Dock Street Theatre

On February 12, 1736, a playhouse on the corner of Church and Dock (now Queen) streets opened with George Farquhar’s comedy The Recruiting Officer. It is remembered as the first building in the American colonies designed purely for theatre, and it was probably lost in the great fire that swept Charleston’s French Quarter in 1740. In 1809 the Planter’s Hotel rose on the site, named for the planters who came to town for the racing season; the cast-iron balcony and sandstone columns were added in 1835, and the hotel is credited with introducing Planter’s Punch. Before the Civil War, the future naval hero and congressman Robert Smalls worked in its dining room as an enslaved waiter.

The hotel declined after the war, was damaged in the 1886 earthquake and by the 1930s was condemned. As a Works Progress Administration project during the Depression, local carpenters built a new playhouse modelled on 18th-century London theatres inside the hotel’s shell, using native cypress; it opened on November 26, 1937. The City of Charleston reopened the building again in 2010 after a $19 million restoration, and it now hosts Charleston Stage and the Spoleto Festival USA.

Two figures dominate its ghost lore. One is Junius Brutus Booth, the celebrated and volatile English-born actor and father of Edwin and John Wilkes Booth, who performed in Charleston at least 59 times between 1820 and 1860, stayed at the Planter’s Hotel, and once attacked its manager in a drunken rage. Staff and theatregoers say a figure is sometimes seen in a balcony box, second from stage right. The other is “Nettie Dickerson,” said to have been a young woman who worked by day at nearby St. Philip’s Church and by night at the hotel, and who was killed by lightning while standing on the iron balcony in her red dress.

No record has been found to confirm that Nettie existed or died as the story says; she belongs to the familiar “lady in red” type of American ghost lore. Booth’s connection is documented, but there is no reason beyond legend to tie a ghost to him. The theatre itself treats the stories with good humour, and they are a regular stop on Charleston’s walking ghost tours.

A woman in a red or tattered red dress, described as sad and wild-eyed, glimpsed on the second floor and the old hotel balcony; a male figure in a balcony box during performances; footsteps, cold air and the feeling of being watched in the upper floors.

The second-floor rooms and the Church Street balcony of the former hotel for Nettie; the auditorium balcony box second from stage right for Booth.

The theatre is a fixture of Charleston ghost walks and of published guides to the city’s ghosts, and National Geographic has listed it among Charleston’s most haunted sites. Its real history – America’s first theatre, Planter’s Punch, Robert Smalls and the WPA – is told on tours and during the Spoleto Festival.