Magnolia Cemetery

Three crews. Three sets of graves. And every one of them climbed into the same submarine. Look around before you go any farther. Because scattered through this cemetery, only a short walk from one another, are the graves of men who died aboard the H.L. Hunley. Not one crew. Three. Magnolia Cemetery opened in 1850, laid out along the Cooper River on land that had once belonged to the Magnolia Umbra rice plantation. Today, roughly thirty-five thousand people are buried across these grounds. Governors. Soldiers. Children. Entire generations of Charleston families. But there is something especially unsettling about the Hunley graves. Because they tell the same story three times. Men climb inside. The hatch closes. The submarine disappears beneath the water. And the men don't come back. The first time happened in August of 1863. Five men died. The Hunley was recovered. And instead of leaving the thing at the bottom where it had killed them... they put another crew inside it. October 1863. Eight men climbed through those narrow hatches. Among them was Horace Lawson Hunley himself. The submarine went down again. This time, it stayed there. Imagine what that must have been like. Eight men sealed inside an iron tube beneath Charleston Harbor. No escape hatch large enough to simply throw open and swim away. No modern breathing equipment. No rescue team coming through the darkness. Just men sitting shoulder to shoulder as something went terribly wrong... and the air inside that iron cylinder slowly became the most precious thing on Earth. They died together. The submarine was raised again. And somehow... a third crew volunteered to climb inside. February 17, 1864. Eight more men entered the Hunley. The hatch closed above them. And that night, they accomplished something no submarine crew in history had ever done. They attacked and sank an enemy warship—the USS Housatonic. Then the Hunley vanished. No triumphant crew returned to Charleston. No eight men emerged from the harbor. For more than a century, they simply remained out there. Somewhere beneath the water. Until the submarine was finally recovered in 2000. And inside... the crew was still there. Eight men who had disappeared in 1864 were brought back into the daylight nearly a hundred and forty years later. In 2004, Charleston finally buried them here at Magnolia Cemetery. Their funeral procession stretched roughly four and a half miles through the city. Thousands came to watch. And when it was finished, Magnolia contained something extraordinarily rare: the graves of three different crews killed aboard the same doomed vessel. Walk among them and think about that. The Hunley sank. Men died. They raised it. The Hunley sank again. More men died. They raised it again. And then it went beneath the water a third time... and took another eight men with it. There are other graves here that can stop you cold. One belongs to a baby named Rosalia Raymond White. She lived only seven months. Her monument was carved in the shape of a small bassinet. And on it is the sculpted face of the child herself. A baby's face... still looking out from the stone long after everyone who ever heard her cry disappeared into history. There is also a ghost story attached to Magnolia that you may hear repeated around Charleston. Some versions claim a woman named Anna Ravenel, supposedly buried here, inspired Edgar Allan Poe's Annabel Lee. It's a wonderful story. There's just one problem. There is no reliable historical evidence that it's true. Poe really was stationed nearby at Fort Moultrie in the late 1820s. But Annabel Lee wasn't published until 1849, decades later, and historians have never established the Charleston romance the legend requires. And perhaps that's fitting. Because Magnolia Cemetery doesn't need us to invent anything. It doesn't need Annabel Lee. It doesn't need a woman wandering between the tombstones. It doesn't even need a ghost. Stand here after the sun begins disappearing behind the trees and remember what is already beneath your feet. Thirty-five thousand dead. A baby's face carved forever into stone. And three groups of men who entered the same cramped iron submarine... one crew after another... despite what happened to the men before them. Three crews. Three funerals. One submarine. And if you're leaving Magnolia tonight and find yourself looking toward the Cooper River... remember something. For the last crew of the Hunley, the cemetery wasn't where their journey ended. For nearly one hundred and forty years... they never made it here at all.