Ghostly Savannah

Every night that I walked around Savannah I would see no end of kitsch ghost tours at dusk. You know the kind, an old hearse converted into an open top bus, a ghoulish looking guy (who is probably ugly enough without the makeup to scare the average punter) as the driver etc. A local had recommended that I tour the Bonaventure Cemetery while I was in town, so I booked a cab and set off.

The cab driver clearly smoked in the cab anytime there weren’t any passengers in it. He was a wheezing, bandana-wearing nutter. Just perfect. So we got to talking about the cemetery and completely unprompted he starts telling me about the ghost living at his house.

Apparently thirty years ago or more the wheezing cab driver was living in a different house somewhere on the outskirts of Savannah and was digging up part of his yard with plans to build a garage. He's digging away when he comes across the human remains of a confederate soldier (complete with rifle, which he kept) and a 12 year old Indian girl. Since then, the Indian girl has haunted the cabbie, even moving with him to his new house.

She sleeps in the middle of his bed and if he tries to sleep there too, she pushes him in the night or takes the blanket right off the bed. So he sleeps on the couch, and has done so for years. “But it’s your house”, I protested, he said he’s tried various things over the years, but she just wants to push him out of his bed.

True or not, it was a entertaining tale for the ride to the Bonaventure Cemetery. We arrived and I entered through the gates to the 100 acres of cemetery on the edge of town that used to be an old cotton plantation that edges down to the river. The boulevards of the cemetery are planted with massive oak trees which were part of the original plantation some 200 years ago, now dripping with Spanish Moss, like most of Savannah. After the ghost stories in the cab, I was a little apprehensive about my Sunday afternoon stroll alone in the cemetery.

More tourists arrived soon and the cemetery lost some of its ghoulish feeling, as I shook off more of the cab driver’s ghost stories, but after two hours I was well and truly done and walked back the front and waited for another cab.

Back at the B and B, I thought I’d continue with the ghoulish theme and since it was my last night in Savannah, I booked in for a walking ghost tour. They’re a dime a dozen, but this was one was reviewed in Tripadvisor as actually scary with knowledgeable guides.

The tour guide was your classic strange theatre-restaurant type employee. About 40,with obviously dyed Grecian 5000 black hair in a bit of an Elvis coiff with sideburns and black goatee. He was of course dressed from head to toe in black and wore Bono style 'not really black' sunglasses. Altogether odd-looking, but I guess it’s OK in his line of work. His name was Nicodemis and unfortunately he was Australian. I say unfortunately, because he’s not the country's finest ambassador – and his appearance, combined with the lame jokes and accent had some of the other tour guests grimacing. When I say ‘other guests’, I really mean me.

What started off lame quickly became more than a little spooky as night fell over Savannah and we criss-crossed the squares and the cemetery listening to stories of tragic suicide and accidents. Things really stepped up a notch when we went to the abandoned hospital which hasn’t been used in forty years. It’s on the edge of Forsyth Park and according to our guide, during the Yellow fever outbreak the hospital dug a series of mortuary tunnels under what is now the park and just buried the victims in it as they didn’t know what to do with them and we’re afraid the number of dead bodies would scare the townspeople. When he showed us the trapdoor beside the hospital that ran across the road, I think we all took a step back and found a new level of respect for the weirdo leading our tour.

The tunnel ends at a local doctor’s house who is a Mason (as most of Savannah’s influential leaders are) and is locally infamous for his ‘natural causes’ death certificates. Apparently he’s the man in town to go to when you have an aids related death in the family you’d like to keep on the 'down-low'.

After the hospital we wound back through the streets of Savannah exploring more sites, but they became so creepy that I couldn’t even walk up the stairs of some of the old abandoned houses and look inside the windows, I was too scared. But I wasn’t the only one.

It was a very quick walk, more like sprint from the end of the tour back to the B and B, and once I was safely inside drinking my milk and eating my cookies, I was glad that I’d left the ghost tour ‘til last. If you’re ever in town, I highly recommend it.


A couple of ghost story links for you…

Wesley Espy 1902 - 1934
The son of a federal judge, Wesley Espy’s untimely death on Calhoun Square was painted as a fall from a tall porch at the Espy home. It is more culturally held that his father was tangled up with a Georgia bootlegging family during prohibition and that Wesley became the associate of a gangster’s girlfriend and that his death was a retaliation. According to our tour guide Wesley was returned home to the front porch hanged with his testicles in his top pocket.

The soldier in the DeSoto hotel
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12494679/
According to our guide the soldier climbed up the side of the building through the ventilation duct as a dare after heavy drinking at a bar just around the corner.

The tunnels under the park
http://www.savannahbest.com/savhist/tunnel.htm