Five tales from the crypt

Charleston is a city populated by thousands of fascinating personalities, many of whom just happen to be dead. Historian, tour guide and author Ruth Miller has been researching local graveyards for years and has filled books, literally, with Charleston cemetery stories. We asked her to tell just five from the Historic District.

CSI: 18th century

St. Philip's Churchyard

Nicholas Wightman was returning home on March 12, 1788, when he was attacked by a mugger - or, in the parlance of the day, a 'footpad.' The criminal was part of a gang that infested Charleston, and when Wightman resisted, he was shot to death. They might have gotten away with it, but 'Divine Providence ordered it so that a single button belonging to the coat of the murderer' was found at the scene of the crime. The button served as evidence at the trial, and the murderer and five of his accomplices were promptly tried, convicted and executed. Wightman's obscure stone marker is remembered today as 'Footpad's Memorial.'

The Dead Bride

St. Michael's Churchyard

Lovely 17-year-old heiress Harriet Mackie was 'possessed of wealth, youth, beauty, and blooming health' when she died suddenly, just days before her wedding. Her distraught fiance commissioned a portrait of his deceased bride-to-be, laid out in her wedding dress like a fairy tale sleeping beauty. Because she died before marriage, Harriet's valuable dowry passed to cousins John and William Alston instead of her future husband. Her mother filed a lawsuit against the brothers, but died before its settlement. Does an unsolved murder lie buried at St. Michael's? The Alston boys' sudden inheritance provides a grand and obvious motive.

The Petrified Forest

St. John's Lutheran Church

The great granite tree trunk that marks the grave of Oskar Aichel is a fine example of a popular style from 1895 to 1905. The Rural or Rustic Style can be seen in furniture made from branches, jewelry using non-precious stones, decorator items and even cemeteries! While Oskar's monument is grand and masculine, the adjoining marker for his wife Margaretha - an angel clasping a cross constructed of bark-covered logs - is a feminine version. Other rustic monuments in this churchyard show marble blocks carefully carved to represent rock piles housing stone ferns, and a variety of log crosses.

All about Daddy

St. Mary's Roman Catholic Church

The large box tomb with the bronze coat of arms tells more about the father of the dead sisters within than it does of the girls themselves. Admiral François Joseph Paul, marquis de Grasse, was the commander of the French fleet that defeated the Royal Navy at the Battle of the Chesapeake in 1781, forcing General Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown. When a slave insurrection broke out later in the French colony of San Domingo, the admiral brought his family to Charleston. Here, two of his daughters later died of yellow fever, a viral disease once known as 'American plague.'

Caroline's Garden Graveyard

Unitarian Church

The Rev. Samuel Gilman and his wife, Caroline, were newlyweds when they arrived in Charleston in 1819 to lead the local congregation. The Bostonian newcomers were fans of Mount Auburn, America's first 'rural cemetery,' and Caroline set out to create something similar in their new urban church on Archdale Street, laying out romantic paths and landscaping the graveyard with perennials. Today, the Gilmans rest in her beloved churchyard garden surrounded by antique plants, heritage roses and old-fashioned flowers.

Excerpted from the series of booklets on Charleston's 18th-century graveyards, "Touring the Tombstones," by Pamela Gabriel and Ruth Miller.