Month: January 2014

Haunted Pillar
North Corner, Intersection of Broad and 5th Streets
Augusta, Georgia

“If you wouldn’t mind,” I explained to my boyfriend, “I’d like to get my picture in front of the pillar, but I won’t touch it. Supposedly, if you touch it, you die. And I’m far too superstitious to risk it.”

“Well, he’s not,” my boyfriend said looking towards the infamous “Haunted Pillar.” Glancing across the street, I saw a young boy casually passing the landmark and running his hand along it as he passed. He seemed totally unaffected by the curse.

After dodging traffic, we finally crossed the street and approached the curious landmark. There’s not much to it, though it’s a bit taller than I assumed from pictures. Given its sinister name and legendary history, I expected something more frightening. Other than being located on a section of Broad Street that was dodgy, the pillar looks rather forlorn and innocent. Just behind it is a tattoo parlor bearing the name of the accursed column with a gaudy sign painted above it.

The drab gray pillar glowers sourly in the middle of the sidewalk like a grumpy old man. After the rough history it has witnessed, I’m sure I’d glower too.

The pillar once proudly stood as part of the Old Lower Market in the middle of Broad Street. Built around 1830, Augusta’s market consisted of two buildings, two hundred feet long by one hundred feet wide. Under its expansive roof, agricultural goods were sold and traded; trade that possibly included slaves. As with any place that’s been tainted by the stench of slavery, the pillar’s history, both factual and legendary, still reeks with it. The historic marker near the pillar makes no statement as to the selling of slaves in the market but other sources involve the pillar with the inglorious industry.

Slavery is alluded to in the account of the Haunted Pillar collected in the mid to late 1930s by the WPA’s Writers’ Project. It mentions that at one point the pillar bore the handprint of a slave. Scott A. Johnson in his The Stately Ghosts of Augusta (2005) suggests that the pillar may have possibly been part of the slave-trading platform. Sean Joiner in his Haunted Augusta & Local Legends (2002) goes further by suggesting that the pillar’s curse may be “the residue of a curse being uttered by a man being sold into slavery.”

However, this is where slavery’s involvement in the story ends and the general legend takes up, jumping to the late 1870s. According to the legend, shortly before the night of February 8, 1878, an itinerant preacher began exhorting sinners within the market. Perhaps his condemnations drowned out the cries of vendors or his strong words upset customers, for whatever reason he was asked to leave. Before leaving, he warned those within earshot that a great storm would smash the building but leave one column standing. Anyone attempting to move that lone column would most surely die.

In the early morning hours of February 8, 1878, the market’s destruction commenced as a rare mid-winter tornado ripped through downtown Augusta. In the flowery language of the period, Patrick Walsh, editor of The Augusta Chronicle editorialized: “While thousands slept in what seemed perfect security, tremendous agencies of destruction were abroad on the wings of the wind, and but for the mercy of heaven, few of the slumberers would have escaped.” Indeed, two slumberers did not escape and were killed a short distance from where the Broad Street sentinel now stands.

Later that day, the Chronicle reported that the market was a “heap of ruins.” “The whole roof of the structure was thrown into a mass of ruins. Timbers were broken and many piled in utter confusion.” With a dramatic flourish, the reporter added that the market’s bell rang out as it crashed to the ground. Opinions on the market were quite strong as evidenced in papers published later that week: “It was, at best, an unsightly edifice and marred the grand boulevard upon which it was mistakenly located.”

But, among the broken timbers and toppled brick, the pillar remained standing like a scolding finger. At this point, the column’s history becomes murky again. Jim Miles writes in his 2000 book, Weird Georgia, that a local grocer, Theodore Eye of Lavasseur & Eye paid workmen to move the column the year after the market’s destruction. As the workmen began, a young boy set off a firecracker scaring the workers (and the horses as well, I imagine). The effort was abandoned.

Other attempts to move the column are not as well documented and include workmen being struck and killed by lightning while trying to move the column during a road-widening project. Another story mentions a bulldozer operator suddenly dying of a heart attack just as he begins moving towards the column. Like most legends, these are just embellishments that beef up the story.

The historic marker erected to briefly outline the pillar’s history mentions that the pillar has moved successfully at least once during its history. From other sources, it appears it has been moved a number of times. A 1997 article from The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution quotes the owner of a business across the street from the pillar as noting that “it’s been moved several times because it was too close to the street.”

Still, there seems to be a mythos surrounding the cracking brick and cement creation. On two occasions, the pillar has been nearly demolished. In 1935, the pillar was struck by an automobile, but the driver was not injured. In 1958, on a Friday the 13^th, the pillar was knocked over by a large bale of cotton from a truck. Again, the driver was uninjured. That incident led city leaders to move the pillar eight feet back from the street.

While the stories of deaths associated with the pillar seem to be urban legends, Jim Miles does note that there is apparently paranormal activity associated with the pillar. This includes the sounds of “whispered conversations between phantoms and footsteps of invisible beings pacing alongside.” The grim structure also seems to attract bad luck. The 1997 AJC article notes that the local sheriff counted eleven traffic accidents over the course of ten months of that year at the intersection where the pillar stands. The sense of bad luck was so forbidding that a group of people gathered that January to surround the pillar in an attempt to pray away the evil that dwelled there.

While most locals scoff at the legend they still don’t touch it.

Both my boyfriend and I posed next to the pillar, but we also took care not to touch it. Neither of us needs any more bad luck in our lives. 

Update 31 December 2016

It’s seemingly been a bad year for everyone. Even haunted places have had a terrible year as demonstrated by Augusta, Georgia’s Haunted Pillar. In the early morning hours of December 18, the pillar was struck by a vehicle and toppled into a pile of broken brick and mortar.

Taking cues from the Augusta Convention and Visitors Bureau and other local organizations, money is being collected to rebuild the pillar. While the pillar and its lingering curse has served for years as a bleak reminder of oppression, death, and destruction, we can take hope from its story. The pillar’s recent toppling is not the first time it has been toppled. Every time it has been damaged, locals have banded together to restore and rebuild this odd monument. 

Update 5 July 2018

The remains of the Haunted Pillar are lingering in a city storage facility. The location of this curiosity is haunted by a pedestrian orange cone. The last word from local media regarding the landmark’s fate states that some city workers are still afraid to touch it and that it will eventually be restored. Hopefully, the columns will be restored to its rightful position as a pillar of the community.