Hauntings Tour

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Savannah and the Supernatural: A History of Ghosts and the Ghosts of History photographs by Rob Levin Compiled from published reports and other reliable sources by Jess C. Henderson Strangeness permeates Savannah; strangeness that may date back to its settlement and even perhaps before to the time when the coast was inhabited by Indians and pirates and a few Spanish missionaries. History hung in that limbo for a century with the British to the north and Spanish to the south engaged in a somewhat lackadaisical struggle for supremacy till General James Oglethorpe came with his colonists in 1733. The coastal waters and islands were often a refuge for pirates, outlaws and others who were not necessarily friends to authority. Much of Savannah's haunted history is intertwined with recorded incidents. This tends to give credence to the many ghost stories. An 1830s townhouse at Bull and Perry Streets has sent at least one family packing, according to Margaret Wayt DeBolt's book, Savannah Spectres. A family had just rented the house and on their first night they heard a scream upstairs followed by the sobbing cry "Oh, so much blood! So much blood!" The family spent the night in a hotel and moved their furnishings out of the house the next day. The city of Savannah is literally built on its dead. Cemeteries were built on the edge of the settlement. As the colony grew into a port city the cemeteries were absorbed and homes and businesses built on former burial sites. Some of the dead were moved, some probably weren't. And some just turn up. A mummified body was found in the walls of the Foley House some years back. But, even before settlers arrived in Savannah this high ground known to the Creek and Choctaw peoples as Yamacraw Bluffs was probably a burial ground. Native Americans from this culture literally built their towns around their dead. When Oglethorpe arrived with his colonists new bodies were soon interred. By 1750 the original cemetery plot was full of Yellow Fever victims and other unfortunates and a new cemetery was established a few hundred yards to the south and east of the original burial plot. A cemetery for Savannah's Jewish community had already been established at what is now the median ground of Oglethorpe avenue east of Bull street as well as under Independent Presbyterian church. The Revolutionary War saw a desperate battle fought on this ground. Chippewa Square did not then exist and this ground was occupied by fortifications. The bloody conflict of the siege of Savannah was contested from here to the west side of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. This struggle, after the Battle of Bunker Hill the second bloodiest battle of the war, left Savannah in British hands despite significant French assistance to the colonists in their attempt to capture the city. But, there may be more to Savannah's strangeness than just the dead. After all, people die everywhere, every city has its share of graveyards that have been displaced by development. Few places have such a history of hauntings, of strange tales of the paranormal than Savannah. For one clue we can go back to the beginning of the colony. Oglethorpe's founding of the city is famous in great part because of his venture into urban planning. But, what did his plan involve? What was its basis? Historians have speculated on its origins, perhaps in freemasonry or the Biblical design of Solomon's Temple. Perhaps there is more to the city's plan than we know or imagine. By one measurement - using cubits - the original city was a square 1000 cubits on a side. The square is an important pattern in occult lore, a magical square can be used to trace a talisman to achieve a purpose or set a tone or direction for an ongoing enterprise. Could this plan have been, in effect, a magical design of such power and persistence that spirits are trapped between two planes of existence? No one knows. One may assume that any purposes Oglethorpe might have incorporated in an occult dimension of the plan would be extensions of his dream of a utopian, commercially successful colony based on the efforts of free and industrious men - lawyers, slaves, Catholics, and whisky were banned. Oglethorpe's bans did not stand. Any force the plan might have been intended to harness has not worked uniformly for the city's good. Tragedy has followed Savannah as periods of good fortune have been stopped dead by wars, recessions, fires and plagues. Much of the city has been burned as close-packed wooden structures went up in flames that spread from block to block. That is why so many homes still standing are built of brick. In the early 19th Century the city was cursed by a departing newspaper publisher embittered by the poor reception of his weekly. "I leave you, Savannah, a curse that is far/The worst of all curses - to remain as you are!" John M. Harney wrote in 1820, shortly before his departure from the city to Charleston and thence Kentucky, where he died a few years later. Admittedly, 1820 was a bad year for the city with a major fire and a yellow fever epidemic. Whether Harney's curse took hold is a matter of interpretation. The city's still much like it was and some tragedies and changes have been avoided. Sherman did not burn Savannah but other conflagrations have destroyed large parts of the city as did 20th Century developers. Whatever Savannah's mystical connections, there is one thing that is certain. A lot of people seem to believe they have had paranormal experiences in the city. There are hundreds of ghost stories. And strange occurrences connected to the paranormal still occur. Just recently a local woman who had organized "Psychic Fairs" was brutally murdered and dismembered, allegedly by her father. That should be enough to set another spirit adrift or at least fuel tales until well into the next century. Savannah's ghosts have connections to history that stretch far beyond the boundaries of this sleepy coastal city. The story goes that when Girl Scout founder Juliette Gordon Low's mother, Nellie Gordon, died February 22, 1917, the ghost of her husband, General William Gordon, was seen by one of the daughters-in-law waiting in a room next to the room where Nellie lay with her five living children. A servant reported seeing the man as well. The Gordon children reported "that when she died, her face took on the radiance of a bride, going to meet her bridegroom.," according to her biography, Lady From Savannah, written by niece Daisy Gordon Lawrence with Gladys Denny Shultz. Mary Stewart Gordon Platt wrote that the servant who sighted the general said the general appeared well and happy. "I thought you lake to know de General come fetch her hisself, suh," the servant is reported to have commented. However, according to reports, the general may not have actually taken Nellie Gordon completely away. There have been reports she is still walking the old Gordon home. Objects disappear and reapper in plain sight. Savannah Spectres quotes the home's maintenance man saying he frequently caught glimpses of a Nellie "wearing a long blue robe, with flowers all over it," sitting at the breakfast table when he would arrive early in the mornings. The faint sounds of a pianoforte, such as Mrs. Gordon loved and played, have been reported as well. An exorcism has been performed in at least one Savannah residence. On December 7, 1963 an Episcopal bishop conducted a 45 minute ceremony to cleanse the Hampton Lillibridge House on East Saint Julian Street of spirits. The house, which had been moved from another location, had a rollicking history of inexplicable incidents. One young man was found face down hugging the floor in an upstairs room when the house was undergoing renovation. The desperate man had been convinced that a force beyond nature was attempting to pull him through an opening in the floor - a drop of thirty or more feet. This incident was reportedly locally at the time and appeared in ghost hunter Hans Holzer's book, The Phantoms of Dixie. Restoration work proceeded slowly because workers left the house due to strange occurrences or just paused to listen. Jim Williams, the Georgia antique dealer who owned and was restoring the home later was tried three times for the murder of his associate, Danny Hansford. These trials inspired the bestseller, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, in which Williams, now deceased, was the central character. Williams moved into the Mercer House on Monterey Square after completing the Hampton Lillibridge restoration and became well known for his fabulous parties. Some years after Williams death, reports surfaced that visitors had observed lights and festivities in the elegant mansion on the very same night of the year as Williams most oppulent annual party - yet there had been no party. Nancy Roberts, a prolific South Carolina writer of tales of the supernatural reported in her book, Georgia Ghosts, that two New York visitors had witnessed this phenomena in 1994, five years to the day after Williams last big gala in 1989 that celebrated his acquittal in the Hansford shooting. According to tradition, not everyone sees ghosts. Sometimes they apppear to special persons from their lives, sometimes they may appear to psychically gifted individuals or they may make apparently random appearances, driven by who knows what strange logic. A maid at the old City Hotel on Bay Street is reported to have been found in tears outside the gate of the Colonial Cemetery when she followed an interesting young man home from the hotel. He walked into the cemetery and disappeared, she told worried co-workers who discovered her. Some people are said to be gifted with psychic abilities while others do not have the appropriate sort of "energy." Accomplished psychics may talk of being able to see, "The Other Side," and tribes around the world were guided by medicine men or shamans who were often said to have received their wisdom from visions. In a certain way, tribal culture is very close to Savannah. In the 1930s a book was compiled by a Depression era federal writer's project consisting of interviews with living persons who knew people who had been brought from Africa as slaves. The book, Drums and Shadows, was published in 1941. In Savannah's urban neighborhoods old traditions were passed on as a sort of magic revolving around charms and "root doctors." Porches and shutters were painted voodoo blue, also known as "haunt" blue because of the color's apparent ability to dissuade visitors from the spirit world. The introduction to Drums and Shadows sums up the situation, "Today, sorcery is still practiced. Modern root doctors

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