Gray Beauty, the Spirits of Charleston

An old iron gate, rusted by tears and time, squeaks open, breaking the silence. The names chiseled on tombstones—Bennett, Gibbes, Waring, Calhoun, Legare, and Vanderhorst—echo through history, the tales of their lives caught up in the eternally lingering stanzas of a piper's solo recital of "Amazing Grace" that can still be heard softly drifting among the afternoon clouds.

Death seems all too final for the citizens of a city that so tightly embraces its past. But in Charleston's historic graveyards, among the oldest in the nation, peace finally comes beneath the mighty live oak trees to the dearly departed, comforted that their names whispered by passers-by will keep the spirit of Charleston's past alive.

In the spring of 2004, the drummer's beat summoned eight Confederate sailors to their final resting place in Magnolia Cemetery. Likely the final Confederate burial of thousands in the centuries-old graveyard and garden, the third crew of the submarine H. L. Hunley was escorted by mourners into the waiting arms of their brethren. Freed from their watery grave off the coast of Sullivan's Island 140 years after successfully ramming a spar torpedo into the Union ship Housatonic, these brave men of the Confederacy had finally come home, their remains interred in a place of honor alongside those of the two fallen Hunley crews before them.

Thousands of fallen Confederate soldiers came home to Magnolia Cemetery, located two miles from downtown Charleston on the banks of the Cooper River. Their phantom neighbors behind the gates at Magnolia include five governors, three U.S. senators and two cabinet members, fine company for the humble soldiers who gave their lives for the cause.

Downtown, the churchyard of St. Philip's Episcopal Church, Charleston's oldest congregation, is divided into two sections, the eastern and the western. In 1768, the western graveyard, located opposite the church, was set aside for burial of "strangers and other transient whites." Some say to be buried in the eastern churchyard one had to be born in Charleston. But on both sides of Church Street, tombstones read like the names from a history book. Members of the Continental Congress, signers of the Declaration of Independence, U.S. Supreme Court justices, governors and a vice president of the United States all rest there in the heart of a city.

St. Michael's Church, located on the corner of Meeting and Broad streets, also has a churchyard where some of the key figures in the early history of the region are buried, their names remind all Americans of our common heritage.

For the persistent explorer, the ancient cemeteries of Charleston also reveal the lives of those whose names will never be inscribed in the annals of history. But beneath the mounds of dirt that mark their existence, we somehow know them.

All of Charleston's graveyards are sacred sites, places where lives are celebrated and history remembered.

Love a good ghost story? Read about Charleston's Whistling Doctor.

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