Charleston: Unitarian Church Cemetery

We went on a ghost tour on our first night in Charleston, which is one of my favorite ways to be introduced to a city. I've been on enough ghost tours now to realize that they're definitely lying to you, but the places they show you and most of the history is very real. I had the Unitarian Church Cemetery on my list already, but it was a stop on the tour as well—or rather the gate was, since the cemetery is closed and locked at night. Our guide told us that several people had inexplicably passed out while standing outside the gates—which can't possibly be true, right?—but his spooky stories made me even more eager to actually see the inside of the cemetery. We went back the next day, and were thrilled with what we found.

We walked by several churchyard cemeteries on our trip, but if you only go to one, Unitarian is the one to see. The Unitarian Church of Charleston was founded in 1787 and it's one of the oldest of its kind in the country. The graveyard is small, but it's packed with interesting headstones and a huge variety of plants. Upon first glance it might appear as if the cemetery is abandoned, but I overheard a woman explaining that "it actually takes a lot of maintenance to look this overgrown."

There is pretty much no better cemetery dressing than Spanish moss, and even though some of the trees had lost their leaves they were still dripping with the always-spooky moss. The graveyard has a Secret Garden-vibe that is so lovely—the entrance gate puts you in an alleyway so the cemetery is hidden from the street on three sides. I remarked immediately after entering that this was one of my favorite cemeteries, a distinction I don't make arbitrarily.

Neighboring St. John's Lutheran Church also has a graveyard, albeit not as picturesque as Unitarian's. They were once separated by a fence but now sort of bleed into one another so I'm counting them as pieces of a whole. That incredible "Memento Mori" skull stone is actually part of St. John's and is one of the best skull-and-crossbones renderings I've seen. The graveyard also had "DANGER DO NOT ENTER" tape wrapped around a few stones forming a scene straight out of my Halloween parties.

The Unitarian Church Cemetery is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Annabel Lee— subject of the famous Edgar Allan Poe poem—although we couldn't find evidence of her grave despite having a (poorly-drawn) map from our ghost tour guide. I don't need a famous ghost story to get me into a cemetery, but it doesn't hurt either.