Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon

Built in 1771 as a customs house, with a dungeon below that held pirates and Revolutionary War patriots. The building saw some of Charleston's worst moments — and some of its most defiant ones.

The Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon at 122 East Bay Street is one of the most historically significant buildings in Charleston and one of only three sites in the United States where the Constitution was ratified. Anglo-Irish architect William Rigby Naylor designed it, German master masons John and Peter Horlbeck built it, and it was finished in 1771 as the customs house for Charleston's busy port. Underneath the elegant Palladian structure sits something far darker -- the Provost Dungeon, where pirates, prisoners of war, and political dissidents suffered and died in chains for over a century.

The dungeon's history starts in 1718, when captured pirates including members of Stede Bonnet's crew were held underground before their execution at White Point. During the Revolution, things got worse. After the British took Charleston in 1780, the basement became a military prison where American Patriots were tortured, starved, and left to die. Historians have documented at least 120 prisoners, though the real number was certainly higher. Three signers of the Declaration of Independence were held here. The most tragic case was Colonel Isaac Hayne, a Patriot officer captured in July 1781. The British, wanting to make an example of men who broke their paroles, hanged him on August 4, 1781. Before the Revolution, General William Moultrie had secretly moved thousands of pounds of gunpowder from the Powder Magazine to the Exchange's basement and bricked it up -- a cache the British never found during their occupation.

What happens in the Provost Dungeon is among the most intense stuff reported in Charleston. Visitors going down into the underground chambers hear cries and screams bouncing off the brick walls, along with moans that sound like someone in real pain. The heavy iron chains mounted on the walls have been seen swinging when no one is anywhere near them. Dancing orbs of light drift through the darkness. The temperature plunges without warning. The most disturbing reports involve physical contact: visitors have described being pushed by invisible hands or feeling unseen fingers wrap around their throats in the narrow passages where prisoners once rotted among the dead.

Upstairs, the hauntings take a different form. Visitors have walked up to what they assumed were costumed museum interpreters in period dress, only to watch the figures vanish as they got closer. These well-dressed ghosts seem connected to the building's more respectable history as a customs house and the site where South Carolina leaders debated and approved the Constitution in 1788.

The South Carolina Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution took ownership in 1913, and it opened as a museum in 1981. Visitors can tour both the grand upper halls and descend into the original dungeon, where life-size figures and period artifacts recreate prisoner conditions. The Old Exchange is one of the most popular stops on Charleston ghost tours.