Old Charleston Jail

The Old Charleston Jail ran from 1802 to 1939 and held some of the city's most notorious figures — pirates, Civil War prisoners, Denmark Vesey. More than 14,000 people died inside, and it's widely considered the most haunted building in Charleston.

The Old Charleston Jail at 21 Magazine Street locked up everyone from pirates to Civil War POWs between 1802 and 1939. Robert Mills designed the building in a Romanesque Revival style -- massive walls, arched windows, the kind of structure that looks like it was built to contain something. Over 137 years, an untold number of prisoners died inside from disease, violence, and execution.

The jail's most famous resident was Lavinia Fisher, often called the first female serial killer in America, though historians still argue about whether that title is fair. Lavinia and her husband John ran the Six Mile Wayfarer House, an inn outside Charleston, in the early 1800s. The popular version of the story goes like this: Lavinia charmed male travelers into staying, served them tea laced with oleander to knock them out, and John robbed and killed them in their beds. In reality, the Fishers were convicted of highway robbery, not murder, and some historians think Lavinia may not have killed anyone at all. Both were sentenced to death. On February 18, 1820, as she walked to the gallows, Lavinia reportedly shouted: 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 is the ghost people see most often here. Tourists and investigators have caught glimpses of a woman in a red and white wedding dress -- the outfit Lavinia reportedly wore to her execution as a final act of defiance. When restoration work began in 2000, workers reported a surge of strange events: figures glimpsed in peripheral vision, sounds echoing through empty cellblocks, overpowering odors with no source, footprints appearing in dust in rooms sealed for decades, and people feeling shoved or grabbed by unseen hands.

Lavinia isn't the only ghost, though. The building held hundreds of enslaved people before the Civil War, and visitors describe a heavy, oppressive sadness that settles over certain rooms -- the kind that makes you want to leave. During the war, the jail housed Union POWs and Confederate deserters in brutal conditions. Dark shapes have been spotted moving through the upper floors and along the cellblock corridors. Screams, moans, and whispered conversations come from every level of the building. The temperature drops sharply in spots throughout the jail, and electronic equipment brought in by investigators frequently malfunctions or picks up voices.

The jail also connects to Denmark Vesey, the formerly enslaved man who planned a massive uprising in Charleston in 1822. While Vesey himself was held elsewhere, some of his alleged co-conspirators were imprisoned here, adding another layer of historical trauma to the site.

Bulldog Tours runs one of Charleston's most popular ghost tours through the building several nights a week. Visitors get access to the cellblocks, solitary confinement, and the areas where Lavinia Fisher spent her final days. Of all the haunted sites in a city full of ghosts, the Old Charleston Jail packs the most human suffering into one building -- pirates, enslaved people, soldiers, and accused killers all confined behind the same walls.