Drayton Hall

Drayton Hall is the only plantation house on the Ashley River to survive both the Revolution and the Civil War intact. British forces used the house during the siege of Charleston; during the Civil War, family tradition holds, yellow quarantine flags warning of smallpox turned the destroying armies aside. The flankers did not share the luck — the laundry went down in the 1886 earthquake, the kitchen in the hurricane of 1893.

The Draytons arrived from Barbados aboard the Mary in 1679; it was John's mother Ann, a widow who became one of the most successful landholders of her era, whose money and brokering put her youngest son in position to build. On the grounds, an African-American cemetery holds some forty graves — among the oldest documented burial grounds of the enslaved in the country. What preservation keeps is legible loss: 'ghost marks' on the walls where paintings hung for two centuries, worn thresholds, paint layers left to testify. The staff's official answer to whether the house is haunted begins, with admirable dryness, by offering ghost marks as the ghosts.

The Travel Channel put Drayton Hall on an America's Most Haunted Places episode in 2003, airing the claim that 'original family members are said to still walk' the house, and interviewed staff who described encounters they placed outside this world. Docents and visitors have reported a man peering from the windows and a figure walking the avenue of oaks toward the river.

The most elaborated account belongs to a psychic who visited in 2000 and reported seeing four men hanging from the great oaks — hanged, she said, on the orders of William Henry Drayton for loyalty to George III. The record files a complication: William Henry Drayton was a leading Patriot, which makes him an unlikely author of the execution. The legend has not been detained by the discrepancy. Other reports run quieter — a woman in period dress seen on the second floor, figures on the grounds, the kind of account a house this age generates on schedule.

Visitors continue to submit photographs — shadows, circles, bright areas the staff catalogs without verdict. The house itself declines to help: an unrestored building generates its own knocks, sighs, and temperature drops, a fact the interpreters note before the subject is changed.

The file's honest summary is the estate's own framing. Hundreds of people knew Drayton Hall as home; some by choice, many with no option at all; a good number were born here and a good number died here. Whether any remained is the question the unfurnished rooms are left, deliberately, to ask.