The South Carolina Lunatic Asylum on Bull Street: History, Ghost Stories and What Is There Now

Generations of South Carolina children were warned that if they misbehaved, they would be sent to Bull Street. The threat meant the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum, later the South Carolina State Hospital, a walled campus north of downtown Columbia that grew from one elegant Robert Mills building in the 1820s into a small town of wards, kitchens, chapels and cemeteries holding thousands of patients.

After the hospital closed, its boarded-up buildings drew trespassers, photographers and a reputation as the most haunted place in the state. That reputation is still repeated on lists of haunted places, but the site has changed completely. This guide covers the real history, what is and is not known about its ghost stories, and what you can see at the BullStreet District today.

History of the South Carolina Lunatic Asylum

In the early 1820s South Carolina set out to build one of the first state-run mental hospitals in the country. The state turned to Robert Mills, the Charleston-born architect who would later design the Washington Monument, and his building on Bull Street was built between 1822 and 1827. The asylum took its first patients in 1828. It was presented to wealthy families as a modern place of moral treatment, with a regime it called a treatment of kindness.

Patients’ experiences were often very different. Treatments included bloodletting, forced vomiting, restraints and isolation, and one woman was kept in a dark cell for a month. Mary P. Allston, a Lowcountry aristocrat admitted in 1848, wrote letters describing conditions she found torturous before her family took her home five years later. In the Civil War the grounds became Camp Asylum, a prisoner-of-war camp for captured Union soldiers.

After the war the institution was renamed the South Carolina State Hospital for the Insane, and it kept growing. The great red-brick Babcock Building, with its curving wings and domed central tower, was completed in 1885 and became the heart of the campus. By 1900 the hospital held more than 1,000 patients, and according to the state Department of Mental Health about a third of those in its care in the early 1900s died there. Tuberculosis was treated on the segregated campus, and more than 20,000 people were sent to Bull Street in its first century.

From the 1960s, deinstitutionalization emptied the wards. The Mills Building stopped housing patients in 1937 and the Babcock Building in 2003, when the state announced the hospital’s closure; the Department of Mental Health ended its use of the site in December 2015. In 2013 the city agreed to redevelop the 181-acre campus with Hughes Development Corporation as the BullStreet District, and Segra Park, home of the Columbia Fireflies, opened beside the old buildings in 2016.

Fires twice threatened the Babcock Building, and in September 2020 a blaze destroyed its cupola and about a third of its central core. It was rebuilt as more than 200 apartments, with the first residents moving in during 2022 and a replica red dome raised in 2023. The Mills Building, still owned by the state, housed the Department of Health and Environmental Control until 2024 and became the headquarters of the South Carolina Office of Resilience in 2026. A University of South Carolina medical school is being built on the campus.

The ghosts of Bull Street

The empty wards

Most of the asylum’s ghost stories date from the years it stood empty. People who slipped past the fences described cold spots, slamming doors, footsteps on upper floors, and cries and screams echoing through the corridors, along with sounds of a working hospital in rooms that had been closed for years. Lists of haunted places began calling it one of the most haunted buildings in the country.

We have not found any of these accounts recorded in a newspaper, an archive or an interview with a named witness. They come from anonymous trespassers and ghost-story websites, and some describe buildings that have since been demolished. What is documented is the scale of suffering on the campus, which is reason enough for the stories to have grown.

Shadows in the windows

The most repeated story is of figures at the windows of the Babcock Building, seen from the street at night when the building was dark. With the building now full of residents and lit every evening, those reports have faded, and residents of the apartments have not, as far as we can find, reported anything out of the ordinary.

The forgotten dead

Over the hospital’s long life, thousands of patients died at Bull Street, about a third of those in its care in the early 1900s alone. Most were poor, many had no family to claim them, and their stories went largely unrecorded. For many people that history, more than any ghost, is what makes Bull Street haunting.

Where to look

• The Babcock Building: The curving red-brick wings and rebuilt red dome, best seen from the BullStreet green after dark. It is a private apartment building.
• The Robert Mills Building: The original 1820s asylum, a classical building by Robert Mills, now a state office; view it from the street.
• The historic bakery and power plant: Two of the old service buildings, now a coworking space and an event venue.
• Segra Park: The ballpark sits beside the Babcock Building; an evening game gives a good view of the dome lit up.

Visiting Bull Street today

There is no ghost tour of the asylum and no public access to its historic interiors. The Babcock Building is home to hundreds of residents and the Mills Building is a working state office, so treat both as private property. You can walk around the BullStreet District freely: park near the green, walk past the Babcock Building’s long facade and the old bakery, and catch a Columbia Fireflies game at Segra Park for a night view of the dome.

To learn the history rather than the legend, visit the South Carolina State Museum and Historic Columbia’s house museums nearby, which tell the wider story of the city.

• Visiting Buildings are apartments and offices; view from the public streets and green
• Ghost hunting No ghost hunting: private homes and state offices

Tips for your visit

• Go in the evening when the Babcock dome is lit, and stay on public sidewalks and the green.
• Do not try to enter any building: they are homes and offices, and trespassing is a crime.
• Pair your visit with Elmwood Cemetery, a short drive west, and the Hampton-Preston Mansion a few blocks south.
• Visit Longstreet Theatre and the Horseshoe at the University of South Carolina for ghost stories you can walk into.

More haunted places nearby

• Haunted places in Columbia: Longstreet Theatre, the State Museum and the Horseshoe
• The Westin Poinsett, Greenville: the nearest big haunted hotel
• Haunted hotels in South Carolina
• Haunted places in South Carolina
• Haunted places in Columbia

Sources

Facts on this page are checked against the official website, historic records and news coverage. Ghost stories are reported as staff, visitors and investigators tell them, and we say where records contradict a story.

• Wikipedia: South Carolina State Hospital
• Post and Courier: The history of the Bull Street asylum
• Post and Courier: Columbia's historic Babcock Building nearly ready for first residents
• SC Living: From painful past to vibrant future at SC's former mental hospital
• Only In Your State: The Babcock Building of the former South Carolina State Hospital
• The BullStreet District (official site)