Haunted Savannah: America's Most Spectral City

by Caskey, James

  These same lions were kept in the wine cellar in the evenings, the very same space my friend experienced a creeping sensation of an inhuman presence which was still on the hunt; a shadowy spirit in the cellar which apparently still wanted to devour her, even after a century and a half.

  Anyway, it was the assertion of R that Moon River Brewing was the most haunted place she had ever encountered. She was literally overcome by whatever spirits were inside, and was pale and trembling when she left; she had to rest on the sidewalk after her ordeal. This is one case where the overwhelming spirits at Moon River Brewing didn’t come by the pint.

  The Staff’s Experiences

  There are a number of employees who have had run-ins with unexplainable phenomena. It seems the property has a way of making most people, even many staff members, at least a little more open-minded about the possibility of the existence of spirits. And that rather lengthy list starts, naturally, with management.

  Gene Beeco, co-owner and general manager of Moon River Brewing, was an absolute disbeliever in ghosts when he began working at the restaurant/brewery, and is still seemingly a little uncomfortable with the fact that his place of business has unexplainable happenings. Gene is analytical and businesslike in nearly all respects. In the words of one associate, “Gene is the sort of guy to swear up and down to you that there’s no such thing as ghosts, but if you prod him, eventually he’ll tell you his own personal ghost story.” This is precisely how it happened with me: I asked Gene one day if he had any personal experiences that he could share, fully expecting a negative answer. I suppose I was asking merely as a formality. But I was incredibly surprised when he hesitated, and then answered in the affirmative:

  “I had only been working here for a few weeks. I went upstairs on a very busy evening to grab some supplies. As I walked past the hallway I saw a little girl running around.” When I asked if he was surprised by the apparition, Gene smiled: “I didn’t think it was one, at the time. I thought some parent had let their child wander up here to the second floor unattended. I only realized it was something else entirely as I began to search for her and walked the direction she ran, only to find an empty room.”

  When I asked him if the encounter scared him, Gene laughed and shook his head. He said his reaction was, “Awww, I don’t have time for this ghost stuff tonight!”

  A former bartender, named Amanda, claims that as she went upstairs she felt a hand on her neck as she entered a main hallway. She whirled to confront what she assumed was a co-worker pulling a prank, but there was no one: she was all alone. Amanda also had a strange occurrence in the basement, when one night she went down the stairs alone. She saw a man out of the corner of her eye, and blinked, thinking that she was seeing things. The apparition did not vanish, however, and for several moments she and this spectre regarded each other before she finally slowly backed out of the area. She claims that he was wearing 19th century attire.

  Another former employee, a waiter named Sam, claims to have heard strange pounding and knocking sounds in the basement, near a large archway. The sound, he says, was distinctly that of someone knocking on a wooden door—but the downstairs archway’s large wooden door had been removed years ago. When he was still employed at Moon River Brewing, Sam refused to go into the basement alone, a claim verified and echoed by several members of the wait staff.

  It’s hard to find a member of the staff at Moon River Brewing who hasn’t had some sort of paranormal run-in. Kelly, a former server, has had several supernatural experiences. I sat down with her one quiet afternoon for an interview at one of the tables located directly south of the bar.

  I asked Kelly what sort of things had happened to her while working at Moon River Brewing. She paused, and looked at the center of the table as she spoke: “From my experiences I have found that there are several distinct entities at Moon River, they range from your apathetic ghosts, where they don’t really register or care about the living, the interested ghosts, they make themselves known but it is not necessarily in a positive or negative way. And then there are the poltergeists, and usually they are involved and interested in the goings on and will make their presence known, mostly in a negative or mean spirited way. No pun intended.”

  When I pressed her for specifics, Kelly seemed to consider this for a moment, as if trying to decide how much of her happenings she was willing to divulge. Finally she spoke in a calm, measured voice. “I have had experiences with some of the entities at Moon River. I have seen a vague figure down in the basement, and it came towards me. The feeling of fear that went along with the experience was almost irrational. I have had one or two experiences where I was pushed, I actually felt something shove me on the back, and I fell down the stairs, luckily without injury. I have heard someone walking upstairs when no one else was in the building and when I went to investigate there was no one there. Also, sometimes when giving a tour to customers upstairs, anytime that renovations were mentioned it would sound like someone was stomping around the upper level and then it would sound like they were running towards the stairs. Down in the basement one morning, I went down and found all of the extra glassware smashed, as if someone had thrown it to the floor in a rage.” It was hard for me to imagine anyone wishing harm on Kelly. The quiet, unassuming twenty-something just seemed to radiate calm and positive emotions. She seemed to be almost embarrassed by the attention her ghostly experiences had garnered.

  When I asked if she ever felt personally threatened, and if she thought the activity centered on the location, or certain people, or a combination of the two, Kelly replied: “Personally threatened? Not really. The only time there has ever seemed to be a threat was when renovations were mentioned or started, especially to the upper levels. There is a definite sense of anger when renovations are mentioned.” Her describing the flash of anger when renovations are spoken about gave me a chill on a warm afternoon, since I spend a major portion of my tour story telling tour groups about the failed renovations!

  Kelly also related an incident she once had very early in the day. One morning she was opening the restaurant, so she was there by herself. She kept hearing heavy footsteps upstairs, however, so she went up the staircase to investigate a supposedly deserted upper level. The footsteps started out on the second floor, she said, but once she got up there she could then hear them walking around on the third floor, which also proved to be deserted. When I remarked that she was braver than I for checking it out, she smiled and told me, “Well, I took an icepick just in case it wasn’t a spirit.”

  The litany of paranormal experiences experienced by employees is far too long to list here. But here are a few: longtime employee Kristine has attested to hearing her name being called—from an empty room. She has also witnessed unexplainable shadows under the bathroom door, even though the bathrooms were unoccupied at the time. A cook in the kitchen also swears that the ovens have mysteriously switched off by themselves. In another instance, a female server who was taking a cigarette break at the westernmost second-floor window suddenly had her long ponytail pulled from behind with frightening force. She whirled to confront her attacker, and found only a deserted room. A former manager once had a bottle of vodka fling itself off of a nearby shelf, crashing perilously close to his head. When I asked him about the frightening incident, he laughed and said, “At least it was the cheap stuff.”

  A ‘Haunted Savannah’ Haunting

  We hosted the premiere for the first edition of this book, Haunted Savannah, in the Beer Cellar of Moon River Brewing on June 6th, 2005. Although the setting was chosen for its connection to the book, never in our wildest dreams did we expect anything supernatural to occur at the premiere. Needless to say, we should have anticipated the unexpected in a building as haunted as Moon River Brewing.

  After three hours, the party was winding down. The media left, the guests began to ebb towards the exit, and the staff began to break down the food trays and chafing di
shes, which were being carried up the stairs (I, meanwhile, was nursing a case of writer’s cramp after signing and personalizing close to a hundred copies of the book). Between the logjam of exiting food trays and people, the stairwell leading back up to the first floor was momentarily blocked.

  My former publisher and good friend Cristina Piva knew of a back exit, the second service stairwell which was back by the pool tables that were in the area at the time, so she headed for that door. Her urgency had something to do with the herbal tea she had been sipping all night. Cristina threaded her way through the dwindling crowd, and walked past the first pool table. She reached the low wall in the very back room, nearly at the exit door, and ran headfirst into a mass of energy. This unseen energy field knocked her backward, almost sweeping her off of her feet. Somehow she maintained her balance, and staggered back to the crowd. Her husband, Murray, leapt to his feet to see what was the matter. We asked what had happened, but Cristina seemed momentarily be out of breath, and was pale and shaking. All she could do was point back to the area where she had her strange encounter. She later described her experience as almost feeling like she had been submerged in cold water.

  The moment this occurred, I simultaneously thought of three things: first, Cristina looked like she had experienced exactly the same thing that my psychic friend had encountered, since they were both pale and shaking; second, this was precisely where my friend Amanda (former bartender) had had her encounter; and thirdly and most importantly, the former City Hotel is still perhaps the most active hotspot for supernatural happenings in the city of Savannah.

  Ghost Folklore vs. An Actual Haunting

  One of the most frequent questions I get is this: “So who haunts Moon River Brewing?” That is an incredibly hard question to answer, much harder for me than it might first appear. If I wanted to make things easy on myself, I would just say that it is the spirit of James Stark, or Mrs. Johnson, and be done with it. But to me the idea of the ‘famous ghost’ is more an element of a folklore story. If the idea of the ‘famous ghost’ is correct, then the spirits of Edgar Allen Poe, Blackbeard, Jean Laffite, Abraham Lincoln, Robert E. Lee and the like must get absolutely no rest whatsoever in the spirit world, because these ghosts are spotted a lot, and in various locales all across the country. I reject the majority of these types of stories unless they are packaged as fiction.

  Instead, I much prefer the more complicated and sometimes messy idea of the ‘anonymous ghost,’ or more accurately, a location that brings out hauntings. I believe that Moon River Brewing is just such a place: one possessed by the past. Nearly every historical account involving 21 West Bay Street also includes murder, dueling, violence, human bondage, or other forms of heartbreak. That sort of lineage certainly has an effect on what sort of paranormal experiences people have there today. How can it not? A building with such a violent pedigree is definitely not going to manifest as haunted tales of puppies and rainbows. You know for certain that you are due for a dark tale when someone starts telling you what happened to them at the brewery.

  What I see in my mind’s eye when I think of Moon River Brewing Company is not a single spectre, or a couple of lonely spirits which ramble through the deserted upper floors. I see a location which is constantly charged with negative energy, a place that crackles with a brutal aura. I do not see the spirits as being separate from the building at all; they are not the aberration, they are a direct result of the location’s history. The odd and frightening events which tourists, locals, staff members and tour guides continue to encounter in that building on Bay Street are a build-up of nearly two centuries worth of bad mojo. For me, the proper question is not who inhabits the space. The proper question is: why? What makes the nature of the location itself so incredibly angry? I find that simply gaining an understanding the complex and dark nature of 21 West Bay’s history, which so often is a means of finding comfort in these types of paranormal hotspots, offers no solace in this particular instance. The spirits are unhappy, and no one, even me—a guy who has spent a decade studying the building—has the slightest idea of what to do about it.

  My advice to readers who want to experience Moon River Brewing for themselves is the same that I gave off-camera to Zak Bagins of Ghost Adventures (sadly ignored): “Enjoy the beer, but try not to anger the ghosts.”

  Juliette Gordon Low’s Birthplace

  10 East Oglethorpe Avenue

  Many houses in Savannah have a great amount of history, but perhaps none so much as the imposing mansion located at the corner of Bull Street and Oglethorpe Avenue, the birthplace of Juliette Gordon Low. Many Savannah residents simply call it ‘The Birthplace’ instead of its proper title, the Wayne-Gordon House. The Regency style house, completed in 1821, is thought to be a William Jay design, the same architect who designed the Owens-Thomas House. However, it is possible that the structure was built by a protégé of Jay’s, perhaps the same unknown architect who designed the old City Hotel.

  Juliette Gordon Low founded the Girl Guides, which later became the Girl Scouts. The house today is used as the National Center of Girl Scouts, and is visited by approximately eighty thousand Girl Scouts every year. But beyond the story of Juliette, one of the most liberated women of the past 150 years, we find the tender love story of her parents.

  Juliette’s father, William Washington Gordon II, was also born in the house, and it is here that he brought his new bride, Nellie Kinzie, in 1858. It is one of the family’s favorite stories that Willie fell in love with Nellie in 1853, when she slid down the main staircase of the Yale Library at New Haven and crushed his brand new hat. She maintained that high-spirited habit of sliding down banisters all her life.

  “... her face took on the radiance of a bride.”

  Clashing Feminine Personalities

  When Nellie moved into the house with her new husband, they moved in with Willie’s parents, William I and Sarah Gordon. The house could barely contain the two strong female personalities of Sarah and Nellie. The two experienced friction from nearly the very beginning, including Nellie’s objection to her husband being required to sign over half of his paycheck to his parents.

  Three children were born to Willie and Nellie before the country went to war. In what Nellie called ‘The Confederate War,’ Willie served the Confederacy in the Georgia Hussars, and was wounded in the Battle of Atlanta. Nellie never lost that spark that had attracted Willie: her brother and uncle were fighting for the Union, and so a woman remarked to her, “I hope that the first shot fired will kill [your brother] dead.” Nellie later ran into the same woman, and said, “I hear that your brother has been shot in the back. Mine is doing quite well, thank you.” So deep and abiding was her love for Willie that Nellie found the need to track him down not once, but twice—once enlisting the aid of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, and the other with the help of Union General William T. Sherman.

  When General Sherman occupied Savannah, he and his officers came to pay their respects to Eleanor Kinzie Gordon. Accompanying Sherman was Brigadier General O. O. Howard, who was notable because he had lost an arm during the Battle of Seven Pines. Eleanor’s daughter, Daisy (whom we know today as Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts) noticed that Howard was missing an arm. She, with the charming tactlessness of a child, asked how he lost his arm. Howard replied that a Confederate soldier had shot his arm off. Daisy then wondered aloud, “I wonder if my Papa didn’t do it? He has shot lots of Yankees!” No one laughed harder than William T. Sherman.

  After the war, Willie and Nellie were reunited, and three more children were born into the Gordon household.

  When Nellie visited her daughter Juliette in England, Rudyard Kipling put her in a story as “a little old lady with snapping black eyes, who used very bad language.” Nellie thanked him for the honor.

  When Willie passed away in 1912, Nellie was devastated. She wrote to a cousin: “My strict observance of the 5th Commandment
has resulted in my ‘living long in the land’… unless it is because the Lord doesn’t want me, and the Devil doesn’t either. At any rate, here I remain, very much against my will, for there is nothing I so sincerely desire in this world as to get out of it.”

  Nellie was ill in the fall of 1916, and a doctor ordered her confined to her to bed on the third floor. She was to avoid stairs at all costs. The family met to discuss the dividing up of the estate, but did so in secret on the second floor, as to not upset Nellie. Suddenly Nellie appeared in the doorway, and admonished them all for treating her as if she was already in the grave. When the family began to chastise her for disobeying the doctor, Nellie smiled and told them that she hadn’t—she had given her word that she wouldn’t use the stairs, so she slid down the banister!