Action In Equity to Enjoin Playing Baseball at Night

In Carter v. Lake City Baseball Club, 218 S.C. 255, 62 S.E.2d 470 (1950), trustees of the Lake City School District leased an athletic field to a semi-professional baseball club. Residents whose homes bordered the field brought an action in equity to enjoin the playing of baseball at night. The residents claimed that the flood lights, noise, unruly crowds and the numerous foul and home run balls batted onto their property by older players, rendered the playing of night baseball on the school athletic field a private nuisance. The ball club and school district argued as a defense that the residents voluntarily moved to the nuisance. the Supreme Court of South Carolina disagreed: as a rule, it is no justification for maintaining a nuisance that the party complaining of it came voluntarily within its reach....The fact that a person voluntarily comes to a nuisance by moving into the sphere of its injurious effects... does not ... deprive him of the right to enjoin its maintenance, especially where, by reason of changes in the structure or business complained of, the annoyance has been since increased. Carter, 62 S.E.2d at 478.