Several years ago, I traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, and stayed in the beautiful Battery Carriage House Inn facing the historic White Point Gardens.

Just prior to my visit, however, I watched an episode of Haunted History that featured events witnessed by patrons of the inn.

Visitors had seen the headless torso of a Civil War ghost while another spirit, dubbed the “gentleman ghost”, had frightened several females by joining them on their beds. Needless to say, I was nervous when I crawled into the antique four-poster my first night there, which, incidentally, was a Friday the thirteenth.

Whether it was just my imagination or really the famed gentleman ghost, I did feel a presence sit on the bed with me that night and the night thereafter.

While on one of the Charleston ghost walk tours, our guide asked if anyone was staying at the inn. Sheepishly I raised my hand, and she inquired if the ghost had sat on the bed with me. I recounted my experience.

With a wave of her hand, she dismissed the History Channel’s version, which portended the gentleman ghost was a man who had committed suicide in the house. The guide claimed she knew the identity of the real gentleman ghost. “Why, it’s Stede Bonnet,” she said in her lovely Low Country drawl. “He was incredibly handsome and was known as the ‘gentleman pirate’. He was hanged on the site where the house stands now.”

The romantic story of Stede Bonnet has fascinated me ever since.

Stede Bonnet was christened July 29, 1687. He was born into a wealthy family from Barbados. He married Mary Allamby in 1709, and the couple had four children. Shortly after the birth and subsequent death of his daughter in 1716, he purchased a ship—which he named Revenge—hired a crew and sailed off to become a pirate.

Shortly thereafter, he encountered Blackbeard. The two formed an uneasy alliance but after a falling out, Bonnet petitioned the governor of North Carolina for a pardon and a Lettre of Marque, which would classify him as a privateer instead of a pirate.

When a hurricane prevented him from obtaining his Lettre of Marque, he returned to a life of piracy.

In the late summer of 1718, Colonel William Rhett led an expedition against pirates along the Carolina coast and captured Stede Bonnet at the mouth of the Cape Fear River. Bonnet was held in Charleston but managed to escape disguised in a woman’s dress.

He was recaptured and, despite impassioned entreaties for his life by the ladies of Charleston, he was hanged for piracy on December 10, 1718, at White Point Gardens.

While the characters of Stede Bonnet and Blackbeard are based on real people, Watchkeeper is a work of fiction.