Slavery
At its peak in 1841, the plantation boasted dozens of slaves, the majority working several hundred acres of cotton and tobacco. Butler was known to openly boast that he was breeding his own workforce, and many of the slaves born on the property were fathered by Butler or his brother. On several recorded occasions, if a child born on the property was too light skinned, Butler would feed it alive to the passel of hogs he kept on the property.
Butler soon became one of the largest slave buyers in the South, which caused one of his contemporaries to remark, “[Butler] has purchased so damned many he could farm the entire state.” But at any given time, Butler never seemed to have more than fifty slaves working for him, even though records have shown he had bought more than four hundred.
Known to be unusually cruel masters, the Butler brothers seemed to have delighted in inflicting punishment on their slaves, for slights real or imagined. They made full use of the house’s torture chamber, where slaves were skinned, boiled, crucified, scourged, whipped, mutilated, and burned.
Colton Butler, a self-professed physician who demanded to be addressed as “Doctor” even though he held no known medical degree, conducted many surgical experiments on slaves, without anesthesia, with the apparent goal of joining them together.
“I believe I have the ability and necessary determination,” Butler wrote, “to fuse the parts of two Negroes together into a single being. Consider a slave with four strong arms, which would double his work output, or with six breasts to suckle young…”
Rebellion
The Butlers hired ten armed men to guard them and their property, and they were known to be as cruel as their employers. Daily beatings, corporal punishments, and public executions (even though the killing of slaves was against the slave code) were commonplace. A one-eyed man named Jonathan “Blackjack” Reedy, worked as taskmaster in the fields, and once said, “Spilled blood is good for the soil, makes the cotton stronger.”
On October 31, 1847, near the end of the annual cotton harvest, Blackjack was whipping a young boy whose only infraction was said to have been stopping for a moment to wipe the sweat from his brow. This appeared to have been the final straw for the mistreated slaves, and they revolted, beating Blackjack so severely the only way the authorities could identify his corpse was by his black leather eyepatch.
The rebellion spread throughout the fields, the guards either being surprised or running out of ammunition, and after the last was killed the angry slaves converged on Butler House.
Jebediah Butler, and his wife Annabelle, were hung naked by their ankles from the rafters in Butler House’s great room and beaten to death with whips and scourges. Colton was chased into the bowels of the basement, and dragged to the torture chamber where he was placed upon the rack and stretched until his arms and legs were broken in several places each. Then he was set ablaze.
The majority of the slaves escaped to nearby states, some making their way to the North and freedom.
Aftermath
The deaths of the Butlers was headline news for weeks after the incident, and bounties were put on the runaway slaves’ heads. But there weren’t many takers. There were rumors of a “slave curse” which claimed any who tried to capture the Butler slaves would meet the same fate as the Butler family.
The house, and plantation, went unoccupied for five years, until a man claiming to be a distant cousin of the Butlers, Sturgis Butler, petitioned the court for ownership and moved in during the summer of 1852.
Sturgis tried, unsuccessfully, to hire workers to fix up the house, which had fallen into disrepair and still bore the damage incurred during the rebellion. But laborers always quit in terror after a few days, claiming to have witnessed strange ghostly figures, or disembodied screams.
Sturgis resorted to repairing the house on his own, but he didn’t try to recapture the farm, and the land soon became a dense marsh.
Though Sturgis never married, he entertained a wide variety of women at Butler House, many of them prostitutes. At least a dozen were never heard of again.
Civil War Years
When the War Between the States broke out in 1861, Butler House was commandeered by the Confederate Army as a garrison. Between 1861 and 1865, at least six soldiers committed suicide on the grounds, and sixteen more were remanded to a local insane asylum, ranting about supernatural phenomenon. While under psychiatric care, four killed themselves, eight died of unexplained causes, and one man plucked out his own eyes with a fork.
Sturgis, exempt from the draft because he worked as a druggist, remained at the house during its occupation by troops, though he kept to himself in a closed off wing of the basement. Rumors abounded of him being “in league with the devil” and a proponent of “black magick.” Milledge Luke Bonham, governor of South Carolina and Brigadier General in the army, said of Sturgis, “There is something dark and twisted about that man. He is certainly no Christian.”
Reconstruction Years
During the four decades after the war ended, little was heard from Sturgis Butler. Prostitutes from the county continued to disappear, and the locals paid little mind to it. But in in 1902, Mia Lockwood, the only child of Southern poultry magnate Earl Lockwood, vanished the night before her debutante ball in Charleston.
Gossip and rumor led to the formation of a posse/lynch mob who raided the Butler House on May 1, the pagan holiday known as Walpurgis Night. Upon breaking into the house, the group discovered Sturgis presiding over a Black Mass replete with occult paraphernalia including black candles, severed animal heads, sacrilegious objects, and a seventeenth century binding of the Compendium Maleficarum, a notorious text on witches. Sturgis had hung a naked and violated Mia upside-down on a cross, and was lapping at the blood streaming from her slashed throat when the mob arrived.
Sturgis was immediately dragged outside, lashed to a black oak tree, and set ablaze. He allegedly laughed as he burned.
Inspection of the property over the succeeding weeks discovered three mass graves, some going back over seventy years (determined to be the bones of slaves) and some more recent (the corpses of missing prostitutes) making Sturgis one of America’s first, and most prolific, serial killers.
1910-1945
Butler House remained unoccupied for a few years after Sturgis Butler’s death, until the county acquired it, making the mansion a home for the blind, and for invalid veterans of the First World War . At the height of its use, it housed over a hundred. During its thirty-five years of operation, there were many fatal illnesses that infected patients.
1911 – Tuberculosis killed 35.
1918 – The Spanish Flu killed 63.
1920 – Diphtheria killed 9.
1924 – Botulism killed 40.
1931 – Cholera killed 5.
1940 – Measles killed 5.
In 1945, a fire broke out in the great room, and all of the 86 residents died of smoke inhalation or third degree burns. It is unknown why they were unable to escape, as the doors were all in working order.
After WWII
Butler House remained abandoned until 1956, when it was acquired by a land development company intent on tearing it down and building a housing development. The day before demolition occurred, the owner of the company, J.J. Hossenport, was struck by lightning and killed while getting into his car.
During his funeral, lightning struck and killed his widow, Myrtle Hossenport.
Their heirs, believing the property to be cursed, put it up for sale. It remained on the market and vacant for twenty-nine years, though six different realtors showed the house dozens of times.