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At the beginning of October, I had planned a trip down to Atlanta, Georgia, to see a friend in concert and then take an extended route back on mountain roads in my Miata – but the day before, I was rear-ended while stopped and waiting for traffic so I could turn. While I was okay, the car was totaled. I borrowed my partner’s car and planned to take it easy on the way back. I hadn’t been on an Urbex expedition since before the pandemic and hadn’t intended to change that this trip.

The morning of my return, I decided instead to set my navigation app to avoid freeways and toll roads, hoping to find exciting things to photograph along the way. Unfortunately, the GPS route largely kept me on a business bypass route through South Carolina, which proved almost indistinguishable from an interstate. Disheartened, I gave up and rerouted to the fastest route home. I stopped for a restroom break and to grab a picture of a fireworks store’s sign that shares my first name, and from the parking lot, I saw a recently cleared property and, at the top of the hill, what looked like an antebellum plantation home in disrepair.

Although I was woefully unprepared, as this trip was about a concert, not Urbex, I knew I must explore this place as there was no way I’d get another chance. Even though I had no tripod, the wrong lens, no mask, only my small EDC flashlight, and entirely inappropriate footwear – leopard print boat shoes and no-show socks are less than ideal, I found a hidden place to park, grabbed my camera, and found my way in and around the 50 acres and multiple structures that make up the mansion and its surrounding property.

I later learned the main building, the Sally Abney Rose House, was much newer than it appeared, having been built in 1948 for the daughter of a mill tycoon. After she died in 2005, her son auctioned off her art collection for $4 Million before selling the home and property for another $6.5 Million. It has sat abandoned and unprotected the whole time. While there had initially been plans to restore the house, it has fallen into such a state of ruin that the plan is now to bulldoze it and make way for commercial, restaurant, and hotel space to serve the nearby university stadium.

While only a shadow of its former self, you can tell the house was once beautiful. To better understand what it looked like, you can visit the Anderson County Museum and see a miniature of the main building, complete with accurate representations of the art and furniture it once held. The owner commissioned the model in the 1970s before a construction project that added a glass hallway and connected building.

The home had two main floors accessed by a stunning grand staircase, a cluttered attic with angelic lighting, and a high-security basement meant to be accessed primarily by an elevator. Also on the property were a beautiful greenhouse almost entirely hidden by brush, a carriage house with bizarrely colorful wallpaper, a poolhouse with exterior fireplace, a pump house, two detached homes, a collapsed workshop, what appeared to be a store of some sort, a lovely chicken coop, and the chimneys for two long-lost buildings. Explore pictures of everything in the largely unedited gallery below.