As with any scene of tragedy, tales of hauntings came to define the property. I’ll be honest up front. I’m a complete skeptic, but still love a good ghost story. And there are several of them associated with this property.
The late Jason Profit wrote about his investigations on the orphanage property in his book Haunted Greenville, South Carolina. His team recorded several responses on K2 meters and ghost box which they attributed to young female and adult male spirits. Profit goes into much more detail about the history in his book than I do here. He includes many more conspiratorial connections between Odd Fellows, Vaughn, and even the governor of South Carolina.
Tally Johnson also wrote about the Tanglewood area in his book, Ghosts of the South Carolina Upcountry. Instead of the orphanage, Johnson focused on the tales of hauntings at Tanglewood Middle School. I’ve read these stories in other places, and they all involve more modern hauntings, usually a student who was killed on campus. Johnson is a firm believer in the paranormal, but in this case his research determined that these were just tales made up by students and teachers at the school and enlarged and perpetuated over the years.
As for these hauntings, despite the trauma of sexual and physical abuse, I could find no record of deaths at the Odd Fellows Orphanage. The victims of Vaughn’s abuse lived into their eighties, so unless I don’t really understand ghosts (which I don’t pretend to), it’s unlikely that the little girl voices Jason Profit’s team recorded were those of the orphanage. Reports stated that Vaughn was nearly decapitated by his suicide, and one of the ghosts in the old Tanglewood house was said to be headless. It’s easy to see people drawing a conclusion that those are the same.
As for Tanglewood Middle School, Tally Johnson’s book was published in 2005. That same year a new school building was opened and the old one demolished. Any reported ghost sightings would have been in the old building. But, in 2023 there was a fatal student shooting in the school. That was a very tragic incident, but maybe the new school may yet be haunted.
I started researching this story several years ago, before COVID. The pandemic and other things took priority, and this got pushed to a back burner. I drove through the Tanglewood subdivision and took a few photos of the area. The old house at that time seemed to be boarded up. I didn’t tarry, as suspicious neighbors were keeping an eye on me.
Today I decided to drive by there once more to see what had changed, especially since I read about Tanglewood Inn opening. The house was in great shape and there was a new brick wall and entryway along the street. As nice as it looked, there were no signs or anything else to indicate that it was an inn. It just looked like someone’s house.
I’m sure the new owners are aware of the tragic history of the site and its tales of hauntings. However, they don’t advertise any of that on their website. Staying in a haunted inn has an appeal for some, but not for everyone. If this were, indeed, haunted, it would be with the spirits of children, which would be upsetting to anyone. I think I’ll just stick with my theory that as terrible as the story of Thurston Vaughn and the Odd Fellows Orphanage is, the house itself isn’t haunted, and that the inn’s guests can get a good night’s sleep.
