History
Savannah was drawn on paper before it was built. On February 12, 1733, James Oglethorpe landed at Yamacraw Bluff, on the Savannah River about 15 miles from the ocean, with the first colonists of Georgia. It was the last of England’s 13 American colonies, and Savannah was its first city. The bluff was already home to the Yamacraw, a small band of Native Americans. Their leader, Tomochichi, had brought his people there in 1728, partly because his ancestors were buried there. He and Oglethorpe were on good terms from the start.
Oglethorpe and his co-planner, William Bull, laid the town out in wards. Each ward was a neighborhood of houses and public buildings around its own square, and Savannah kept to the plan as it grew. Oglethorpe laid out the first four squares himself, among them Wright Square, where Tomochichi was buried in 1739. The city eventually had 24 squares. Of those, 22 are still there, and many are shady, with monuments and fountains.
Georgia started out banning slavery, but the ban was lifted in 1750. From then until the Civil War, Savannah was built on slavery and on the cotton and rice it shipped, and it became one of the world’s leading cotton ports. By 1860, it was Georgia’s largest city, and 7,712 of its people were enslaved.
Armies came for it twice. In 1779, French and American forces tried and failed to take the city back from the British. It was the second deadliest battle of the Revolutionary War. In December 1864, the Union general William T. Sherman marched his army across Georgia to Savannah, the end of his March to the Sea. The story Savannah tells visitors is that Sherman was “so impressed by its beauty that he could not destroy it.” The record is plainer. The Confederate general holding the city didn’t want it leveled by artillery, as Atlanta had been, so he pulled his troops out, and the mayor surrendered. Sherman telegraphed President Lincoln to present Savannah to him “as a Christmas gift.”
Savannah came through the war standing, but over the next century it nearly lost its old town to neglect. In the 1930s and 1940s, many of its old buildings were torn down for parking lots. By 1955, the old City Market was gone, and the 1820 Davenport House was about to be demolished too. A group of women stopped it, bought the house, and founded the Historic Savannah Foundation, which has since saved many of the city’s old buildings.
Then, in 1994, John Berendt published Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, his account of a killing at the Mercer Williams House and the trials that followed. Locally, it quickly became known simply as “The Book.” It has sold more than three million copies and brought hundreds of thousands of tourists to Savannah. Clint Eastwood shot the movie version there in 1997, with scenes at the Mercer Williams House itself.
Why Is Savannah Haunted?
Andrew Nichols, whose institute named Savannah America’s most haunted city, gave two reasons: “There are old structures that are relatively unchanged and haven’t been moved from their original locations. You’ve had a lot of people living and dying in Savannah.” War, yellow fever, and slavery account for much of the dying. The city buried its dead in the middle of town, and it didn’t always keep track of them. And the old buildings are still standing.
War
In October 1779, French and American troops stormed the British lines around Savannah and were beaten back. They lost about 1,094 men killed, some 650 of them French, against about 40 British dead. The Savannah Daily Republican reported in 1846 that some of the French wounded who died before their fleet sailed were buried on the Bonaventure plantation, part of which is now Bonaventure Cemetery.
When Sherman’s army occupied the city in December 1864, “they had to camp in all the squares and cemeteries,” the news producer and tour guide Orlando Montoya told Savannah Magazine. “When they stayed in Colonial Park, they knocked over a bunch of graves, many were vandalized, and some of the names and dates were changed.” The magazine passes on a story it calls apocryphal: that cold winter, the soldiers opened the crypts, slept in them, and burned the bones inside to keep warm. The army also used the Marshall House on Broughton Street as a hospital until the war ended, and many of the hotel’s ghost stories are about soldiers.
Yellow Fever
Yellow fever came back to Savannah again and again. Mosquitoes carried the disease, and it was named for the jaundice it caused, which turned the skin and eyes yellow. In the autumn of 1820, the mayor printed the city’s deaths in the paper every few days: 230 in September and 323 in October. Both counts left out the city’s Black residents. Many of the 1820 dead were buried in Colonial Park Cemetery. The fever killed Isaiah Davenport, the builder of the Davenport House, in 1827, and it returned in 1854 and again in 1876.
The fever left ghost stories behind. According to WJCL, a Savannah TV station, the buildings pressed into service as fever hospitals or morgues “accrued reputations for apparitions linked to suffering within their walls.” The old Candler Hospital on Drayton Street is one of them. The museum in Davenport’s house won’t tell ghost stories at all. Instead, almost every October since 2003, it has staged the epidemic itself. Its director, Jamie Credle, told the local weekly Connect Savannah that “we couldn’t think of anything quite as frightful as Yellow Fever.”
Slavery
On March 2 and 3, 1859, Pierce M. Butler sold 436 men, women, and children to pay his creditors. They came from his plantations near Darien, Georgia, and the sale, at the Ten Broeck Race Course outside the city, was one of the largest sales of enslaved people in U.S. history. The Daily Morning News reported that it brought in $300,205. It rained “violently” through both days, Kwesi DeGraft-Hanson writes in the journal Southern Spaces, and let up only after the last person had been sold. The breakup of families is remembered as “the weeping time.”
The slave quarters behind the Owens-Thomas House still stand, and so does the carriage house at the Sorrel-Weed House, where that house’s best-known ghost story ends.
Cemeteries and Unmarked Graves
Colonial Park Cemetery took Savannah’s dead from 1750 to 1853, and it once spanned several blocks. The City counts more than 9,000 graves there, but fewer than 600 headstones are left.
From about 1763 to 1844, the city’s enslaved and free Black residents were buried in a public burial ground, part of which lay where Whitefield Square is now. In January 2026, a radar survey done for the City concluded that it’s unlikely all of the remains were moved before the square was built in the 1850s.
Even Tomochichi’s grave lost its marker. After he died in 1739, his grave in Wright Square was marked with “a Pyramid of Stone,” gathered nearby. Those stones were removed in the early 1880s, and a granite boulder has stood near the spot since 1899. Guides say the same square is haunted by Alice Riley, whose story is below.
Old Buildings
Nichols’s other reason is the one a visitor sees first. Savannah saved its old houses, inns, and taverns, so most of the buildings in its ghost stories still stand where they were built. Many line streets shaded by live oaks hung with Spanish moss. You can sleep in several of them, from the Kehoe House, a funeral home for much of the 20th century, to the Hamilton-Turner Inn on Lafayette Square. The exception is the Hampton-Lillibridge House, which was moved from East Bryan Street to East Julian Street in the early 1960s. In 1984, the writer Margaret Wayt DeBolt called it the only house in Savannah “known to have had an exorcism.”
Telling those stories is a local trade. By July 2002, 21 companies were running tours of haunted Savannah, the Associated Press reported, three months before the parapsychologists gave the city its title.
