The Powder Magazine

Charleston's oldest public building, dating to 1713. It was built to store thousands of pounds of gunpowder for the young colonial city, and three centuries of thick walls have kept plenty of secrets.

Completed in 1713, the Powder Magazine at 79 Cumberland Street is the oldest public building in the Carolinas and the last piece of Charleston's original colonial fortifications still standing. The squat, fortress-like structure was built just inside the city's northern defensive wall with three-foot-thick brick walls designed to contain an explosion, no windows, and a sand-filled roof meant to direct blast force upward while smothering flames. At its peak, it held up to five tons of gunpowder -- the volatile supply line for a colonial city constantly threatened by raids, rival navies, and pirates.

Charleston learned the hard way what happens when a powder magazine goes wrong. On May 15, 1780, during the British siege, a soldier carelessly fired a musket into a separate magazine containing four thousand pounds of gunpowder. The blast killed roughly two hundred people and destroyed multiple buildings -- more casualties than the entire siege itself. The Cumberland Street magazine had already been emptied. General William Moultrie ordered its five tons moved to the Old Exchange Building and sealed behind brick walls, where British occupation forces never found it. After the Revolution, the building was retired from military use and bounced through private owners as a print shop, livery stable, wine cellar, and carriage house before the National Society of the Colonial Dames of America in South Carolina bought it in 1902, saving it from demolition.

The most colorful ghost here is the pirate Anne Bonny. Born around 1690, Bonny was one of the most feared buccaneers in the Caribbean. After her capture, she famously dodged the noose by claiming she was pregnant. Museum visitors have reported a woman in period clothing moving through the small building, and some believe it's Bonny, who reportedly spent her later years in Charleston and died at eighty-eight.

The second named spirit is Gabriel Manigault, a wealthy post-Revolutionary War architect who briefly owned the Powder Magazine and used it as his private wine cellar. Manigault moved to Philadelphia in 1805 and died there in 1809, but his ghost still roams the building -- perhaps, as one account notes, looking for an unopened bottle. Dark figures that don't match either Bonny or Manigault have also been spotted inside, leading some to speculate they might be Sir Peter Colleton, one of the original Lord Proprietors of the Carolinas, or soldiers who once guarded the stockpile.

Investigators have documented strong electromagnetic field readings inside. Visitors consistently report pockets of icy air, phantom footsteps in the narrow interior, faint murmurs, and the persistent feeling of being watched. Three centuries of military use, the specter of catastrophic explosion, and connections to pirates, soldiers, and colonial power make this one of the most charged sites in a city already thick with ghosts.

The Powder Magazine operates as a museum dedicated to Charleston's colonial military history and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972.