Old Exchange and Provost Dungeon

Charleston's Old Exchange Building hosted the reading of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution, while the Provost Dungeon underneath held pirates from Stede Bonnet's crew in 1718, three Declaration signers during the Revolution, and Colonel Isaac Hayne before his execution in 1781. Investigators have captured spirit box responses matching prisoner language, and visitors feel shoved and grabbed in the narrow underground passages where men and women were chained together without separation.

On August 5, 1776, someone stood on the steps of the Exchange Building at 122 East Bay Street and read the Declaration of Independence to a Charleston crowd. Twelve years later, South Carolina ratified the Constitution in the great hall upstairs. And underneath the whole time, prisoners were chained to the walls of a dungeon that had been swallowing people since before the building above it even existed.

The dungeon came first. In 1718, captured pirates from Stede Bonnet's crew were held in the underground chambers of the Half Moon Battery that occupied this spot. Bonnet himself got slightly better accommodations at the Provost Marshall's house nearby, but his men rotted below ground until they were marched to White Point and hanged. The elegant Palladian structure above the dungeon wasn't finished until 1771, designed by Anglo-Irish architect William Rigby Naylor and built by German master masons Peter and John Adam Horlbeck as Charleston's customs house.

When the British took Charleston in 1780, the basement became a military prison. Three signers of the Declaration of Independence ended up down there: Arthur Middleton, Edward Rutledge, and Thomas Heyward Jr. They were eventually shipped to St. Augustine to spend the rest of the war as prisoners. Colonel Isaac Hayne had it worse. A Patriot officer who'd agreed to submit to British authority only while they held Charleston, Hayne rejoined the fight once Patriot forces pushed back. The British declared him guilty of treason without a trial. They hanged him at White Point on August 4, 1781. He was 36.

The dungeon held men and women together with no separation. Rats infested the cells. Seawater seeped through the walls. Historians have documented at least 120 prisoners during the Revolution, though the actual number was almost certainly higher. Before the war, General William Moultrie had secretly moved thousands of pounds of gunpowder into the Exchange's basement and bricked it up. The British never found it during their entire occupation.

The ghost people encounter most often is Hayne. He's tied to an upstairs room now called the Colonel Isaac Hayne Room. Visitors have walked up to what they assumed were costumed museum staff in period clothing, only to watch the figures dissolve as they got closer. Downstairs is a different experience entirely. The heavy iron chains mounted on the dungeon walls swing on their own. Tour groups hear cries that bounce off the brick, moans that sound like someone in real pain. People have felt invisible hands shove them in the narrow passages, and a few have described fingers wrapping around their throats.

In February 2019, Grant Wilson from Ghost Hunters led an investigation here with Chad Lindberg from Ghost Stalkers and Carol Cleveland from YouTube's Haunt ME. A separate investigator in 2020 found that an EMF detector went erratic the moment they hit the stairs to the dungeon and stayed active throughout the entire tour. The readings stopped the instant they left the building. A spirit box session produced the words "cruel," "violation," and "he is guilty," all during the guide's description of dungeon conditions.

The Daughters of the American Revolution took ownership in 1913, and the building opened as a museum in 1981. Visitors can still walk down into the original dungeon, where sections of Charles Town's 1702 seawall are exposed in the foundation. The building is one of only three sites in America where the Constitution was ratified. Upstairs, democracy. Downstairs, chains. Same building, same centuries.