests.
