White Point Gardens (The Battery)

A waterfront park at the southern tip of Charleston where forty-nine pirates were publicly hanged over five weeks in 1718. Visitors walking under the live oaks at night have seen figures hanging from the branches and faces staring out from within the trees.

Over five weeks in the autumn of 1718, forty-nine pirates were hanged at gallows erected at White Point, their bodies left to rot between the high and low tide marks as admiralty law required. Every ship entering Charleston Harbor could see them.

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 instead of splitting plunder. 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.

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. 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.

People walking among the ancient live oaks at night have seen anonymous faces staring back at them from within the trees and full figures hanging in midair from the branches. Screams echo through the park around midnight. 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 report sharp temperature drops, strange orbs of light drifting among the cannons and monuments, and the creak of invisible ropes whenever the harbor wind picks up.

National Geographic named the park as part of their feature on haunted Charleston. Multiple ghost tour companies include White Point Gardens as a regular stop, typically saving it for the end of the route because the walk along the Battery at night sets the mood better than any opening could. Forty-nine men were hanged here as a warning to other pirates. Three centuries later, the warning is still being delivered.