South Carolina State Hospital (Bull Street)

One of the first mental health facilities in the U.S., opened in 1822. During the Civil War it became a prison camp, and the decades that followed brought a long history of decline and documented mistreatment of patients.

The South Carolina State Hospital on Bull Street in Columbia was one of the first public mental institutions in the United States. The General Assembly authorized it in 1821, and South Carolina became only the second state to allocate funds for a facility dedicated to the mentally ill. The first patient was admitted in December 1828 into a building designed by Robert Mills, the same architect behind the Washington Monument. The campus expanded dramatically over the following decades, and the landmark Babcock Building was constructed in four campaigns between 1857 and 1885, designed by George E. Walker and Samuel Sloan. By the 1950s, over five thousand patients were confined here.

The conditions were often horrific. An 1870 report described dark, dank, and poorly ventilated wards. By 1900, roughly thirty percent of patients died each year. Overcrowding was chronic -- the facility routinely held far more people than it was built for, and allegations of abuse, neglect, and inhumane treatment dogged the institution throughout its history. The cemetery behind the hospital holds the remains of thousands of patients in unmarked graves, many of whom died alone and forgotten.

The reports from the campus match what you'd expect given that history. Witnesses have seen strange shadows drifting through the corridors of the abandoned buildings, especially in the Babcock Building before the devastating fire of September 12, 2020, which collapsed the building's iconic dome and gutted the interior. Former patients' cries and screams have been heard echoing through empty hallways and stairwells, along with residual hospital sounds -- the clang of metal doors, the squeak of wheels on tile, and murmured conversations in rooms that have been empty for decades. Visitors describe sudden feelings of dread and the overwhelming sense of being watched from darkened windows.

Some accounts describe full figures of patients in hospital gowns walking the grounds at night, particularly near the old cemetery. Others have heard someone crying or calling for help from inside sealed buildings. The sheer volume of human suffering concentrated on this campus over nearly two centuries -- thousands of deaths, decades of overcrowding, generations of patients abandoned by their families -- has made it one of the most investigated locations in the state.

The Bull Street campus closed as a hospital in the 1990s and has since been undergoing redevelopment as BullStreet District, a mixed-use development with shops, restaurants, and Segra Park baseball stadium. The Babcock Building, despite the 2020 fire, is being converted into 208 apartments. Historic Columbia has worked to document and preserve the stories of the people who lived and died here, making sure those voices aren't lost amid the new construction.