In Brief
The Rhett House Inn in Beaufort, South Carolina was a genteel summer mansion until Union forces turned its upper floors into Civil War hospital wards. Guests today report footsteps and giggling up there, where wounded soldiers once recovered and died.
The Full Story
The Rhett House Inn in Beaufort, South Carolina keeps its ghosts upstairs. Guests and staff on the upper floors report footsteps crossing rooms that hold no one, and, stranger given what those floors once were, giggling. One guidebook to haunted Southern inns set the detail down in 2001: footsteps and giggling on the upper floor, when no one else is around.
The house was never meant to hold any of that. Thomas Rhett raised it around 1820 as a summer home at 1009 Craven Street, a Greek Revival mansion with a two-story piazza and 8-foot windows cut to open like doors and pull the river breeze through. Rhett was born a Smith; he took the name to inherit a childless uncle who had promised his fortune to any nephew who would carry it on. The money under it came from a plantation on the Ashepoo River, worked by enslaved people who built and ran the household.
Then Rhett died, right as South Carolina seceded. In November 1861, following the Battle of Port Royal, Union forces took Beaufort, one of the earliest Federal occupations of the South, and confiscated the empty mansion. They turned it into a hospital.
The upper floors became recovery wards. Wounded soldiers convalesced there, and some of them died there. A Civil War-era photograph still in the inn's own collection shows it plainly: Union medical officers and nurses lined up across the piazza, posed on the porch of a dead stranger's summer house.
That is the chapter people reach for to explain what they hear now. No one can point to a single death, a named soldier, a dated night inside the walls. There is no named ghost here, no face, no biography, just the wards and the sounds.
The mansion outlived the war and came back to its old grace. It reopened as a bed-and-breakfast in the 1980s, and in recent years the inn has hosted haunted-history evenings of its own, an author telling ghost stories over wine and cheese out in the garden.
Which leaves the giggling. It is the one that does not fit. Footsteps are the sort of thing an old house explains away after dark. But the men laid out on those floors had been carried in shot and broken, and the rooms where they were left to recover are the rooms where, a century and a half later, people say they hear someone laughing.
