Chasing spirits in Savannah
‘New South’ city still has plenty of history lurking around town
SAVANNAH — Misty Johnson is standing at dusk in Colonial Park Cemetery, one of Savannah’s oldest and prettiest burial grounds, flipping through blurry images on her phone.
“A couple months ago, someone threw a scull over the wall,” she said.
I blink. She mentions it casually, like it you might remark your lawn needed mowing.
Johnson, a private security guard who’s employed to patrol the cemetery on the lookout for thieves trying to steal a piece of history, just nods and then continues.
“We’ve got voodoo and witchcraft here. I’ve had chills just walking around. You’ll see things, if you’re looking with your third eye,” she said.
As Johnson shows images of the unusual things she’s seen at night — fuzzy spectres in the distance, strange shadows around gravestones — I begin to look for the exit gates. Savannah, which lays claim to being one of America’s most haunted cities, was getting a little too real.
I had come with my wife and young daughter to Colonial Park Cemetery for something other than ghosts. Searching for a nice place to picnic, we settled next to James Wild for dinner on a postcard-ready kind of evening in downtown Savannah. It was perfect. In hindsight, maybe it was a little too perfect.
In a city that seemed designed for dining al fresco, our dinner table was a park bench. Our food was southern barbecue takeout, drenched with hickory smoke. And our setting was framed by flowering magnolia trees and giant oaks draped in curtains of Spanish moss.
Wild, shot dead in a duel in 1815, wasn’t much for conversation. But his tombstone, and the hundreds of others buried here, provided a one-of-a-kind backdrop for our last meal in Savannah.
An entire cottage industry has been built around the Georgia port city’s famous ghosts, and legions of tourists come here seeking the supernatural. There are haunted trolley and hearse tours, ghoulish pub crawls, cemetery walks and countless historic buildings with their own resident ghost tales.
No wonder. Chock-a-block with preserved Southern Gothic neighbourhoods and lonely, lovely old parks, Savannah is the ideal place to get spooked. And it doesn’t get much spookier than Colonial Park at dusk.
Opened in 1750, the cemetery is the final resting spot for some of the city’s first residents. Hundreds of typhoid fever victims are buried here, as is one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. So are the dozens of Civil War-era graves that were looted by invading Union soldiers, their headstones knocked over and used as target practice.
Even a non-believer would have to admit there’s a certain creepiness to a historic cemetery that attracts all kinds of unusual traffic. While Johnson speaks, a man in a vest with “ghost hunter” printed in yellow letters on the back walks by, looking intently at gravestones. Tourists wander about, photographing graves and pointing at maps.
The whole place, like much of the city around it, feels a bit like a movie set. While our daughter chases squirrels through the graveyard, darting between burial plots, I keep a wary eye out for the “disfigured orphan” who apparently lived in Colonial Park in the early 1800s. I didn’t see him.
There are plenty of believers like Johnston who flock to Savannah every year. But the closest thing I could call a supernatural encounter were the fried pickles I had from Wily’s Championship BBQ (wileyschampionshipbbq.com), tucked into a plaza outside town on our way to the beach at Tybee Island (tybeeisland.com).
And, I can safely report, the only spirits that I saw were in Wet Willie’s (wetwillies.com) daiquiri bar on the waterfront along River Street, where tourists line up for a plastic take-away cup of boozy, frozen slush.
But whether you believe Johnson or not, Savannah is the kind of place where you’ll regularly catch yourself looking over your shoulder. At Oglethorpe Square, one of the city’s dozens of shaded, manicured public squares, I watched a man in a sea captain’s hat playing Yankee Doodle in an endless loop on a flute. And then he disappeared, as quickly as he came.
Walking around Savannah, I was struck by glimpses of this vibrant, modern “new South” city with its trendy restaurants, hipster art students and high-end shops — but with the ghosts of the past still lurking around every corner, seemingly trapped in time.
As night fell over the old port city, we packed it in and headed back to our hotel. We were soon driving away from the coast, leaving Savannah without seeing any ghosts.
But at least the barbecue was out of this world.