Robert Mills House

Designed by the famous architect Robert Mills (designer of the Washington Monument), this 1823 mansion is one of the finest examples of Federal architecture in the South. The elegant home harbors secrets from its past.

The Robert Mills House stands at 1616 Blanding Street in Columbia, a Classical Revival mansion designed in 1823 by Robert Mills -- the Charleston-born architect who would go on to design the Washington Monument and serve as America's first federal architect under seven presidents. The house was commissioned by Ainsley Hall, an English emigrant who had arrived in South Carolina around 1800 and built a fortune as a merchant by the close of the War of 1812. Tragically, Hall never set foot in his grand new home. He died on August 18, 1823, at Botetourt Springs, Virginia, while on vacation, just months after construction began.

Hall's death set off years of legal battles over his ill-managed estate. His widow, Sarah Hall, was left to oversee the completion of a house she could not afford to keep. In his will, Hall had bequeathed seven enslaved people -- Charlotte, Henry, Joe, Lydia, Matilda, Nancy, and Peter -- to Sarah, but the estate litigation eventually forced her to sell the unfinished mansion in 1829 for $14,000 to the newly formed Presbyterian Seminary of South Carolina and Georgia. Sarah never got to enjoy the elegant home her husband had promised her, and it is this bitter loss that many believe fuels the haunting.

The most persistent paranormal phenomenon centers on a second-floor bedroom where the ghost of Sarah Hall is said to leave visible impressions on the bed, as though she has just risen from a fitful night of sleep. Staff have found the bed linens ruffled and disturbed when no one has been in the room. Docents working after hours report a pervasive feeling of being watched and a general unease that settles over the house once visitors leave. Multiple staff members and visitors have reported encounters with what they describe as an unseen presence throughout the mansion, particularly on the upper floors and in the hallways near the bedrooms.

The house passed through a remarkable series of institutional occupants over the following century. Columbia Theological Seminary held classes there from 1831 to 1927. Winthrop Training School for Teachers -- later Winthrop University -- was founded on the property in 1886 before relocating to Rock Hill in 1895. Columbia Bible College occupied the mansion from 1937 to 1960. By 1961, the building faced demolition, but a grassroots preservation movement saved it, leading to the formation of Historic Columbia. The mansion opened as a museum in 1967 and was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1973.

Today the Robert Mills House operates as a historic house museum with guided tours available Wednesday through Saturday at noon and Sunday at 1:30 p.m. A recent exhibit, Heat and Hardship: The Hidden Labor of Enslaved Cooks, reimagines the warming kitchen to tell the stories of the enslaved people who lived and worked in the house during the 1820s. Whether Sarah Hall's spirit truly lingers in her promised home or the impressions on the bed have a simpler explanation, the melancholy history of a woman who lost everything -- her husband, her home, and her place in Columbia society -- gives the haunting a poignant human dimension that few ghost stories can match.