The Ghosts of Granby Mills

Although ghost stories abound in the lowcountry of South Carolina, there are many other locations throughout the state where you can find some mighty strange happenings. Today I’d like to tell you about one such place that lies a few miles from the sacred football grounds of Williams Brice Stadium in Columbia (not that I’m a huge Gamecocks fan or anything like that).

The place is known as Granby Mills. As the name implies, it used to be a textile mill, and from I understand it was something to behold. Built in 1897 (contrary to popular belief I wasn’t around back then), it was the first mill to be powered by an off-site source of hydroelectric power. But it also took people—lots of people—to run the machines. Believe it or not, a good many of those people were kids. Yes, I said kids, some as young as eight years old. Don’t get mad at me, I’m just the storyteller. Apparently child labor was perfectly acceptable back in Granby’s hey-day.

If that’s not enough to get you riled up, just wait until you hear the rest of this. Those kids had to work some really long hours, up to twelve hours a day. And if they showed any sign of slacking off, they got told that they would be shoved into one of the huge on-site furnaces and cremated live. Talk about negative motivation! Can you imagine being eight years old and told such a thing? I’d work until I dropped from exhaustion, and that’s just what the overseers were hoping for (I’ll reserve my opinion of the overseers because I want to keep this blog ‘G’ rated).

Anyway, there is no evidence that any of the children were actually fed to the furnace. Notice I said “no evidence.” There were plenty of rumors, though, and it is documented that many of the children went missing. Some say that those were the ones that died from exhaustion and the mill managers decided it would be better to ‘dispose’ of their bodies than to explain to the authorities what had really happened to them. Some speculate that the furnaces could have been used for this purpose.

Now, fast-forward to today. Someone came along and decided that the historic mill building would make a great place for nearby USC students to stay. So it was made into an apartment building. Bet you can tell where this is headed, can’t you?

Yep, the building is haunted. Residents often hear the sounds of children crying and furnaces firing. Feet can be heard running across the floors. Objects in locked places are rearranged. Even more frightening, images of small hands and faces are seen in the moisture of fogged windows. Gulp!

Don’t know about you, but the whole thing gives me the chills. Thank God we don’t treat our children like that today. They are the most precious gift bestowed upon us and deserve to have a happy childhood. Shame on those overseers for taking advantage of their gullibility and scaring the you-know-what out of them. I hope they found a few fires of their own to burn in when they gave up the ghost.

Coming up next: More stories to keep you from sleeping at night :)

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