WHAT LIES BENEATH
KNOWN FOR ITS ANTEBELLUM ARCHITECTURE AND COBBLESTONED SQUARES, SAVANNAH IS ALSO HOME TO THINGS THAT GO BUMP IN THE NIGHT
Historic Savannah is also home to things that go bump in the night
FOUNDED IN 1733, the old cotton port of Savannah, Georgia, was the United States’ first planned city. It is also said to be its most haunted. “The Seminole saw spirits like a candlelight in the dark,” says guide Shannon Scott part-way through his Bonaventure Cemetery walking tour, “and Savannah they say, glowed like a bonfire.”
In a city that exudes ghostly charm, I am not certain one needs to wait for nightfall. In the blistering tropical gloom of a late summer’s day, reality blurs in the heat haze. Arcades of giant live oaks sway with spanish moss and the clip-clop of horses pulling carts still fills Savannah’s cobbled streets. The lineup of ornate and Gothic homes, grand churches, neoclassical civic buildings, opulent fountains and no end of monuments celebrating everybody from town founders to war heroes all echo with voices of the past.
John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil drew me here, like many before me. Based on actual events, the book is as much about murder, deceit and power as it is about black magic. Since being name-checked in the 1994 novel, the city’s Bonaventure Cemetery has become a major tourist draw. Many arrive by car to snap a selfie in front of supposedly haunted statuary. The fine marble statue of “Little Gracie”, a child who died of pneumonia at the age of six, has captured interest for well over a century.
According to Shannon, Native Americans believe Savannah sits at a significant spiritual intersection. “Few places in this country are as affecting as Savannah. There is a heaviness here, an energy that pulls you earthward. She will haunt you. If you move away, you will crave her.”
But in this heat, most people find it troubling just to move. It seems that only mad dogs and Kiwis brave the midday sun.
Savannah’s unfortunate history of bloody battles, devastating fires, ruthless epidemics, and cataclysmic hurricanes is enough to unsettle the living, let alone the spirits of the deceased. According to Dr Andrew Nichols of the American Institute of Parapsychology, Savannah has more poltergeist reports than anywhere else in the States. Many residents accept that they cohabitate with spirits who — for better and worse — remain visible and active in their homes and public spaces.
The old town is literally built over its dead. Deep beneath the cobbles lie Native American burial grounds, soldiers’ tombs and obliterated
cemeteries filled with lost slaves and settlers. “Savannah has a pervading psychic weight,” Shannon says. “If you feel death creeping in, you might want to hail a taxi and get out of town lest you become a character in someone else’s ghost tour.”
The pedestrian-friendly streets are strangely deserted. People who do abandon their aircon move like rubbery silhouettes in the heat waves. At the Olde Pink House, I start to write “ghost town” in my notes but the chattering commentary from an open-sided “ghost tour” bus passing by puts paid to that.
The Olde Pink House restaurant is known for its unexplained, phantom encounters. Past guests have been interrupted mid-course by the sounds and sightings of children playing, spilling drinks and throwing bottles. There’s also a table-tidying poltergeist thought to be the spirit of James Haversham who first lived here before hanging himself in the cellar. Somehow, after a Southern-style fine-dining feast of tilapia and shrimp grits, blackened flounder grits and collard greens, I survive sated and unscathed.
Back at Bonaventure, Shannon’s commentary steps us through a time portal back to the brick-and-turpentine plantation turned Gothic cemetery. During its first century, only the bodies of the well-to-do were buried here. Headstones and tombs of local generals, gentry and other “A-listers” provide a connect-the-dots historical narrative filled with suspense and the supernatural.
Songwriter Johnny Mercer, one of Savannah’s best-known sons, lies at rest at Bonaventure. When he wrote the lyrics for Moon River for Audrey Hepburn’s character in Breakfast at Tiffany’s he did so channeling the south. Mercer’s house backed onto Shipyard Creek, which in part has been renamed Moon River. At his grave, there is a marble bench inscribed with all the maestro’s hits upon which to reflect, or at the very least hum some of show business’ best-known tunes.
Poet Conrad Aiken is also commemorated here, not least for his magical musings and lifelong friendship with T.S. Eliot. His resting place also has a seat looking over the Wilmington River. But after Aiken’s grave featured in a séance scene in the film version of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil few rest here, choosing instead to pop a quick selfie before moving on.
Lawton is a name synonymous with Savannah. Spencer Lawton Jnr was the DA responsible for trying the murder case against Jim Williams, the protagonist in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. At Bonaventure, the positioning of the grave of one of Lawton’s forebears, Corrine Elliot Lawton, presents one of the cemetery’s more compelling stories. Corrine’s life-sized effigy sits with her back to the river and to the family’s ostentatious tomb, which suggests she was ostracized from the family. Her eyes deliberately have no pupils, a garland has slipped from her hand, and her broken fingers mean she will never grasp the wedding wreath of eternal life.
There is much conjecture about how Corrine’s life ended. Some speculate suicide, while her death certificate states yellow fever. Shannon’s version says Corrine had refused her family’s prearranged groom of choice and ran off to Europe to live with an Italian painter. Her family brought her home where she died from a broken heart.
Shannon has also seen the cemetery’s fabled spirit, the White Lady. “It was dusk on the Wilmington, and she was barefoot out on the bluff walking over oyster shells.” He says that the most common spirit sightings are of a white alsatian that is often seen running in and out of view. Many visitors also experience the sound of children running and playing. “When you follow the sounds, there are only unexplained lights jumping between the trees.”