Charleston Library Society

If a ghost was ever going to pick the quietest, most dignified place in Charleston to spend eternity, a library seems like exactly the right choice.

Nineteen Charleston gentlemen founded this institution on December 28th, 1748, hungry for access to the same Enlightenment-era books and periodicals circulating through London at the time. It's the third-oldest subscription library anywhere in the United States, and it received a royal charter in 1755, with colonial governors traditionally serving as its president. By 1778, the collection had already grown to five thousand volumes, and this single library ended up seeding two other major Charleston institutions entirely, the College of Charleston in 1770, and the Charleston Museum in 1773, considered the first true museum in America, built originally around this library's own natural history collection. After moving locations repeatedly over a hundred and sixty-six years, private homes, a merchant's warehouse, even the county courthouse, the Society finally settled into its current King Street building in 1914.

The ghost most associated with this quiet, scholarly place is William Godber Hinson, a planter, Confederate soldier, and one of the library's greatest benefactors, having donated more than two thousand books over the course of his life. Staff over the years have reported seeing an older, bearded man in a black coat and top hat, quietly rummaging through the stacks late at night, exactly the sort of figure you'd expect from a nineteenth-century gentleman scholar unable to stay away from a library he loved enough to help build. He's also been blamed for stranger, more modern mischief, an elevator running on its own with nobody inside it, microfilm equipment switching on with no one nearby to touch it.

I want to make sure I don't blur two separate stories here, since Charleston does love recycling its ghosts across different addresses. You may hear elsewhere about a poetry volume called the Blood Book, tied to the death of Confederate poet Henry Timrod, and a related legend attached to his statue in nearby Washington Square. That story belongs to the square, not to this library, and I'd rather keep Hinson's quieter, more personal haunting distinct from it.

So if you ever find yourself here after hours, and a book seems to have moved slightly from where you left it, consider the possibility that it's simply Mr. Hinson, still keeping watch over a collection he spent a lifetime building, unwilling to fully let go of the one place in Charleston that always felt entirely his own.