The Pink House

There's a small pink building on Chalmers Street that most visitors walk past without a second glance, and that's a mistake, because it might be one of the oldest structures in the entire city.

Local historians traditionally date this tiny building, barely a thousand square feet, to 1712, built by a man named John Breton out of pink Bermuda coral stone, a material that had to be shipped in across open ocean just to raise these walls. Some more recent scholarship suggests it might actually date closer to the 1740s instead, and honestly, nobody can say for certain which is right, the records from that far back simply don't settle it cleanly. Either way, this sits in Charleston's old French Quarter, on a street that in the colonial era was a rough, crowded stretch of taverns and boarding houses catering to sailors fresh off the docks. Tradition holds this building operated as one of those taverns. Since then it's served as a private home, a law office, and today, fittingly, an art gallery, small enough to walk past in seconds, old enough to have outlasted almost everything built around it.

Given that waterfront tavern history, it's no surprise this building picked up a pirate reputation somewhere along the way. The version you'll hear most often claims the house was once a brothel run by a madam named Mincey, and that its ghost is none other than Anne Bonny, the famous female pirate, said to have died right here in Charleston in 1782. It's a great story. I have to tell you, though, it doesn't hold up. Anne Bonny was tried in Jamaica back in 1720, and the best historical evidence, a Jamaican parish burial record, suggests she was buried there in 1733, in the very town where she'd stood trial, nearly fifty years before this legend claims she died in Charleston instead. As for Madame Mincey, I couldn't find a single historical record confirming she ever existed at all. Most of what people know about Anne Bonny actually comes from a wildly unreliable 1724 book, padded out over the centuries by novels and even a Victorian cigarette card, until the woman and the myth became almost impossible to separate.

None of that stops the reports. Doors are said to swing open here on their own. Footsteps climb an empty staircase late at night. Windows, latched shut before closing, are found open again by morning. Maybe it really is some restless spirit from this building's rougher tavern days. It almost certainly isn't Anne Bonny. But then again, three hundred years of sailors, tavern keepers, and dockside secrets is more than enough material for a haunting, even without borrowing a pirate queen who was never actually here.