Old Charleston Jail

Operating from 1802 until 1939, this jail housed Charleston's most notorious criminals including pirates, Civil War prisoners, and Denmark Vesey. More than 14,000 people died within its walls, making it the most haunted building in Charleston.

The Old Charleston Jail at 21 Magazine Street operated as the city's primary detention facility from 1802 to 1939, housing Civil War prisoners of war, captured pirates, enslaved people awaiting sale, and some of the most notorious criminals in South Carolina history. The building was designed by Robert Mills in a Romanesque Revival style, with massive walls, arched windows, and a fortress-like presence that dominates the corner of Magazine and Franklin Streets. Over its 137 years of operation, an untold number of prisoners died within its walls from disease, violence, and execution.

The jail's most infamous resident was Lavinia Fisher, widely called the first female serial killer in America -- though historians continue to debate whether that title is deserved. Lavinia and her husband John Fisher operated the Six Mile Wayfarer House, an inn on the outskirts of Charleston, in the early 1800s. According to the most popular version of the legend, Lavinia would charm male travelers into staying at the inn, serve them tea laced with oleander to make them drowsy, and then John would rob and murder them in their beds. In reality, the Fishers were convicted of highway robbery, not murder, and some historians argue that Lavinia may not have killed anyone at all. Regardless, both Lavinia and John were sentenced to death. On February 18, 1820, as she was led to the gallows, Lavinia reportedly shouted her last words: If you have a message you want to send to hell, give it to me -- I will carry it. She was buried in a potter's field near the jail.

Lavinia Fisher is the most frequently reported ghost at the Old Charleston Jail. Tourists and investigators have caught glimpses of a woman in a red and white wedding dress -- the same outfit Lavinia reportedly wore to her execution in a final act of defiance. When restoration efforts began on the jail in 2000, workers reported a surge of strange occurrences: unusual apparition sightings, bizarre sounds echoing through empty cellblocks, overpowering odors with no identifiable source, unexplained footprints appearing in layers of dust in rooms that had been sealed for decades, and physical encounters where workers felt they had been pushed, grabbed, or shoved by unseen hands.

But Lavinia is far from the only spirit said to haunt the jail. The building housed hundreds of enslaved people in the years before the Civil War, and their suffering has left traces that visitors describe as a heavy, oppressive sadness that settles over certain rooms. During the Civil War, the jail held Union prisoners of war and Confederate deserters, and conditions were notoriously brutal. Shadow figures have been seen moving through the upper floors and along the cellblock corridors, and disembodied screams, moans, and whispered conversations have been reported on every level of the building. Cold spots appear and vanish throughout the jail, and electronic equipment brought in by paranormal investigators frequently malfunctions or records unexplained voices and sounds.

The jail is also connected to Denmark Vesey, the formerly enslaved man who planned a massive slave uprising in Charleston in 1822. While Vesey himself was held and tried at a different location, some of his alleged co-conspirators were imprisoned at the jail, and the building's association with the suppression of Black resistance adds another layer of historical trauma to the site.

Today the Old Charleston Jail is owned by the American College of the Building Arts, and Bulldog Tours operates one of Charleston's most popular ghost tours through the building several nights a week. The tour provides access to the cellblocks, the solitary confinement wing, and the areas where Lavinia Fisher was held before her execution. Of all the haunted sites in a city overflowing with ghosts, the Old Charleston Jail may be the most concentrated repository of human suffering and supernatural energy -- a place where pirates, enslaved people, soldiers, and serial killers were all confined behind the same walls, and where many of them appear to remain.