In Brief
The live oaks of White Point Garden in Charleston are the city's prettiest picnic spot. They were also a pirate gallows, where 49 men were hanged in 1718. At night, people say faces peer back at them from inside the trees.
The Full Story
At night, people crossing the live oaks of White Point Garden in Charleston, South Carolina, say faces peer back at them from inside the trees, and that now and then a shape hangs in the branches with nothing under its feet. The oaks are the draw of the park now. They used to be something else.
For about five weeks in the autumn and winter of 1718, this low spit at the southern tip of the Charleston peninsula was a gallows. Judge Nicholas Trott condemned 49 men to hang for piracy across a run of trials that November. On Saturday, November 8, 29 of the crew from the pirate sloop Revenge were hanged here, "at the White Point near Charles-Town." Admiralty law required it be done in the intertidal zone, between the high and low water marks, so the gallows stood at the water's edge, in plain view of every ship coming into the harbor.
The most famous man they hanged was Stede Bonnet. He was a wealthy Barbadian planter who bought his own ship rather than steal one and paid his crew wages instead of shares of plunder, which earned him the mocking name the Gentleman Pirate. On December 10, 1718, he was led to the point manacled and clutching a nosegay of wildflowers, near collapse. The drop gallows that breaks a neck cleanly had not been invented yet, so he died slowly, by strangulation.
What happened to the bodies afterward, no record says for certain. One early historian wrote only that the pirates "were hanged and buried on White Point, below high water mark." The exact spot is gone. The park is filled land now, and the 1718 shoreline no longer exists, so no one can point to where the gallows actually stood.
The killing ground became a public park in 1837. It has a whitewashed bandstand from 1907, a ring of old cannons, and a granite marker at one corner, set in 1943, that names Bonnet and his crew. Families picnic under the oaks. It is one of the prettiest places in the city.
And there is one more piece of it, the part told as legend. Go down near Water Street when the moon comes up, the story goes, and look at the water just off the point. Under the surface, staring up, you are supposed to see the bloated faces of the hanged pirates, waiting where the tide once closed over them.
