Downtown Greenville, South Carolina, is a beautiful and picturesque area, featuring historic buildings that house numerous charming shops and restaurants. But Greenville also has a dark side, like other cities and towns around the Carolinas that we have written about, with many stories of long-time residents from a bygone era. Many still roam the hallways of these establishments.
One building at 14 South Main Street may hold the missing piece of unlocking history and a mystery. According to Jason Profit and the people he interviewed in his book Haunted Greenville, South Carolina, the Davenport building is allegedly home to a ghost and even a secret.
On page 42, Profit interviewed a lady he referred to as Jamie to protect her identity. She worked there but was leaving soon for a new city and wanted to tell what she had observed. Jaime said, “She and another girl had been talking to each other and realized that they were seeing the same things at different times while alone. A full apparition of a man in old-lime clothing would walk up the stairs in the store and walk through as he worked there.” She also told Profit that she would hear footsteps pacing near the front of the second floor, but no one was on the second floor during this time.
Profit began telling this tale to people who took his ghost tour. However, connecting this building to its place in history was difficult because the numbers on Main Street had changed several times.
Over the course of a year, the groups would stop, and people began to tell Profit that they felt like someone was watching them from the second-floor window.
Fortunately, a local radio personality signed up one evening in 2009 to take the tour, during which he informed the group about the building’s past. He claimed that the former owner of the Davenport took him up to the second floor and showed him a hidden room called the Green Lantern.
According to the book, the Green Lantern was a hot spot during Prohibition, known as the downtown speakeasy when alcohol was illegal, with the third floor reportedly home to a brothel. He explained that when the establishment was operational, the windows were boarded up with a little lookout window facing Main Street and the backside.
Speakeasies and brothels were notorious for crime and violence. If the accounts told to Profit are true, this may explain the apparition of the older gentleman seen by Jamie years ago.
Is he trapped here from the Prohibition days, still keeping watch over the Green Lantern?
Written By: John G. Clark Jr.
