The Original Charleston Walks, Mount Pleasant

Over the past 30 years, Dennis Stiles has served as a helicopter-rescue pilot and military diplomat. When his travels led him to settle in Charleston, he took up poetry and a position as a senior docent of the Gibbes Museum of Art. Today, he combines scholarly pursuits and his love for adventure as the director of The Original Charleston Walks. He and pirate-history scholar Mike Brown helm a team of knowledgeable guides who lead walking tours through several centuries of the city's military, political, social, architectural, and often ghostly history.

On the Charleston Walk 300 Years of History tour, guides detail what life was like in the early Carolina colony and describe Charleston’s role in the American Revolution and the Civil War, pointing out landmarks such as Fort Sumter, the Dock Street Theatre, and the place where first governor William Sayle threw his inaugural pool party. They also explore the hardship faced and legends spawned by slavery-era African Americans during the Slavery & Freedom tour, and they tell stories of commandeered ships, wild parties, and daring escapes made by renowned pirates such as Blackbeard and Anne Bonny on the Charleston's Pirates & Buccaneers tour. On a year-round ghost tour, guides unveil mysterious sightings and Gullah islander superstitions, as well as point out hidden cemeteries.