Old Sheldon Church Ruins

Originally built between 1745-1753, this church was burned by the British during the Revolutionary War and rebuilt in 1826, only to be burned again by Sherman's troops in 1865. The hauntingly beautiful ruins remain.

Old Sheldon Church was built between 1745 and 1755 as Prince William's Parish Church, organized and funded by William Bull, who named it Sheldon to honor his family's ancestral home in England. The church was said to be the first conscious attempt in America to imitate a Greek temple, featuring three-and-a-half-foot-thick colonnaded walls, seven Tuscan columns, a portico with a triangular pediment and bulls-eye window, and a Palladian window above the altar on the eastern end. It was a masterpiece of colonial architecture that stood as a symbol of Lowcountry wealth and Anglican worship.

The church has been burned to its foundations twice. In 1779, during the Revolutionary War, General Augustine Prevost's British troops set the building ablaze, leaving only the massive brick and tabby walls standing. The ruins lay abandoned for nearly half a century before the church was painstakingly rebuilt in 1826 atop the original foundations. Then, in 1865, as General William T. Sherman's forces swept through South Carolina in the final months of the Civil War, the church was burned again. Some historical accounts suggest the interior may have been stripped by locals desperate for building materials rather than torched by Union soldiers, but the result was the same -- the second destruction left behind the hauntingly beautiful columns and walls that stand today, never to be rebuilt.

The ghost most frequently reported at Old Sheldon Church is a pilgrim woman in a brown dress who materializes near an infant's grave in the churchyard. Visitors who approach the small tombstone report an overwhelming sense of melancholy that goes beyond ordinary sadness or grief -- a deep, almost physical weight of sorrow that descends without warning and lifts only when they step away from the grave. The identity of the woman and the child are unknown, but the intensity of the emotional experience has been described independently by visitors who had no prior knowledge of the ghost.

Photographer Jason Barnette of Road Trips and Coffee documented an eerie encounter during a visit to the ruins that drew attention to the site's paranormal reputation. Ghost hunters are regularly drawn to Old Sheldon Church, intrigued by the concentration of reported phenomena within and around the ruins. Heavy footsteps have been heard on ground where no one is walking. Strange lights appear among the columns after dark, drifting between the remaining walls as if carried by hands no longer visible. Visitors have reported feeling a mysterious touch -- fingers brushing their arm or shoulder when no one else is nearby. The combination of the open-air ruins, the ancient graveyard, the Spanish moss draping from the surrounding live oaks, and the absolute quiet of the rural setting creates an atmosphere that feels charged with history and loss even before the ghosts appear.

The Bull family, who founded the church, were among the most powerful planters in colonial South Carolina, and their wealth was built on the labor of enslaved Africans who worked the nearby rice plantations. The graveyard surrounding the church contains burials spanning two centuries of Lowcountry life and death. Today Old Sheldon Church Ruins is located off Old Sheldon Church Road between Beaufort and Yemassee and is open to the public year-round. The site is a popular destination for photographers and couples seeking a dramatic setting for wedding portraits, but those who linger into the evening hours -- when the light fades and the Spanish moss catches the last of the sun through the hollow window frames -- may encounter something far more memorable than a photograph.