The Rhett House Inn

This elegant 1820 plantation-style home in historic Beaufort has been converted to a luxury inn. The antebellum architecture houses more than just paying guests, as several spirits have made the inn their permanent residence.

The Rhett House Inn at 1009 Craven Street in Beaufort was built around 1820 by Thomas Smith Rhett and his wife Caroline Barnwell, members of one of the South Carolina Lowcountry's most prominent families. Thomas had originally been born a Smith, but his childless uncle with the surname Rhett promised to bequeath his entire fortune to any male nephew who would carry on the family name. Thomas was happy to oblige, and with his newfound inheritance he built a commanding six-thousand-square-foot Greek Revival mansion with a two-story wraparound piazza just one block from the Beaufort River. The house features original Adam-style carved mantels, heart pine floors, and distinctive gibb doors -- eight-foot windows disguised as doors that open to let the salt air flow through the rooms.

Thomas Rhett owned a plantation on the Ashepoo River where enslaved African Americans lived and worked, and the family raised their children in the Beaufort mansion until the Civil War tore their world apart. Thomas died just 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 by Union soldiers and converted into a hospital recovery building. A Civil War-era photograph still in the inn's collection shows Union medical officers and nurses standing on the piazza of what had been the Rhett family's private home, the house now serving as a place where wounded soldiers convalesced, suffered, and in many cases died.

It is this period of wartime hospital use that most believe accounts for the paranormal activity guests have reported over the decades since the house became an inn in 1987. The spirits of soldiers who died during their recovery are said to still maintain residence in the house, and guests have reported unexplained footsteps in the hallways at night, cold spots that appear and vanish without cause, doors that open and close on their own, and the unmistakable feeling of being watched in rooms where they are demonstrably alone. The activity is said to be concentrated on the upper floors, particularly in the rooms that would have served as recovery wards during the Civil War. Some guests have described waking in the night to sense a presence in the room -- a figure standing near the bed or the door as if checking on patients -- that dissolves when they turn on the light.

Beaufort itself is one of the most haunted towns in South Carolina, with a concentration of antebellum mansions, Civil War history, and Gullah culture that generates a rich tradition of ghost stories. The town was one of the wealthiest communities in the pre-war South, built on the profits of Sea Island cotton and the labor of enslaved people, and the abrupt Federal occupation in 1861 created a rupture in the social order that many believe left psychic traces throughout the historic district. Several houses on Craven Street and the surrounding blocks have their own independent ghost stories, and the Rhett House Inn sits at the heart of this haunted neighborhood.

Today the Rhett House Inn operates as the oldest continuously running bed and breakfast in Beaufort, offering elegant rooms in the main house and surrounding cottages. The Pat Conroy Literary Center has hosted haunted history events at the inn, and ghost tours in Beaufort regularly feature the property as a stop. Whether the soldier ghosts are residual impressions from the suffering of wartime or something more aware and purposeful, the Rhett House remains a place where the boundary between Beaufort's living present and its painful past feels remarkably thin.