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The nighttime walking tour had promised death and depravity in the Holy City, and, in its own way, it delivered. As we walked through the downtown, the tour guide told us stories of the Barbadian pirate Stede Bonnet, who supposedly haunts the Old Exchange Building and Provost Dungeon; of Harriet Mackie, the tragic 17-year-old who, perhaps poisoned by her sewing woman, died shortly before her marriage; and of Sue Howard, the mother in eternal mourning whose ghost haunts the cemetery of St. Philip’s Church. (The church discourages these stories; a plaque on the grounds reads: “The only ghost at St. Philip’s is the Holy Ghost.”)
Leaving race out of any history is a striking blind spot — even in a ghost tour. Ghost stories, after all, are one of the ways we talk about historic injustices and crimes unavenged. Focusing on pirates and poisoned Southern belles, while ignoring the cruelty and horror of chattel slavery, is one of many ways the past gets whitewashed. The ghosts of slavery are still here, though sometimes they don’t lurk in creepy old buildings. Sometimes they are right in front of your face.
The one ghost in particular I was looking for in Charleston was Denmark Vesey. Born into slavery, Vesey had purchased his freedom in 1799 after winning a lottery, and became a prosperous carpenter. He was a prominent member of the community, and even helped found the African Methodist Episcopal Church (now known as “Mother Emanuel”). But in June 1822, he was arrested and charged with masterminding an insurrection. Vesey and his confederates were accused of planning to murder a sizable number of white Charlestonians, set the city ablaze, and flee to Haiti on waiting ships. While historians once debated whether the existence of the conspiracy to rebel was made up by the whites in power, a panic ginned up as an excuse to pass more draconian restrictions, most now seem to agree that it was probably real.
Vesey and 66 other men were convicted; he and 34 others were hanged.
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The legacy of Vesey is complicated. As the likely organizer of a plot to murder on a wide scale, he’s long been viewed as a terrorist, his memory suppressed. Even the trial record was considered so incendiary (lest it fall into the hands of other enslaved Carolinians) that it was ordered to be destroyed soon after it published. His name was barely spoken, and the details of his life were buried, as was his memory.
There are no ghost tours that I know of that tell Denmark Vesey’s story. Some websites will tell you to look for Vesey’s ghost at the Old Charleston Jail, a structure that’s stood since 1802. According to varying reports, Vesey was imprisoned either here, or the long-destroyed workhouse on the premises, while awaiting trial and execution. Long after my own tour, I tracked down two longtime ghost tour guides, Joy Watson and Randy Johnson, who regularly take visitors up to the old jail. They told me that they had never heard of any Vesey ghost sightings there.