The Rhett House Inn

An 1820 plantation-style home in Beaufort, now a luxury inn. The antebellum bones of the building attract more than paying guests — staff and visitors have encountered presences that never seem to leave.

The Rhett House Inn at 1009 Craven Street in Beaufort was built around 1820 by Thomas Smith Rhett and his wife Caroline Barnwell, members of one of the Lowcountry's most prominent families. Thomas had originally been born a Smith, but his childless uncle with the surname Rhett promised to leave his entire fortune to any nephew who'd carry on the family name. Thomas obliged, and with that inheritance he built a six-thousand-square-foot Greek Revival mansion with a two-story wraparound piazza just one block from the Beaufort River. The house features original Adam-style carved mantels, heart pine floors, and gibb doors -- eight-foot windows disguised as doors that open to let salt air flow through the rooms.

Thomas owned a plantation on the Ashepoo River where enslaved African Americans lived and worked, and the family raised their children in the Beaufort mansion until the Civil War tore things apart. Thomas died as the war was beginning. In November 1861, Union forces captured Beaufort in one of the earliest Federal occupations of Southern territory, and the Rhett House was confiscated and converted into a hospital recovery building. A Civil War-era photograph still in the inn's collection shows Union medical officers and nurses standing on the piazza, the house now serving as a place where wounded soldiers recovered, suffered, and in many cases died.

That period of wartime hospital use is what most people think explains the activity guests have reported since the house became an inn in 1987. Guests hear footsteps in the hallways at night, feel the temperature drop suddenly and then return to normal, find doors opening and closing on their own, and get the distinct feeling of being watched in rooms where they're demonstrably alone. The activity concentrates on the upper floors, particularly the rooms that would have been recovery wards during the war. Some guests describe waking in the night to sense someone in the room -- a figure near the bed or the door, as if checking on patients -- that dissolves when they turn on the light.

Beaufort itself is one of the most haunted towns in South Carolina, with a concentration of antebellum mansions, Civil War history, and Gullah culture that produces ghost stories naturally. The town was one of the wealthiest communities in the pre-war South, built on Sea Island cotton and the labor of enslaved people, and the abrupt Federal occupation in 1861 created a rupture that many believe left traces throughout the historic district. Several houses on Craven Street have their own ghost stories, and the Rhett House sits at the center of this haunted neighborhood.

Today the Rhett House Inn operates as the oldest continuously running bed and breakfast in Beaufort, offering rooms in the main house and surrounding cottages. The Pat Conroy Literary Center has hosted haunted history events at the inn, and ghost tours in Beaufort regularly feature the property as a stop.