The Rhett House Inn

An 1820 Greek Revival mansion in Beaufort that served as a Union hospital during the Civil War, now the oldest operating B&B in town. Guests on the upper floors keep waking to figures standing near their beds, as if someone is still making rounds.

Thomas Smith Rhett was 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. With that inheritance he built a six-thousand-square-foot Greek Revival mansion at 1009 Craven Street in Beaufort, one block from the river, around 1820. 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. 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 in the inn's collection shows Union medical officers and nurses standing on the piazza. The house had become a place where wounded soldiers recovered, suffered, and in many cases died.

That period of wartime hospital use is what most people point to when explaining the activity guests have reported since the house became an inn in 1987. Footsteps in the hallways at night. The temperature dropping suddenly and then returning to normal. Doors opening and closing on their own. The distinct feeling of being watched in rooms where nobody else is present. The activity concentrates on the upper floors, in the rooms that would have been recovery wards during the war. Some guests describe waking 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.

Margaret Mitchell may have drawn inspiration from the Rhett family name when creating Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind. The connection between the literary Rhett and the Beaufort Rhetts has never been definitively proven, but the family's prominence in Lowcountry society made them hard to miss.

Beaufort itself is one of the most haunted towns in South Carolina, built on Sea Island cotton wealth and the labor of enslaved people. 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. Sandra Bullock, Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow, Robert Redford, and Barbra Streisand have all stayed at the Rhett House while filming movies in Beaufort, including The Prince of Tides and Forrest Gump.

The 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 property, and ghost tours in Beaufort include it as a regular stop. Whether the celebrities encountered anything during their stays is anyone's guess.