When I was in college I smoked a joint with my friend and then we went skating down by the battery, around 1 or 2am. We always liked to skate down Legare Street because it was exceptionally smooth. After a while of skating around, enjoying the breeze, we slowed down to take in the sights on Tradd Street.
Somewhere along the way we encountered an old cast iron gate. We stood there admiring the gate for a while — it really is a nice gate. Then, out of nowhere, the two of us got absolutely spooked. We felt the need to get out of there immediately. We skated off as fast as we could and didn’t stop to regroup until we got back to my house, which was on Barre Street at the time (the house has since been knocked down).
Still to this day, both of us remember this night and don’t have a true explanation for it. Other than the possibility that we were both just stoned… or we saw a ghost.
I could not tell you the exact gate that we stopped at, but I did come across this page in the Southern Spirit Guide, which offers a possible explanation.
Doing the Charleston: A Ghostly Tour—South of Broad
From the article:
Simmons Gateposts
131 Tradd Street
“These gateposts, marking where Ruth Lowndes Simmons’ home once stood, serve as sentinels to remind us of a tragic love story. While Ruth Lowndes was from a noble Charleston family, she was almost a spinster when she married Francis Simmons, a wealthy planter. Simmons provided his wife with a fine house here, though he had his own home on nearby Legare Street. When their separate carriages would pass, the couple would rise and bow to the other. An old Charleston legend says that the sounds of a horse and carriage are heard here. James Caskey reports that he felt the rush of air and smelled the odor of sweaty horses as he visited these gateposts at night.”
