Off South Carolina's Shining Coast Near Charleston Lies A Hauntingly Beautiful Abandoned Fort

Dark tourism has been around for a while. How else would we describe Romans traveling to watch gladiators butcher each other in the Colosseum? Or the medieval Europeans who treated public executions like a family day out to the seaside? Officially coined by two Glasgow Caledonian University professors in 1996, dark tourism has many offshoots and subcategories, including visiting massacre sites, old battlefields, the scenes of gruesome murders, and eerie and abandoned places — think Pompei, Auschwitz, the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, and even the wreckage of the "Titanic."

America is awash in abandoned sites that have piqued the curiosity of dark tourists, too. There are creepy and abandoned amusement parks scattered across the country, each feeling like they belong in the pages of a Stephen King novel, and once-thriving gold-rush boom towns now left vacant and ghostly. And off the coast of South Carolina sits one of America's most hauntingly beautiful abandoned sites.

Called Castle Pinckney, it engulfs the southern tip of Shutes Folly Island, less than a mile to the east of Charleston's French Quarter. If you're sitting on the pier of this gorgeous city where European revival architecture meets southern charm, you'll get a great view of the former Civil War fortress. A Confederate stronghold and place of imprisonment for Union soldiers, Castle Pinckney has since fallen into disrepair. The South struggled during the postwar Reconstruction era, and the castle was left to rot for much of the 20th century before being added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.

Castle Pinckney is a symbol of Charleston's complicated history, a city that's often described as the "Cradle of the Confederacy." While such an epithet invariably carries negative connotations, it also lends the site genuine historical weight. The soldiers garrisoned here were at the heart of one of the most bellicose and storied periods of America's past, and every crumbling stone and overgrown wall of the old fort embodies that.  

Because of its condition and the limited access, Castle Pinckney is unfortunately closed to tourists today. That said, you can still get close to the ruin on a boat tour. Flippers Finders tours take visitors on small sightseeing boats through Charleston harbor and around the perimeter of Shutes Folly Island, while guides explain the fort's history and the current preservation efforts. Captain Dan's historical boat tours also visit Castle Pinckney, as well as other sites around Charleston, like the USS Yorktown World War II-era aircraft carrier, Fort Sumter, where the first shots of the Civil War were fired, and a handful of battery points.