White Point Gardens (The Battery)

A waterfront park at the southern tip of the Charleston peninsula where nearly 50 pirates were hanged from trees lining the gardens. The executions were meant to serve as a warning to other pirates.

White Point Gardens occupies the southern tip of the Charleston peninsula where the Ashley and Cooper rivers converge, a windswept promontory originally known as Oyster Point for the sun-bleached shells that gave the shoreline its white appearance. In the autumn of 1718, this scenic waterfront became the site of one of the largest mass executions in colonial American history. Over the course of five weeks, forty-nine pirates were hanged at the gallows erected at the White Point, their bodies left to rot between the high and low tide marks as admiralty law required -- a grim warning visible to every ship entering Charleston Harbor.

The executions began on Saturday, November 8, 1718, when twenty-nine crew members from the pirate sloop Revenge were hanged under warrants issued by the South Carolina Court of Vice Admiralty. Judge Nicholas Trott had presided over thirteen trial sessions that month, and Provost Marshal Thomas Conyers carried out each sentence. Nineteen men from Captain Richard Worley's pirate crew were condemned on November 24th. The most famous execution came on December 10, 1718, when Major Stede Bonnet -- the so-called Gentleman Pirate -- met his end. Bonnet, a wealthy Barbadian planter who had purchased his own ship and hired his crew at regular wages, had been captured by Colonel William Rhett's forces on September 27th after being trapped during low tide in the Cape Fear River. At the gallows, Bonnet reportedly clutched a nosegay of wildflowers and appeared terrified and near collapse. His death, like those of his men, came by slow strangulation -- the modern gallows that snapped the neck had not yet been invented. His body was dumped in the marsh alongside his crew, in ground that would eventually be filled in as Charleston expanded southward.

The paranormal activity reported at White Point Gardens today is among the most vivid in Charleston. Visitors walking among the ancient live oaks at night have reported seeing anonymous faces peering back at them from within the trees and witnessing full apparitions hanging in midair from the branches -- spectral reenactments of the 1718 executions. Terrifying screams echo through the park around midnight, believed to be the death cries of pirates meeting their end. Local legend holds that when you stand near Water Street during a full moon and look down at the water's surface, you can see the bloated faces of the executed pirates staring back at you from below. Visitors have also reported unexplained cold spots throughout the park, strange orbs of light drifting among the cannons and monuments, and the creak of invisible ropes and the mutter of long-silenced voices whenever the harbor wind rises.

The park was formally established as a public garden in 1837, though the land had been a gathering place for centuries before. Civil War-era cannons and monuments now dot the grounds, and a granite memorial slab unveiled in November 1943 near the northeast corner of the garden commemorates the pirate executions. Multiple Charleston ghost tours include White Point Gardens as a regular stop, and it remains one of the most frequently cited haunted locations in a city already legendary for its ghosts. The combination of mass execution, unmarked burial in reclaimed marshland, and three centuries of accumulating legend has made this beautiful waterfront park one of the most supernaturally charged sites in the American South.