Savannah-The Journey for Ghosts

My hot fiancé is military and travels about 25% of the time. Having just become engaged, we can’t bear to be apart for even a moment, so I took a much-needed vacation and tagged along to Savannah. I highly recommend visiting this gorgeous place. It’s the most walkable city I’ve ever been to. You’re never more than a block or two from a lush park where moss hangs off pecan trees. It’s eerie and mysterious.

To get into the ‘spirit’ of Savannah, we watched Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and read the book to prep for the trip, leaving me in the mood for the supernatural. The book is excellent, by the way.

Savannah raised the white flag during the civil war and as one of the few cities that wasn’t burned to the ground, the architecture remains preserved. Old houses means one thing: dead people. I am on a personal hunt to hear ghost stories.

After our plane landed, we drove straight to the Pirate’s House for lunch. The restaurant is haunted, y’all! The menu is delicious Southern food complete with biscuits and honey to start you off. Our waiter has had multiple interactions with spirits. In one, a glass floated off on its own. A face flashed from across the garden which he got a picture of. Of course, I was totally skeptical thinking it was photoshopped or just a strange reflection on the glass, but the hair rose on my arm. I have no doubt something (someone?) was there. He said he begins his shifts by saying  hello and ends his shifts telling everyone to have a good night. He doesn’t bother them and they don’t bother him.

The whole city is built on graves. Some slaves, some native Americans from the Yamacraw tribe. Savannah played a key role in the slave trade as a port for ships to deliver their human cargo. It’s part of a painful history with deep scars. I’m sure a lot of spirits linger.

Being a curious cat, I googled “Savannah dive bars” and figured the best way to get stories was to find a dive where the locals hung out who could tell me some ghost stories. Not the ones you hear on a ‘haunted tour’ but the spooky kind you hear from someone who excitedly tells you about the constant smell of cigar smoke, or a figure waving from the window when no one is in the house. I ended up at Pinkie Masters, which is the bar where Jimmy Carter famously announced his presidential run. He later returned there as president to eulogize the owner. Pictures of him hang from every wall. Pinkies was a fun place, but it felt equal parts tourist place and local. One local did tell me that brick walls gating houses were rimmed with broken green glass to keep the spirits out (or in?). The bartender’s girlfriend works at a funeral parlor, but he told me he didn’t buy into spirits or hauntings, disappointing end of story.

We visited the Mercer House, famous for Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the deaths that took place there. It’s hard not to feel surrounded by ghosts when a house looks frozen in time from the portraits on the walls, the hundreds of years old tapestries and worn antique furniture.

In a similar vein, the Andrew Low house was built by a father of Savannah who was a good friend of Robert E. Lee’s and more importantly was the father of Juliette Low Gordon, the founder of the girl scouts. I once wrote a book report about her, but I only now learned that she came home to find her husband had moved in his mistress. They started to divorce and he shockingly had a stroke before it was finalized, so she ended up a widow. Sounds like a “Stroke” of good luck? Maybe helped along by one of the spirits of the Andrew Low house? Apparently there are at least three of them: Her grandmother (an older woman in bed sometimes appears), her father (his favorite rocking chair still rocks on its own) and Robert E. Lee. I’m not sure how they know it’s him, but he was often in that house.

This is inspiring me to investigate some of the historical areas of Norfolk, though the city is mostly known for battles. I’m sure there has to be some hauntings to explore.