Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon

Built in 1771, the Exchange served as a customs house while the dungeon below held prisoners including pirates and Revolutionary War patriots. The building witnessed some of Charleston's darkest moments.

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. Designed by Anglo-Irish architect William Rigby Naylor and built by German master masons John and Peter Horlbeck, the grand Palladian structure was completed in 1771 as the customs house for Charleston's busy port. But beneath the elegant building lies a far darker space -- the Provost Dungeon, where pirates, prisoners of war, and political dissidents suffered and died in chains for over a century.

The dungeon's history of imprisonment began in 1718, when captured pirates including members of Stede Bonnet's crew were held in the underground chambers before their execution at White Point. During the Revolutionary War, the building's role became even more grim. After British forces captured Charleston in 1780, the basement was converted into a military prison where American Patriots were tortured, starved, and left to die in the damp underground cells. Historians have documented at least 120 prisoners held in the Exchange, though the true number was certainly higher. Among the most notable prisoners were three signers of the Declaration of Independence, captured during the Siege of Charleston. The most tragic case was Colonel Isaac Hayne, a Patriot officer imprisoned in the Exchange after being captured in July 1781. The British, wanting to make an example of men who broke their paroles, hanged Hayne on August 4, 1781, at a site just outside the city fortifications. 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 discovered during their occupation.

The paranormal activity in the Provost Dungeon is among the most intense in Charleston. Visitors descending into the underground chambers report hearing terrifying cries and screams echoing off the brick walls, along with harrowing moans as though someone is in great pain. The heavy iron chains mounted on the dungeon walls have been observed swinging by unseen forces -- beginning their eerie swaying when no living person is anywhere near them. Dancing orbs of light drift through the darkness of the cells, and chilling cold spots envelop visitors 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 were once left to rot among the dead.

In the upper floors of the Exchange, the hauntings take a different form. Visitors have approached what they assumed were costumed museum interpreters in period dress only to watch the figures vanish before their eyes as they drew closer. These well-dressed apparitions seem connected to the building's more genteel history as a customs house and the site where South Carolina leaders debated and approved the United States Constitution in 1788.

The building was transferred to the South Carolina Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1913, and it officially opened as a historical museum in 1981. Today visitors can tour both the grand upper halls and descend into the original dungeon, where life-size figures and period artifacts recreate the conditions prisoners endured. The Old Exchange is one of the most popular stops on Charleston's ghost tours, and the combination of pirate imprisonment, wartime suffering, secret gunpowder caches, and the execution of patriots has left the building saturated with the kind of human tragedy that ghost hunters say generates the most powerful hauntings.