01
A Charleston Ghost Story
I bought a ticket for a ghost tour and went alone. By the end, a red orb had found me — and I knew exactly why.
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Places / United States
Walking through Charleston, I found preserved houses, church steeples and streets where the beauty of the city is inseparable from the history that made it.
Walking South of Broad, I began furnishing a house I did not own — and found the fantasy of staying was never quite separate from the arithmetic of leaving.
A 19th-century auction broadside, a small fort with an outsized history, and a minor-league night that turned into something more than baseball.
An 1857 auction broadside at the Old Slave Mart Museum, and Ashley's Sack at the International African American Museum: two records of the same history, read side by side. Originally published in Finding America, Issue 19.
Fort Sumter was smaller than I imagined, and that smallness changed the story. Originally published in Finding America, Issue 10.
A wristband I didn't know I needed, a family in front of me, and a conversation about masonry, Cuba, and the houses South of Broad that lasted the whole game.
I bought a ticket for a ghost tour and went alone. By the end, a red orb had found me — and I knew exactly why.
Three or four centuries old, sprawling instead of rising. No single position explained the whole shape.
A straw hat, a phone held out in front of me, and a Spanish lesson conducted from one of the most photographed streets in Charleston.
A visual notebook from a month South of Broad.
