South Carolina State Hospital (Bull Street)

Columbia's Bull Street asylum confined over 58,000 people from 1828 onward, with a 30% annual death rate by 1900 and thousands buried in unmarked graves. The abandoned Babcock Building, damaged by a 2020 fire, draws reports of shadowy figures in windows, hospital sounds in empty corridors, and figures in gowns near the old cemetery.

For generations, "I'll send you to Bull Street" was the threat South Carolina parents used on misbehaving children. It worked because everyone in Columbia knew what Bull Street meant: the state asylum, a place where more than 58,000 people were confined between 1828 and the mid-twentieth century, and where roughly a third of patients died every year by 1900.

The South Carolina General Assembly authorized the facility in 1821, making the state only the second in the nation to fund public care for the mentally ill. Robert Mills designed the original building, the same architect who would go on to design the Washington Monument. His design included a fireproof ceiling and a rooftop garden, one of the first in the United States. The first patients arrived in December 1828.

What started as a progressive experiment in humane care deteriorated quickly. Within thirty years, overcrowding was chronic. Funding collapsed during and after the Civil War, but new patients kept arriving. By the turn of the century, the facility held over a thousand patients in conditions described in an 1870 report as dark, poorly ventilated, and flood-prone on the ground floors. Wealthy families paid $250 a year for care; for another $100, their relative got a separate dining room. Indigent patients, funded by their counties at $135 annually, got considerably less.

The Babcock Building went up in four construction campaigns between 1857 and 1885, designed by George E. Walker and Samuel Sloan in Italian Renaissance Revival style. It sprawled across 250,000 square feet with 1,100 windows, 20-inch-thick masonry walls, and a central stairwell encased in wooden slats to prevent patients from throwing themselves over the railing. The building was named for Dr. James Woods Babcock, the hospital's first psychiatry-trained superintendent, who arrived in 1891 and in 1907 became one of the first American physicians to diagnose pellagra in the United States. The disease, caused by niacin deficiency, sent thousands of Southerners to asylums with symptoms that mimicked depression and psychosis. Many died at Bull Street from a condition that could have been treated with better food.

The campus also served as a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp from October 1864 to February 1865. A Union prisoner named S.H.M. Byers hid in the hospital's attic when the facility was evacuated as Sherman's army marched on Columbia. When Sherman's refugees arrived, they sought shelter inside the asylum walls.

The cemetery behind the hospital holds thousands of patients in unmarked graves. Most died alone. Many had been abandoned by their families years before. By the 1950s, over five thousand patients lived on the campus at once.

The Babcock Building closed with the last patients in the 1990s and sat abandoned for years, its broken windows and graffiti-covered walls making it look, as one photographer put it, like a set from The Walking Dead. On September 12, 2020, a three-alarm fire collapsed the iconic dome and gutted the interior. Thirteen months later, investigators still couldn't determine the cause.

Paranormal accounts center on the Babcock Building and the cemetery. A former ambulance worker reported seeing a shadowy figure standing in a Babcock Building window during a lunch break in 2006; the figure vanished when spotted. Visitors describe hearing cries and calls for help from inside sealed buildings. Others hear residual hospital sounds in the empty corridors: metal doors clanging, wheels squeaking on tile, murmured conversations in rooms no one has entered in decades. The grounds near the old cemetery produce sightings of figures in hospital gowns walking at night.

The Bull Street campus is now BullStreet District, a mixed-use development with Segra Park baseball stadium. The fire-damaged Babcock Building is being converted into 208 apartments. The "People, Not Patients" project, a collaboration between Historic Columbia and Able South Carolina, documents the lived experiences of people confined here, making sure the stories of the thousands who lived and died on this campus don't disappear under the new construction.