Haunted Savannah: America's Most Spectral City

by Caskey, James

  While you ponder this, consider that several Savannah businessmen (led by Charles Lamar) decided to violate the Federal ban on importing slaves from Africa in 1858, a highly illegal act (this story is told in the chapter entitled ‘Pour Larry’s in City Market’). The conspirators were eventually caught, perhaps not coincidentally at the City Hotel. Can this all be a casual happenstance, or perhaps is something much, much darker at work? Is the former City Hotel a magnet for violence?

  Fall... and Rise Again

  You could almost use the building located at 21 West Bay Street as an allegory for Savannah’s post Civil War fortunes. Union General William T. Sherman occupied Savannah in December 1864, and the hotel closed its doors for good. The postwar Reconstruction period saw the building used as coal and lumber storage, and she spent most of the 20th century as storage space and an office supply store. But the building, like much of the downtown, slid into decay and neglect. The roof was damaged extensively by Hurricane David in 1979, forcing the office supply store to close up shop. From that point, the building sat vacant for nearly twenty years. Few Savannahians understood the significance to the old timeworn eyesore on Bay Street. Her windows were boarded up, and went unnoticed by all, other than a few architectural enthusiasts.

  But the 1990’s brought change, both to the Historic District and the former hotel. A new company bought the mostly-ruined edifice, and renovations were begun to turn the space into a bar, restaurant and brewery (originally to be called ‘Oglethorpe Brewing Company’) which opened in December of 1996. The initial concept was that the bar was going to be on the first floor, and the upstairs was going to be a restaurant. However, the building itself seems as though it had other ideas. The crew that tried to renovate the second floor reputedly ran into constant and unexplainable difficulty.

  A Bad Reputation Returns

  The City Hotel initially did not appear to welcome renovation, seemingly dishing out quite a bit of aggression towards the unfortunate work crew. Some of these men even complained of experiencing a sensation of being pushed, pinched, or tugged on their clothing. Several people saw apparitions: usually of a woman standing in view on the third floor landing, but also occasionally of a man wearing a waistcoat in various places on the property.

  The apparition the workmen kept seeing on the third floor landing has a special place in Moon River lore, because during the renovation the foreman of the job even began to jokingly call the strange female spirit by a name: ‘Mrs. Johnson.’ He made up an elaborate back-story for Mrs. Johnson: she was a slave who was a cook at the former hotel. She died a violent death, he said, but had dabbled in voodoo so she still harassed the living from time to time. This was supposedly a joke to scare some of the workers, whom he viewed with good-natured amusement because of their fear of the paranormal happenings. However, what started out as jest ended in violence shortly thereafter—no surprise, given the building’s seeming predilection for hostility and aggression. The jokes about Mrs. Johnson ended when she (or someone or something) decided to attack the foreman’s wife! It seems the wife had come by the site to deliver his lunch, and on her way down the stairs leading to the first floor, she felt a sharp push in the back, and no one had been on the stairs behind her. This wife of the foreman took a nasty spill down the stairs. The foreman is said to have tendered his resignation on the spot and left the property.

  The work was abruptly called to a close on the upstairs, even though the restoration had not yet been completed. Too many experienced workers were quitting, many of whom cited the strange occurrences as the reasons for leaving, so the owners simply gave up their renovation plans due to the difficulty of keeping a construction crew on site. The second floor today is still unrenovated, and is used as a storage area. The first level, which was successfully restored, serves as the bar and restaurant. The three floors above what became Moon River Brewing Company (it was re-christened and opened in 1999) remain largely untouched, with the majority of the beautiful early 19th century architecture intact, yet crumbling. Immense pocket doors, since removed from their wall slots can still be viewed on the second floor, as well as a curved door—giving clues to the opulence of the old hotel.

  The unrenovated upper floors of Moon River.

  A Worker’s Story

  While leading a tour one night, I had the good fortune to actually meet one member of the former construction crew (at his request I have changed his name). Roger told me several stories of paranormal problems he himself experienced at Moon River Brewing Company. He related that while working, he often heard footsteps coming from areas which he knew were completely vacant, at least of the living. He complained to co-workers and superiors alike about a sensation of being watched, a sentiment that many of his friends on the work crew echoed. He also experienced cold spots on numerous occasions on the second floor, which was extremely odd since they were working in a space that was not air-conditioned in the middle of summer.

  However, one incident stood out to Roger, a strange happening which actually made him leave the job site for good. He was running an electric sander, and flipped the power switch to the ‘off’ position. The sander kept running at full power. Thinking he had a short circuit in his equipment, he walked to the electrical outlet and unplugged the cord. The sander kept running anyway, though it was completely separated from any power source, including batteries. An unplugged sander was somehow running all by itself! He decided he had had enough, so he held the sander and unplugged cord up to his supervisor and yelled, “I quit!” Roger then left the property. Ten years after the fact he still preferred to sit outside, smoking nervously, when the tour went into the building. He refused to set foot inside the property.

  Tour Occurrences: Trouble ‘Brewing’

  The strange reputation of the building persists. Several haunted pub tours, including my own offering from Cobblestone Tours, go into the unrenovated area. Tourgoers and tour guides alike have claimed to have had some strange experiences. I have had unexplainable occurrences on more than one occasion. If I were to list everything that I or other guides have encountered, this book would be Faulkner-esque, so it has been difficult to pare this chapter down to the essentials. Here then are the best of the best:

  On one cold evening, a man on the tour expressed to me his disbelief in all things supernatural. He even complained that his wife had cajoled him into taking a ghost tour, and he chose this particular tour because he could at least have a beer while his wife listened to the stories. After the story I tell in the upstairs of Moon River Brewing had concluded, we were walking back down the stairs to the first level. This gentleman was right in front of me as we descended, and suddenly he slapped his hand to the side of his neck and whirled around, looking at me suspiciously. He later admitted to me the reason for this bizarre behavior: he claimed to have felt a hand on his neck, which grabbed his scarf. He thought at first that it was me, reaching down and grabbing him, and that I was either playing a joke on him or perhaps even picking on him for publicly stating that he didn’t believe in ghosts. But when he turned around behind me he suddenly realized that I had my hands full, and was eight feet behind him. Yet another nonbeliever became fodder for the tour.

  And yet nonbelievers suddenly getting ‘converted’ on tour is not an uncommon occurrence. One night a man joked that his wife was on tour for the spirits, and he was “just here for the beer.” Once we ascended to the second floor of Moon River, however, he began twisting and gyrating like he had walked into a spider web, and quickly left the tour group to head back downstairs. I assumed he was simply in need of another drink. After walking outside, his wife found him on the sidewalk in front of the pub next door, silently weeping. After much prodding by his wife to tell us what happened to him, he finally admitted that something unseen had grabbed him by the head, neck and shoulders and would not let go. He had to physically leave the space to escape whatever had been assaulting him. “I thought these stories we
re just made up,” he said to me. “You need to warn people.”

  On another evening, I was upstairs telling part of the tale to a group of about twenty people and a young woman on tour was staring intently. She was seriously spooked, if you’ll pardon the pun. I noticed as we moved further back into the second floor of the old crumbling edifice that she looked noticeably jumpy, and I couldn’t understand why. All became clear a little while later in the tour when she and I were standing together at the first floor bar. That same young lady approached me and said, “I liked your stories upstairs, but I didn’t understand part of it.” I told her I’d be happy to clear up any part of the tale that was confusing, and she said, “Oh, no, not the story part—I’m talking about the woman in period costume walking around in the hallway right behind you.” She went on to say that the woman we had hired to jump out and scare people on the tour had missed her cue, because she had disappeared into one of the rooms and had never reappeared. Her mouth fell open in surprise when I told her that A) we don’t employ cheap theatrics, and B) no one else was asking about a period-costumed woman—she was the only one who saw her. She had had an authentic paranormal experience at Moon River Brewing, and hadn’t even realized it at the time. Was this yet another sighting of the spirit dubbed ‘Mrs. Johnson’?

  Tour guide Karl Kessler has also had some strange instances. He has experienced a choking sensation while telling his tale on the second level, and also claimed to have once felt a sensation “like someone pouring ice-cold water down my back” as he was relating a story. In yet another happening, he was leaving the upper area with his group one evening and heard someone’s footsteps walking in the central hallway behind him. Thinking that he had missed a member of his tour group, he went back to find them. The footsteps were indeed walking in the hallway, but no one was there. “It sounded like they walked right past me, and I felt a chill. I got the heck out of there.”

  My Nominee for Mother of the Year

  Another Mrs. Johnson episode: one night a mother and her (adult) daughter showed up, very much interested in visiting the unrenovated second floor of Moon River Brewing Company. They had seen the space featured on the Travel Channel’s America’s Most Haunted Places (a show also featuring yours truly), and had planned their trip to Savannah around visiting the deserted second floor. The mother, who did not drink alcohol, told me she was willing to take a pub tour just for the stories, and did not plan on drinking. For her, the locations would be enough. Once the group got upstairs at Moon River, however, the mother had second thoughts. She grew noticeably pale and informed me she needed to go back downstairs—which I thought was odd considering her previous excitement at seeing the second floor firsthand. She left me, her daughter and the rest of the tourgoers, and returned to the first level. When we finished that portion of the tour, the group descended to the first floor and we prepared to head to our next location. It was then that the daughter gasped in surprise, because her teetotalling mother was drinking heavily at the bar. When I asked the mother what was going on, she replied that she had been initially very excited, but everything changed once she got to the second floor. She suddenly realized that there was a woman wearing an all-black period costume weaving throughout the tourgoers, and she was the only one in the group who saw this strange woman! She described the spectre as being very angry and aggressive. She didn’t know how to point this out without appearing crazy, so she retreated downstairs and began to drink to calm her nerves. For me, the only real surprise was NOT that she had seen an apparition while on the tour… it was that she had left her daughter up there in harm’s way with Mrs. Johnson while she chased spirits of a different kind at the bar.

  Not Even Grandmothers Are Safe

  One night a close personal friend named Lindsay approached me as I began my tour at Moon River. Her elderly grandmother wanted to take my tour, but the entire tour was too much walking for her (even at less than a mile traversed in two hours) due to slight disability. Lindsay’s grandma just loved ghost stories, and very much wanted to hear a tale or two. Would it be okay if grandmother was around just for one story? Naturally I agreed. I took her sweet-natured grandmother by the arm and led her along with my tour group up to the second floor.

  Near the end of the story, I moved the group to the center hallway to show off a bit of architecture, and that’s when it happened: Lindsay’s grandmother flinched so hard I thought both her feet were going to come off the ground! She immediately reached down and began rubbing her right forearm. Concerned for her well-being, I asked if she was okay. She nodded, but continued to rub her arm as the tour continued.

  As soon as I got the group back downstairs, Lindsay conferred with her grandma and walked over. “Grandma says someone slapped her on the arm while listening to your story. She says there was no one around her when it happened, but that’s impossible. Did you see who did it?” I told my friend that there was no possible way that anyone could have slapped her, since I was looking right at her grandma for the entire story. I confirmed that I saw her practically jump out of her skin while I was talking, but absolutely no one was around her when it happened. Upon examination, the elderly woman did indeed have a red mark on her right forearm resembling a slap-mark. Her grandma continued to insist that she hadn’t hit her arm on anything—someone had slapped her.

  The next day I got a phone call from Lindsay. She noticed that morning that her Grandma had a deep bruise on her arm—and it was extremely odd because the mark was on her right arm, and the bruise was in the shape of a right handprint. There was no way that her grandmother could have done this to herself. “I’m officially scared to go back to Moon River,” Lindsay said. I have to admit that I was a little frightened, myself. I mean, what sort of mean-spirited ghost picks on Grandma?

  “...a shadowy spirit in the cellar which apparently still wanted to devour her, even after a century and a half.”

  Psychics: or a Lion, a Witch and my Wardrobe

  I have a good friend (who I will call ‘R’) who is gifted with psychic ability. This is someone who will suddenly receive information in a flash—info that she could not have any knowledge of, and yet somehow she does know it. For instance, once while I was dining with R she suddenly began to speak in great detail about my childhood, even including specific events and street names. There is no way that she could have possibly known this information about me, since we met in 1997, and I had never discussed my early life with her. It was strange, but she seemed to know all my secrets. This same friend asked me in the Spring of 2003 to take her somewhere that I believed was truly haunted, to see if she could have an authentic experience. I unhesitatingly took her to Moon River Brewing.

  After gaining permission from management, we ascended the stairs. My friend R grew incredibly cold to the touch, and even the quality of the air surrounding her changed. Being a native Floridian, the only comparison I can make is being at the location of an imminent lightning strike, a close-call I have had happen many times. I felt a new charge to the atmosphere, a sudden change in air pressure, and all the hairs rose on my body. And remember, this was just from me standing near her. I cannot imagine what she went through personally. She appeared to step around something unseen in her path in the ruins of the former hotel, and when I asked why she did so, she replied, “I’m sorry, I just thought it would be terribly rude to step right through them...” She could see someone in our path whom I could not, although it seemed that I could feel their presence. She later likened her experience in the upstairs of Moon River Brewing to being an open radio receiver, tuned to all the channels simultaneously.

  R began to speak in clipped tones about one of the many presences she could sense in the building, one in particular that eerily matched what the former foreman had supposedly said about the place. She described an extremely angry black female, pre-Civil War, who was full of fury over her being mistreated in her past life and was using her knowledge of dark arts to gain some
revenge on this plane of existence. At one point my friend told me that the spirit is extremely territorial and explained: “Well, it clears up why she seems to hate you so much. You are constantly invading her space by bringing groups up here.” This was certainly not welcome news, seeing as how I was spending at least three nights a week in Moon River Brewing on tour. She went on to suggest that me wearing Confederate grey around the spirit of a former slave might also be a bit of a sticking point, to put it mildly.

  There is a carefully measured disclaimer here: I never managed to interview the foreman. I have only second- and third-hand accounts of what happened to him, mostly in the form of stories from that former worker and one of the current owners of Moon River Brewing. But I find it extremely interesting that my good friend would tell a nearly identical tale, her having never met the foreman or any other sources of the story. One must give at least a little credence to the story since it is coming from several unconnected sources.

  I then took my friend downstairs into the basement (formerly the wine and brandy cellar for the upstairs hotel barroom) and had yet another surprise: she refused to go near the center of the room, and explained that there was some kind of inhuman presence down there. One of R’s exact phrases resonated with the history of the space, unbeknownst to her at the time: “I know this is going to sound weird, Jamie, but I feel like I’m being hunted.” My friend had no knowledge of this fact, but in the 1840’s, the owner of the City Hotel wanted to announce the structure’s preeminence as a luxury accommodation. He therefore installed two live lions in the lobby (thought to be the main dining room of Moon River) that he had acquired while in Africa. One must wonder what these two large cats thought of being transported from an African savannah to Lowcountry Savannah, or even what the four-legged predators in the cage thought of the two-legged, gambling predators at the bar. Or vice versa.