Charleston's oldest English burial ground (some stones to 1695), adjoining a Romanesque Revival church (rebuilt 1891) for a congregation founded with Charles Towne in the 1680s; reported haunted by Revolutionary-era apparitions.
150 Meeting Street, Charleston, SC 29401
Age
All Ages
Cost
Free
Graveyard is free during open hours; donations welcome; church services and tours have their own schedule
Access
Limited Access
Graveyard has uneven brick walks and grass paths; some areas not accessible. Church sanctuary itself is accessible.
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1681 · Congregation founded with Charles Towne in 1681 (English Congregational, Scots Presbyterian, French Huguenot union) · Oldest English burial ground in Charleston; earliest stones to 1695 · British cannonball burst in graveyard during Sunday service, 1780 siege of Charleston · Current Romanesque Revival sanctuary (1890-1892) built using bricks from the 1804 Robert Mills-designed predecessor
The Circular Congregational Church congregation traces its founding to 1681, contemporaneous with the establishment of Charles Towne by the Lords Proprietors. The original congregation united English Congregationalists, Scots Presbyterians, and French Huguenots — a deliberately ecumenical 'Independent' congregation that reflected the diverse Protestant population of the early colony.
The adjoining graveyard is generally regarded as the oldest English burial ground in Charleston, with the earliest surviving stones dating to 1695. More than 500 gravestones are still in place and approximately 730 individuals are identified by name; the burying ground holds Revolutionary War soldiers, Confederate officers, ministers, and Charlestonians from across three centuries.
A particularly remembered event occurred during the British siege of Charleston in 1780, when a British cannonball burst inside the graveyard during a Sunday service — a story preserved in church tradition. After Charleston fell to the British in May 1780, 38 heads of congregational families were exiled to St. Augustine and later to Philadelphia, a measure of the congregation's prominence in the Patriot cause.
The present 'Circular' church building is the third on the site. The first Independent meeting house dated to the 1680s; a second, circular-plan structure designed by Robert Mills was completed in 1804 and destroyed by the Great Fire of December 1861. The present Romanesque Revival building, designed by Stephenson & Greene, was constructed 1890-1892 using bricks salvaged from the 1804 structure. The graveyard has been carefully conserved in partnership with the Historic Charleston Foundation.
The church and graveyard are contributing structures to the Charleston Historic District National Historic Landmark.
Sources
The Circular Graveyard is one of Charleston's most-visited paranormal-tourism stops. Ghost City Tours, US Ghost Adventures, and Charleston Terrors all describe a similar cluster of phenomena anchored to the burying ground's three-century span of mortality.
The most-reported apparitions are figures in Revolutionary War-era military dress, sometimes seen briefly between the older monuments before disappearing. Given that the graveyard contains documented Revolutionary War burials and was struck by a British cannonball during the 1780 siege of Charleston, the historical resonance supplies the lore even where individual sightings are unverified.
Shadow figures glimpsed in peripheral vision among the older stones are also commonly described — often near the back wall of the graveyard, which adjoins other historic-district properties. Cold spots and a sense of being touched are reported, particularly by tour group members on evening visits.
Orbs in photographs are routinely highlighted by ghost-tour guides as evidence of paranormal activity. The graveyard's environment — moist coastal air, abundant pollen, dappled light through live oaks, and many tourists carrying flash photography — produces conditions in which orb-like artifacts are predictable photographic outcomes; tour-operator framing typically does not engage these alternative explanations.
Additional reports collected by tour operators include disembodied voices (described as conversational rather than threatening) and occasional appearances of a man in colonial-era clothing near the church entrance. As with most Charleston cemetery sites, the reported phenomena are largely subjective experiences rather than independently corroborated events.
Notable Entities
Walk among more than 500 surviving gravestones (about 730 individuals identified, 450 burials predating 1800) in what is widely considered the South's finest collection of colonial-era funerary art.
Frequent stop on Charleston's evening ghost tours and daytime history tours; guides discuss the cannonball-during-services story (1780 siege) and the layered colonial congregational history.
Every HauntBound history is researched from documented sources. We clearly separate verified historical fact from paranormal folklore.
Charleston, SC
The congregation organized in 1772 as an overflow from Charleston's Congregational Church; construction began that year, was interrupted by the Revolutionary War (the building used as a barracks and stable), and was completed in 1787. The current church building was reconstructed in Gothic Revival style in the 1850s. The adjoining cemetery, established in 1772, was deliberately landscaped from the 1830s by Caroline Howard Gilman as a wildflower garden in the Mount Auburn (Massachusetts) tradition.
Charleston, SC
St. Philip's Episcopal Church is one of the oldest religious congregations in the southern United States, founded in 1681. The present 1838 Greek Revival church on Church Street replaced an earlier 1723 building destroyed by fire. The two graveyards across Church Street contain burials from the early 18th century through the present, including signers of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Mobile, AL
Cathedral Square occupies part of Mobile's 18th-century Catholic Campo Santo cemetery, a roughly 400-by-300-foot burial ground spanning portions of city blocks between Joachim, Dauphin, Franklin, and Conti Streets. Most burials were moved to the new Church Street Graveyard in 1819 when Mobile's city limits expanded, but additional remains continued to surface along Conti Street as late as the 1890s. The blocks were filled with buildings through most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries before being demolished in 1979 to create the public park facing the Cathedral Basilica.