White Point Gardens (The Battery)

A waterfront park at the southern tip of Charleston where nearly 50 pirates were publicly hanged from the trees lining the gardens. The executions were meant as a warning. The pirates stayed anyway.

White Point Gardens sits at the southern tip of the Charleston peninsula where the Ashley and Cooper rivers meet, a windswept point originally called Oyster Point for the sun-bleached shells along the shore. In the autumn of 1718, this waterfront became the site of one of the largest mass executions in colonial American history. Over five weeks, forty-nine pirates were hanged at gallows erected at the White Point, their bodies left to rot between the high and low tide marks as admiralty law required -- a warning visible to every ship entering Charleston Harbor.

The hangings started on Saturday, November 8, 1718, when twenty-nine crew members from the pirate sloop Revenge were executed under warrants from the South Carolina Court of Vice Admiralty. Judge Nicholas Trott had presided over thirteen trial sessions that month. Nineteen men from Captain Richard Worley's crew were condemned on November 24th. The most famous execution came December 10, 1718: Major Stede Bonnet, the Gentleman Pirate. Bonnet was a wealthy Barbadian planter who had bought his own ship and hired his crew at regular wages. Colonel William Rhett's forces trapped him during low tide in the Cape Fear River on September 27th. At the gallows, Bonnet clutched a nosegay of wildflowers and appeared terrified, near collapse. Death came by slow strangulation -- the modern gallows that snapped the neck hadn't been invented yet. His body was dumped in the marsh alongside his crew, in ground that would eventually be filled in as Charleston grew southward.

What visitors report at White Point Gardens at night is some of the most vivid stuff in Charleston. People walking among the ancient live oaks have seen anonymous faces staring back at them from within the trees and full figures hanging in midair from the branches -- spectral replays of the 1718 executions. Screams echo through the park around midnight, believed to be the death cries of pirates. Local legend says that during a full moon, if you stand near Water Street and look down at the water, you can see the bloated faces of the executed pirates staring up from below. Visitors also report sharp temperature drops, strange orbs of light drifting among the cannons and monuments, and the creak of invisible ropes and the mutter of voices whenever the harbor wind picks up.

The park was formally established as a public garden in 1837, though people had gathered here for centuries. Civil War-era cannons and monuments now dot the grounds, and a granite slab unveiled in November 1943 near the northeast corner commemorates the pirate executions. Multiple Charleston ghost tours include White Point Gardens as a regular stop.