“There’s a ghost here.” 140-year-old Port Royal building has more than just history
Most ghosts are gone by Nov. 1. Sheets with holes for eyes are packed into costume bins and “Who ya gonna call?” is asked for the last time until next Halloween.
At this historic building, occupants say a spirit stays past October and has for the past couple of years.
Carpenter’s Hall, located at 933 Paris Ave. in Port Royal, sold to Jeremy Taylor this year for $550,000. The hall is about 140 years old and was built around 1880, though the deed doesn’t show an exact date.
When deeds were written in the 1880s, they didn’t include whether there was a building on the property, according to President of the Port Royal Historical Foundation Eileen Newton. All they included were land size, lot number and street address.
“[The date is based off] narrative about the the building itself and age of the wood and people just talking about that,” Newton said.
For eight years before purchasing the building, Taylor rented the property from Sheena Jenkins as an office for his real estate company, but didn’t know the building could be haunted until after he signed the papers in March.
The building is split into two floors, with Taylor’s offices on the bottom floor and Jenkins’ interior design business on the top floor. Now, Jenkins rents from Taylor.
“I didn’t really have any experiences until I came upstairs and then one of these big booklets randomly just fell to the ground for no reason,” Taylor said, referencing fabric swatch binders hung on metal hooks. “I made the joke, I said, ‘I didn’t know this place was haunted.’”
[Jenkins] said, ”‘Oh, I didn’t tell you, there’s a ghost here.’”
Most of the encounters with ghosts have been with Jenkins.
“One morning really early. I was at the copy machine. And it felt like somebody ran their hand on my back,” Jenkins said. “I turned around and there was nobody there. I just had chills.”
None of the encounters have been unfriendly or scary, according to Jenkins, who has noticed things like furniture being rearranged overnight with no explanation. Taylor has noticed binders falling out of bookshelves.
“The secretary was in that office, and she would put country music on. Then she would come in and it would be changed to a different station,” Jenkins said, joking that the ghost didn’t like county music. “It’s just little fun things.”
From town hall to observation tower
The building is one of the oldest commercial buildings in Port Royal and has never been a residential building.
It was originally built as a town hall at the corner of 7th Street and Paris Ave., three streets over from 10th Street, where it stands today.
In addition to a town hall it was used as a school, a general store and community center for social events from the 1880s until the early 1940s. There aren’t exact dates for these uses.
Around the time Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941, a small watch tower was built on the roof to help volunteers from the Ground Observation Corps look for enemy planes.
“It looks like they cut a hole through the roof and they put a widow’s walk, except it’s glass,” Newton said. “You’d look on top of the roof and you could look through the glass of the widows.”
The tower no longer exists, but the stairs that led up to the tower are still there and lead into the roof.
“I didn’t know it was there until I did an inspection on the home,” Taylor said, who saw the stairs for the first time only a couple of months ago.
The hall was named in 1947, when the United Brotherhood of the Carpenter’s Union purchased the building and occupied it until 1962.
There are no oral or written records until 1965 when Port Royal Mayor James Ritter purchased the hall, and Ritter family history says that the the timber used to build the hall was grown on their farm in Hampton County and the mayor’s father-in-law helped build it.
The floors, walls and windows of the building are mostly original, according to Taylor, and if anything breaks he must get guidance from the Port Royal Historical Foundation before fixing it since its on the Port Royal list of historic buildings.
“I can’t replace it with anything but “like” material, [meaning] historic,” Taylor said. “If that window breaks, I can’t just go get a window. I have to go to Charleston and go to some historian and be like, ‘Please take some really old wood that’s 150 years old and make a window for me.’”
Moving and renovations
In 1994, the government of Port Royal took back the building from the Ritters by eminent domain. The watch tower was likely demolished when the building moved locations to make way for the current Port Royal Town Hall in 1995, according to Newton.
“It was literally moved. It was not torn down and moved. It was moved. The whole thing was moved down the street to where it is now,” Newton said. “It used to sit in what is now the parking lot of City Hall.”
When the hall moved to its current location it was in a “sad state,” according to Billy Keyserling, who helped move the building in partnership with the new owner, Village Renaissance Inc., in 1995.
“We had to strip down all the paint and refinish the floors and the walls and the paint on the inside,” Bob Turner said, who was president of VRI at the time.
Turner said they didn’t need to replace any of the floors, and they were able to use a lot of the original materials to renovate it.
“We didn’t have to do a lot to it to to restore it because all the original material was in it,” Turner said. “It was a pretty well built building. We added the porch on the outside that wraps around it.”
Turner sold the building to a custom home building company, who in turn sold it to Newton and then to Taylor.
Keyserling and Turner never had any ghostly encounters, and said this was this first time they heard of anything.
It was also the first time Newton heard the rumors and she laughed when it was mentioned.
“I‘ve never heard that before, but you know, old buildings have many tales to tell,” she said. “Sometimes those that were there before us are there to tell those tales, and they don’t tell them to everybody.”
This story was originally published October 30, 2022 at 7:00 AM.
