Savannah: America's `most haunted' city?

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Posted 7:58AM on Saturday, October 12, 2002

SAVANNAH - The stately charm of Savannah's historic squares and antebellum homes becomes cloaked in gloom when viewed after dark from the back of a Cadillac hearse only recently retired from carrying caskets. Gnarled oak branches and wrought-iron gates cast sinister shadows. Light reflected on the rain-slicked streets gives an eerie glow. Marble monuments resemble towering tombstones. As the hearse creeps past Colonial Park Cemetery, top-hatted tour guide Carlo Cagna tells his six passengers how Union troops defaced many of its headstones during the Civil War. Some stones turned up missing. ``People have reported a man in colonial attire walking the cemetery at night, as if looking for something,'' Cagna says in a smoky voice. ``Someone on this tour said he saw a man in colonial attire saluting a headstone. Then, he disappeared.'' True story? For more than a century, Savannah's cobblestone streets and brick-and-stucco homes have been the backdrop to dozens of ghost tales that many locals believe. Guided tours of the city's haunted hotspots are a nightly occurrence. And now the American Institute of Parapsychology, which professes to investigate hauntings with scientific rigor, is holding a conference here this weekend to declare Savannah ``America's Most Haunted City.'' It's a title claimed by several others - New Orleans, Chicago, Philadelphia and Charleston, S.C. And A.I.P. founder Andrew Nichols, who has a doctorate in psychology and has investigated more than 600 ghost cases, acknowledges Savannah's designation is more honorary than scientific. ``If I had to name the most haunted city, Savannah would be right up there,'' Nichols said. ``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.'' Georgia's oldest city, settled in 1733, has had enough grim episodes for homegrown ghost stories - a bloody Revolutionary War battle, a harsh Civil War occupation, devastating fires and three deadly yellow fever epidemics (the first in 1820 killed 666 people). The Marshall House hotel, where the ghost hunters are gathering, served as a military hospital during the Civil War. The ghost of a Union officer has been said to walk the halls at night. The late antiques dealer Jim Williams - whose murder trials were the basis of the book, ``Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil'' - famously had an exorcism performed on his 1796 home when workers reported strange laughter and screams. Williams says he woke to the sound of footsteps one night to find a man's apparition next to his bed. Local merchant Al Cobb has written a book about bringing home an antique bed haunted by young poltergeist that identified itself in a hand-scrawled note: ``Danny 7.'' ``Most of the really drastic stuff, that's rare,'' says Kathleen Thomas, a Savannah writer and photographer who founded her own ghost-hunting club, the Searchers, in 1996. ``Most of it's subtle - lights flickering, flushing the toilets or turning faucets off and on, seeing things out of the corner of your eyes like shadows or lights.'' Thomas' group has investigated a handful of reportedly haunted sites. She says she's photographed balls of light that she believes are spirits, and members have tape recorded ghostly whispers they couldn't hear with their naked ears. One of Savannah's most chilling firsthand accounts of a ghostly encounter was written in 1857 by Charles Colcock Jones Jr., an attorney who later served as the city's mayor and as a Confederate officer. Jones was handling a lawsuit by the family of Jane Robertson Wright, who had died recently, to retrieve property she had left to two stepchildren. Wright had married a young widower six years earlier. The marriage quickly soured, and some said she died of a broken heart. Jones lived in Wright's Savannah home while preparing her case. One night, Jones wrote, he sat by the fire after dinner when he heard footsteps in the hall. The servants had already left. Jones wrote that he saw a woman enter the room, ``her eyes fixed upon the floor, pale of countenance, thin-visaged, and emaciated in figure.'' She wore ``a thin morning gown of grave color.'' The woman walked past him and into the parlor without speaking. When Jones stood to follow her, his visitor disappeared. Jones asked a neighbor about the woman the next morning. He was told the woman he described was Miss Jane, the house's late owner. Guests at the Hamilton-Turner Inn on Lafayette Square still report strange happenings at night, though the ``ghost bird'' carvings on the inn's mansard roof supposedly ward off evil spirits. The 1837 mansion was built by Samuel Hamilton, a wealthy jeweler, Civil War blockade runner and Savannah mayor. As mayor, Hamilton would have a policeman keep watch over the city from his rooftop. One day, the guard failed to come down. He was found on the roof, fatally shot. ``Some people still complain about hearing doors close, a cold draft coming in on them, windows closing,'' says Earl Moore, the inn's front-desk manager. Moore says the story about the dead guard is true. But he doesn't put much stock in the ghost stories. He's never seen or heard anything after seven years at the inn, ``and I've slept in every room in this house.'' Perhaps not everybody believes Savannah's spook stories, but they've been good for the city's thriving tourism industry. When Hearse Tours opened for business in July, it became the 21st operator offering guided tours of haunted Savannah. Hearse Tours owner Daniel Murphy, who bought the 1984 hearse from a local funeral home and bolted seats into the back to carry passengers, says Savannah's ghosts have been profitable enough for him to add a second hearse soon. ``Savannah's got that kind of mystery and voodoo,'' Murphy says. ``The trees and the Spanish moss and the old houses, they work together to give you an atmosphere of going back in time."

Savannah: America&#39;s `most haunted&#39; city?

Savannah: America's `most haunted' city?