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Blood on the Irons | St. Philip's Graveyard & Cemetery · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:14
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristin.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering St.
0:21
Kristin: Philip's Graveyard and Cemetery, located in Charleston, South Carolina.
0:25
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:28
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:30
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:31
Kristin: It's time to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: It's hard to avoid Charleston, South Carolina on a graveyard podcast.
0:38
Kristin: Known as the Holy City for its countless churches, it inevitably comes with its fair share of graveyards.
0:44
Kristin: Old, haunted, and stegian legends that have taken on tales of their own.
0:48
Kristin: Charleston is an irresistible destination for any wandering soul.
0:52
Kristin: Today, however, we find ourselves within the city's oldest church and its surrounding graveyard, though within feels almost misleading.
0:59
Kristin: Charleston itself is a vast lowland cemetery, a romanticized city built on top the dead.
1:05
Kristin: Southern Charm softens its edges, disguising its past convincingly, until you begin to read its long and sordid history.
1:13
Kristin: It's one of my favorite historical digs, one that reveals unsettling details at every turn.
1:19
Kristin: St.
1:19
Kristin: Philip is no different.
1:20
Kristin: If you've seen photographs of Charleston, you've most likely seen St.
1:23
Kristin: Philip's on Church Street.
1:25
Kristin: It's an infamously phonogenic landmark, frequently captured by visitors touring the city.
1:30
Kristin: Yet, unless when you're on a guided tour, you may never learn its full history.
1:34
Kristin: What makes St.
1:35
Kristin: Philip's unique is it holds both a graveyard and a cemetery.
1:38
Kristin: The graveyard rests beside the church as expected.
1:41
Kristin: The cemetery, however, lies across the street to the west, known simply as the West Cemetery.
1:47
Kristin: It's easiest to explore its past under the collective name of St.
1:50
Kristin: Philip's Cemetery.
1:51
Kristin: Established in 1681, St.
1:54
Kristin: Philip's is the oldest religious congregation in South Carolina, a title earned through endurance as much as faith.
2:00
Kristin: Its first church was a modest wooden structure raised between 1680 and 1681 at the corner of Broad and Meeting Street, on ground that would later become St.
2:10
Kristin: Michael's.
2:10
Kristin: Even then the city was young, unstable, and already learning how easily structures and lives could be erased.
2:17
Kristin: In 1710, a hurricane tore through Charleston, leaving the original St.
2:21
Kristin: Philip's damaged beyond repair.
2:23
Kristin: A new church rose a few blocks away on Church Street, its construction slowed by hardship and uncertainty, but finally completed in 1723.
2:33
Kristin: It stood there for more than a century, long enough to watch generations pass beneath its roof, until Fire claimed it in 1835, reducing stone and timber alike to ash.
2:43
Kristin: Yet St.
2:44
Kristin: Philip's was rebuilt once more almost immediately.
2:47
Kristin: Construction on the present church began that same year and was completed the next, a swift resurrection in a city accustomed to ruin and renewal.
2:56
Kristin: The steeple followed between 1848 and 1850, climbing skyward as if to outpace disaster itself.
3:03
Kristin: But below that rising silhouette, the dead were already gathering.
3:07
Kristin: Every destruction left something behind.
3:09
Kristin: Every rebuilding layered the ground with memory.
3:12
Kristin: As the church endured storm, fire, and time, the cemetery quietly grew, patient, permanent, and waiting.
3:19
Kristin: The Western Yard was originally set aside for the burial of strangers and transit white persons, those without family plots, permanence, or place.
3:28
Kristin: Over time that boundary softened, and church members were laid to rest there as well.
3:33
Kristin: What began as marginal ground slowly became hollowed by proximity, its purpose reshaped by necessity rather than intention.
3:40
Kristin: Today the West Cemetery holds the debt of rank and remembrance.
3:44
Kristin: The irony is difficult to ignore, though.
3:46
Kristin: Ground was reserved for outsiders, now shelters men woven tightly into the nation's power and identity.
3:53
Kristin: A quiet reminder that status fades, boundaries blur, and in death even the carefully divided earth eventually closes the distance.
4:01
Kristin: Several colonial governors are buried here along with five bishops, yet among them rests a man whose ideals placed him firmly on the wrong side of history, despite his rise to one of the highest offices in the United States, vice president.
4:15
Kristin: John Caldwell Calhoun was born in South Carolina in 1782 and carried his convictions with him to the grave in 1850, convictions so fiercely held that they continue to disturb the American conscience nearly two centuries later.
4:29
Kristin: Calhoun moved effortlessly through the highest corridors of government, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, U.S.
4:36
Kristin: Senator, and the seventh vice president of the United States.
4:40
Kristin: He served under two presidents, John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson, an uncommon distinction, but his legacy is not defined by how high he rose.
4:50
Kristin: It's defined by how far he was willing to go.
4:53
Kristin: In 1832, Cahun became the first vice president in American history to resign the office, walking away from the nation's second highest post when loyalty to his state eclipsed loyalty to the Union itself.
5:06
Kristin: Cahun didn't begin as the man history would remember.
5:09
Kristin: Early in his career, he was a nationalist, an advocate for a strong federal government, modernization, and productive tariffs, but in the late 1820s, something hardened.
5:19
Kristin: His ideologies shifted simply toward state rights, limited government, and nullification.
5:25
Kristin: The belief that individual states could declare federal laws void.
5:29
Kristin: At the center of this transformation, though, was slavery.
5:32
Kristin: Cahun became one of the most vocal and unyielding defenders of Southern slavery.
5:36
Kristin: He rejected the notion that it was a necessary evil, declaring instead that it was a positive good.
5:42
Kristin: He argued that the survival of the Union depended on the North's acceptance of Southern slaveholding power.
5:48
Kristin: These ideals rippled outward, shaping Southern political thought, and laying the intellectual groundwork for succession decades later.
5:56
Kristin: His clashes with President Andrew Jackson, most famously during the nullification crisis, revealed the lengths to which Calhoun would go.
6:04
Kristin: When federal authorities stood in his way, he resigned rather than compromise, returning to the Senate to champion what he called a concurrent majority, a system designed to safeguard the political power of the slave-holding South over majority rule, but ideology alone couldn't drive him.
6:21
Kristin: Calhoun's resignation was entangled with the Petticoat affair, a social scandal that consumed Washington's elite.
6:28
Kristin: Secretary of War John Eaton and his wife Peggy were ostracized by cabinet wives who judged her marriage improper.
6:35
Kristin: Calhoun's old wife led the charge.
6:38
Kristin: It was a moment that exposed how national governance could be stalled by social grievance, how questions of honor, reputation, and perceived purity could weigh as heavily as constitutional crisis.
6:49
Kristin: Even at the highest levels, petty hierarchies shaped the fate of the nation.
6:54
Kristin: In his later years, Calhoun became known as the cast iron man.
6:57
Kristin: Rigid, unyielding, and uncompromising, he enslaved dozens of people on his Ford Hill plantation, while shaping theories meant to preserve that very system.
7:06
Kristin: Tuberculosis claimed his life in 1850, but his ideals sadly didn't die with him.
7:12
Kristin: Even in death, Calhoun's presence stirred concern.
7:15
Kristin: During the Civil War, his remains were removed out of fear that Union soldiers might desecrate them.
7:20
Kristin: Hidden in an unmarked spot within St.
7:22
Kristin: Philip's graveyard, they remained untouched until the war ended, and were eventually returned to his grave in the West Cemetery.
7:29
Kristin: Through ruthless ambition and unshakable devotion to slavery, Calhoun helped pull a nation toward fracture and war.
7:36
Kristin: His ideals meant to preserve a system built on bondage shaped policy and politics long after his death, leaving a legacy of suffering intertwined with his name.
7:46
Kristin: Now he rests within St.
7:48
Kristin: Philip's West Cemetery, on ground once reserved for strangers and outsiders.
7:53
Kristin: Even in death, the architects of oppression find themselves folded back into the same soil they worked so fiercely to control.
8:00
Kristin: Within St.
8:02
Kristin: Philip's, though, Cowan was not alone.
8:04
Kristin: Another man lies here who shared his ideals and who too held the levers of power.
8:09
Kristin: Rollins Lowndes was born in 1721 on the island of St.
8:13
Kristin: Kitts, into a world already shaped by empire, commerce, and enslavement.
8:18
Kristin: His family relocated to Charleston when he was still a child, bringing enslaved people with them.
8:24
Kristin: Not long after, his father, ruined by failed investments, took his own life.
8:29
Kristin: It was an early lesson in instability, one that followed Lowndes throughout his entire career.
8:34
Kristin: Trained as a lawyer, Lowndes rose steadily through South Carolina's colonial ranks.
8:39
Kristin: By his early 20s, he had become a provost marshal through ambition, advantageous marriages, and a labor of enslaved people.
8:48
Kristin: He amassed vast plantations.
8:50
Kristin: For Lowndes, his career was cultivated as deliberately as land.
8:54
Kristin: Though he opposed outright independence from Britain, Lowens aligned himself with the Patriots' cause as imperial control tightened.
9:01
Kristin: He denounced the Stamp Act, challenged royal authority, and played a central role in South Carolina's revolutionary government.
9:09
Kristin: In 1778, amid war and unrest, he was elected president of South Carolina, but would soon be renamed governor, overseeing sweeping constitutional changes while British forces closed in and his own plantations were raided.
9:23
Kristin: Yet Lon's resistance to tyranny had its limits.
9:26
Kristin: After the war, he emerged as a fierce opponent of the United States Constitution, objecting not to centralized power alone, but to any restrictions on the transatlantic slave trade.
9:36
Kristin: To him, federal authority threatened the economic and social order that slavery sustained.
9:41
Kristin: He spoke passionately against ratification, arguing that South Carolina's sovereignty and its human property must remain untouched.
9:50
Kristin: Lowns would go on to serve again as state legislator and as mayor of Charleston, shaping civic life even as a nation moved forward without him.
9:58
Kristin: Two of his sons would later serve in Congress, both inheriting his influence and his contradictions.
10:04
Kristin: He died in 1800, leaving behind a legacy entangled in revolution and restraint.
10:10
Kristin: Liberty argued aloud while bondage persisted beneath it.
10:14
Kristin: Today he rests in St.
10:15
Kristin: Philip's West Cemetery, a man who resisted kings, resisted constitutions, and resisted change itself, now returned quietly to the same earth he worked so fiercely to control.
10:27
Kristin: Lownd's grave marks the end of one era, but not the end of influence.
10:31
Kristin: St.
10:32
Kristin: Philip's doesn't hold just the men who shape law and governs, but it also keeps those who shape the stories of region in text.
10:38
Kristin: DeBose Hayward was born in Charleston in 1885, heir to both literary ambition and southern legacy.
10:45
Kristin: A descendant of Thomas Hayward Jr., signer of the Declaration of Independence, he came from the Plenary League.
10:52
Kristin: Yet much of his life was spent on the margins of health and uncertainty.
10:56
Kristin: Childhood illness shadowed him early on, polio, typhoid fever, pleurosy.
11:01
Kristin: His body failed him repeatedly, confining him to sick beds where imagination became both refuge and occupation.
11:07
Kristin: Hayward left formal schooling at 14, calling himself a miserable student, but literature never loosened its grip.
11:15
Kristin: While working as an insurance agent to support himself, he wrote, quietly, persistently, poems and stories shaped by Charleston's low country rhythms.
11:24
Kristin: In 1913, a modest one-act play reached the local stage.
11:28
Kristin: It wasn't a triumph, but it was enough to convince him to keep going.
11:31
Kristin: By the early 1920s, Hayward had become a central figure in Charleston's literary revival.
11:37
Kristin: Alongside fellow writers, he helped found the Poetry Society of South Carolina, giving voice to a region still reckoning with its past.
11:44
Kristin: His work drew heavily on the city itself, its languages, its hierarchies, and most notably its African-American communities.
11:52
Kristin: In 1925, Hayward published Porgy, a novel set in the Charleston's Catfish row.
11:58
Kristin: It was widely praised for its sympathy and lyricism, and soon adapted into a stage play by Hayward and his wife Dorothy.
12:05
Kristin: Composer George Gershwin would later join them, transforming the story into the opera Porgy and Bess.
12:10
Kristin: When it premiered in 1935, it featured an African-American cast and chorus.
12:16
Kristin: Unusual, ambitious, and extremely controversial.
12:19
Kristin: Hayward's portrayal of African American life earned both admiration and criticism.
12:24
Kristin: Some praised him for depicting his characters with humanity rather than caricature.
12:28
Kristin: Others argued that sympathy didn't absolve stereotype, that even kindness could preserve a vision of the South frozen in place.
12:36
Kristin: The tension still remains, but Porgi and Bess is now regarded as an American masterpiece.
12:41
Kristin: Its beauty inseparable from the questions it raises.
12:44
Kristin: Haber continued to write novels, plays, poetry, even a beloved children's book, before dying suddenly of a heart attack in 1940 at just 54 years old.
12:55
Kristin: A man who listened closely to Charleston, who translated its voices into art, and whose legacy, like the city itself, remains complicated, contested, and impossible to separate from the ground it rose from.
13:07
Kristin: Some men, though, didn't just listen to the city.
13:10
Kristin: They were shaped by its unwritten rules, its hierarchies, and its relentless expectations.
13:15
Kristin: Charleston shaped Edward Rutledge long before he helped shape a nation, its wealth, its hierarchies, and its dependence on enslaved labor, forming the quiet foundation of his rise.
13:26
Kristin: The youngest of seven children, Rutledge follows his elder brothers across the Atlantic to study London's inns of court.
13:33
Kristin: Returning home in 1772, polished by empire and prepared for power.
13:39
Kristin: At just 26 years old, he would become the youngest man to sign the Declaration of Independence.
13:44
Kristin: His name had permanently into the founding of a nation still uncertain of what liberty would mean.
13:49
Kristin: In 1774, Rutledge married Henrietta Middleton, binding two of South Carolina's most prominent families together.
13:57
Kristin: They would have three children, though only two survived infancy, a quiet reminder of the fragility that threatened even the lives of the elite.
14:05
Kristin: By the time Revolution reached Charleston in earnest, Rutledge had established himself as a successful lawyer and leading citizen of the city.
14:13
Kristin: He was also a slaveholder, owning more than 50 enslaved people, an inheritance of wealth built on bondage that would shape his politics as much as his prosperity.
14:22
Kristin: Though a vocal defender of colonial rights, Rutledge approached independence cautiously.
14:28
Kristin: South Carolina's leadership initially believed the moment premature, and Rutledge worked active to exclude African American men from the Continental Army, even as the language of liberty filled congressional halls.
14:40
Kristin: When independence was finally declared, he signed young, resolute, and already deeply entangled in the contradictions of the new republic.
14:48
Kristin: He returned to South Carolina in 1776, serving in the General Assembly, and later as a captain of the artillery and the state militia.
14:56
Kristin: In 1780, during the British Siege of Charleston, Rutledge was captured alongside fellow signers Arthur Middleton and Thomas Hayward.
15:05
Kristin: The men were sent south to St.
15:06
Kristin: Augustine, prisoners of an empire they had defied, and released the following year in a formal exchange.
15:13
Kristin: Rutledge's later career unfolded in legislative chambers rather than on a battlefield.
15:18
Kristin: He served nearly two decades in the General Assembly, advocated for the confiscation of loyalty's property, and resisted foreign entanglements, first British, then French.
15:29
Kristin: Though once aligned with Thomas Jefferson, Rutledge eventually broke with him, disillusioned by partisan loyalties and shifting alliances.
15:36
Kristin: In 1798, he was elected governor of South Carolina.
15:40
Kristin: Illness, though, followed him into office.
15:42
Kristin: When attending a meeting in Columbia, he was forced to return home, weakened by gout.
15:47
Kristin: Edward Rutledge died in Charleston on January 23, 1800, before completing his term.
15:53
Kristin: Some claim the news of George Washington's death hastened his end, while others saw it as a slow reckoning of a body worn by ambition.
16:01
Kristin: Today, Rutledge rests in Charleston's soil, remembered as a founder, a governor, and a man whose legacy, like the nation he helped bring into being, with swords and ideals proclaimed aloud while injustice endured beneath them.
16:13
Kristin: Beyond the figures we've already met, St.
16:15
Kristin: Phillips holds a constellation of Charleston's leaders, diplomats, and public servants.
16:20
Kristin: Men and women whose names shape the city, this state, and the nation.
16:25
Kristin: Generals Christopher and James Gladstone, defenders of the independence, lie here alongside Charles and Thomas Pickney, framers of the Constitution and governors of state, Daniel Huger, Colonel Isaac Modi, and William Lawton Smith, served the fledging United States in Congress and abroad, while William Johnson sat on the Supreme Court.
16:44
Kristin: Early Governor Robert Johnson and 20th Century Major General Joseph Pesquia Sullivan also find their final rest here, a quiet testament to lives of duty, ambition, and the enduring mark they left on Charleston.
16:57
Kristin: Before continuing, I do want to be honest about something.
17:00
Kristin: I was deeply torn when deciding to cover St.
17:02
Kristin: Philip's.
17:03
Kristin: Many of the individuals buried here are active participants in history shaped by slavery.
17:08
Kristin: A history that carries pain, injustice, and consequences that still echo today.
17:13
Kristin: But history isn't made up of solely heroic or beautiful stories.
17:18
Kristin: It's also built from the uncomfortable, the shameful, and the deeply human.
17:22
Kristin: To look only at what flatters the past is to misunderstand it entirely.
17:26
Kristin: These individuals played a role whether we like it or not, and refusing to look directly into that past, to understand how it happened and why, risks allowing its lessons to fade.
17:37
Kristin: Remembering it's not an endorsement, it's a reckoning.
17:40
Kristin: And reckoning is how we make sure history is never repeated.
17:44
Kristin: So I just wanted to make sure that was absolutely clear.
17:47
Kristin: And it's with that reckoning that St.
17:49
Kristin: Philips exists.
17:50
Kristin: Like many graveyards in the South, St.
17:52
Kristin: Philips is wrapped in legends and tales of hauntings.
17:56
Kristin: It's easy to imagine them here.
17:57
Kristin: The grounds are cloaked in moss drape oaks, their shade falling over weathered stones even at midday.
18:03
Kristin: And when the hate fades into a brief human night, the cemetery seems to hold its breath, inviting the imagination, and perhaps something more to wander among the graves.
18:12
Kristin: Tales have always hung heavy in southern air, but one assuming visitor and a single camera would make them tangible in ways no one could forget in 1987.
18:22
Kristin: Harry Reynolds strolled through St.
18:24
Kristin: Philip's on a bright sunlit afternoon, hoping only to capture the quiet beauty of the stones and iron fences glinting in the light.
18:32
Kristin: Yemen's photographs were developed, one image left from the page, and that would linger in the minds of ghost hunters for decades to come.
18:40
Kristin: Here on film, a woman appeared, transparent, bent low over the grave of a small child.
18:45
Kristin: She knelt on hands and feet, as though the weight of grief itself had pressed her into the earth.
18:50
Kristin: This they say is Sue Howard, a member of the St.
18:54
Kristin: Philip's congregation who in 1888 lost her stillborn child.
18:58
Kristin: Six days later, Sue mysteriously fell ill.
19:01
Kristin: She died quietly, some say of a broken heart.
19:04
Kristin: The image spread quickly.
19:05
Kristin: Newspapers and magazines across the world carried her story.
19:09
Kristin: But Charleston already knew.
19:11
Kristin: Locals recognized her immediately.
19:13
Kristin: Her sorrow, captured in ghostly form, became one of the city's most retold legends.
19:19
Kristin: Some whisper that pregnant women who touch the photograph feel a sudden chill or a queasy unease, as though her grief has passed through the paper and into their bodies.
19:28
Kristin: Sue, though, is not alone within St.
19:30
Kristin: Philip's, they say.
19:31
Kristin: There's also a tale of a young girl who wandered into the cemetery at night, her small frame clutching a cane.
19:38
Kristin: It said the girl had been dared to leave it at the grave of a man named Boney.
19:42
Kristin: Once enslaved, Boney had saved St.
19:44
Kristin: Philips from a devastating fire in 1796, climbing the roof to protect the church with nothing but his own courage.
19:51
Kristin: For his bravery, he was granted freedom, but some say he never truly left the grounds.
19:56
Kristin: Even in death, Boney remains near the church, a quiet Guardian over the stones and the silent dead.
20:02
Kristin: The girl, though, was not as fortunate.
20:05
Kristin: Startled by the sound in the darkness, she stumbled, pinning her cane into the wet earth.
20:09
Kristin: Terrified and alone, she couldn't rise, and in that moment became one more shadow among the graves.
20:15
Kristin: And yet there's a strange comfort in the tale, she's remembered, watched over by Bonnie's enduring presence, her curds preserved in the whispered stories that still drift through St.
20:25
Kristin: Philip's at night.
20:26
Kristin: And so the cemetery waits, and not as a place of silence but accumulation, of lives layered upon one another, held fast in earth and memory.
20:35
Kristin: For those who wander its past, the stones in the shadows begin to speak.
20:39
Kristin: The grieving mother, the frightened child, the steadfast protector.
20:44
Kristin: Founding fathers and forgotten citizens alike rest here, their stories etched into soil and stone, lingering in the hush between the tombs.
20:53
Kristin: For now, though, the stories of St.
20:55
Kristin: Philip slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
20:59
Kristin: Yet they're never silent for long.
21:01
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into St.
21:03
Kristin: Philip's graveyard and cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
21:08
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.