Robert Mills House

Staff find unexplained bed impressions in a second-floor bedroom of this 1823 Classical Revival mansion designed by Robert Mills. The ghost is believed to be Sarah Goodwyn Hall, whose husband died before the house was finished, leaving her in a years-long legal battle that cost her everything.

Staff at 1616 Blanding Street keep finding the bedsheets disturbed in a second-floor bedroom. The linens are ruffled, the mattress dented, as if someone just stood up from a long, restless night. No one has slept in that room in over a century.

The ghost, if there is one, is almost certainly Sarah Goodwyn Hall. Born in 1790 to a wealthy Richland County family, Sarah married Ainsley Hall, a British merchant who had arrived in South Carolina around 1800. The couple lived well. In 1818, Ainsley commissioned the Hampton-Preston Mansion, a grand home just blocks away. But in 1823, he sold it to General Wade Hampton without telling Sarah. She was furious.

To make it right, Ainsley hired his friend Robert Mills to design something even grander. Mills was already on his way to becoming America's first federal architect, the man who would eventually design the Washington Monument. Construction started in April 1823 on a Classical Revival mansion with four massive Ionic columns and an elevated basement. Outbuildings included a kitchen, smoke house, carriage house, and a frame gardener's cottage. It was going to be the finest home in Columbia.

Ainsley never saw it finished. He died on August 18, 1823, at Botetourt Springs, Virginia, while on vacation. He was forty years old. Construction had barely begun. The house was completed in 1825, two years after his death, by workers finishing a dead man's dream for a widow who couldn't afford to keep it.

What followed was worse than the loss. Ainsley left behind a poorly managed estate that triggered years of lawsuits. His brother and nephew contested the will, and Sarah accused them of fraud. She fought to hold onto the unfinished house, but the litigation ground her down. In 1829, she sold the property for ,000 to the Presbyterian Seminary of South Carolina and Georgia. The house she was promised, the one built to replace the home sold out from under her, was gone.

Sarah retreated to Bellwood, her family plantation in Lower Richland County. The 1850 census listed her as "insane." A year later, a court declared her a "lunatic" and placed her under her nephew's trusteeship. She spent her final years living with her half-sister, Keziah Hopkins Brevard, and died in 1867 with an estate valued at just ,500. The woman who had once brought a dowry of enslaved people and land to her marriage left behind almost nothing.

The mansion kept changing hands. Columbia Theological Seminary held classes there from 1831 to 1927. Winthrop Training School for Teachers was founded on the property in 1886 before relocating to Rock Hill in 1895. Columbia Bible College occupied it from 1937 to 1960. By 1961, the building faced demolition, but a grassroots preservation campaign saved it, and Historic Columbia opened it as a museum in 1967. It became a National Historic Landmark in 1973.

One TripAdvisor reviewer describes hearing loud footsteps climbing the main staircase while touring the second floor. The house was empty except for the visitor and a tour guide. The guide didn't hear the footsteps but didn't deny them either, mentioning that visitors at the Hampton-Preston House across the street had similar experiences. The reviewer thought the sounds might be students from the building's seminary days, going about routines only they can remember.

Docents who work after hours describe an unease that settles over the house once visitors leave, a feeling of being watched that concentrates on the upper floors and hallways near the bedrooms. But the bed is the detail that sticks. A woman who lost two homes, who watched her husband's family fight over the scraps of her life, who was declared insane by a court that couldn't imagine a woman's grief as anything but madness. If any ghost has earned the right to a restless night, it's Sarah Goodwyn Hall.