Travels of Jackie and Randy: Savannah - beautiful, historic and haunted

We've had a few days off now and it's so nice to get out and see the area. A couple of days ago we went to Savannah for a walking tour. We were going to take the tour on Friday but found our tickets were only valid on Monday through Thursday, so we high-tailed it over there in the afternoon. It's hard to find parking in Savannah, so we parked on this side of the river and took the ferry across. The ferries are free and fairly quick so it's a good option.

We didn't have much time before the tour so we just grabbed a sandwich at Five Guys. That was the first time we've been disappointed by Five Guys - the burgers were really small. But we didn't have much time anyway so we scarfed the burgers and went out to meet up with our tour guide. One of the first things he told us was about the streets. Many of the riverfront streets are made of big, ungainly rocks. According to our guide, the reason is this: When ships arrived from Europe, they carried rocks as ballast. When they loaded the cotton or whatever was being shipped out, the rocks were left on the riverfront. A certain Irishman offered to get rid of them, for a fee. After awhile the combination of rains and carriages made the riverfront a muddy mess. The Irishman then offered to bring back the rocks . . . for a fee. He made a nice business from those ballast rocks and the Savannah riverfront has some interesting roads, which, by the way, are tricky to drive or walk on.

The sidewalks are usually made of Tabby, which is a combination of lime, sand and crushed oyster shells. That tells you how common oyster shells are here - they literally pave with them.

One of the first buildings we saw was the US Custom house where, according to our guide, General Sherman stood on the roof to survey the city while he was deciding whether or not to burn it. I can't find any supporting evidence of that but I learned elsewhere that he did review his troops here. This is part of what I find so fascinating about this area. I am used to "history" being in National Parks or museums. Here it is in the streets and buildings that are used everyday.

What else did we learn? Well, we learned why older houses here often have a lower level that is halfway underground. According to our guide, the goal wasn't to lower one level of rooms, it was to raise the other. The problem goes back to those muddy streets. The lower rooms were usually kitchen and storage rooms, while the parlor and sitting rooms would be on the raised-up main level, away from the dust and mud that was raised by passing carriages.

I learned about Creek Indian leader Tomo-chi-chi, who was very helpful to the English settlers, making sure they didn’t do things that would start wars with local tribes. When he died Savannah gave him a nice burial, but decades later a great big monument to William Gordon was set up directly on top of his grave. To be fair, William Gordon’s descendants weren’t happy when they found out about it, and they personally setup a memorial to Tomo-chi-chi nearby.

I also learned that haunting is an inseparable part of the Savannah culture. Whether or not that was true before "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil" I don't know, but it is absolutely true now. Currently Savannah has the title of the most haunted place in America. Apparently much of current-day Savannah is built over at least 4 big graveyards, including the old Jewish cemetery. Some are mass graves, from the times of cholera and yellow fever, and because the town basically burned down twice (not Sherman; it burned in 1796 and 1820), a lot of records have been lost. They know the locations of 3 of those big graveyards but the 4th one could be anywhere. So although our walking tour was not advertised as a haunting tour, a significant amount of it was.

Our guide pointed out the CVS Pharmacy that closes at 6 pm, ostensibly because if they stay open later than that, the ghosts start thumping on the walls. This theme - loud thumping if workers stay in the building after dark - is repeated at several buildings in town. The ghosts seem to believe the town belongs to them after dark (or maybe the employees want to go home on time?).

Juliette Gordon Lowe, founder of the Girl Scouts, lived here, which gives Savannah the best of both worlds - a chance to combine history and haunting. Her mom had a wonderful marriage and apparently didn't leave her house after she died in 1834; Juliette had a horrible marriage and apparently didn't leave her house after she died in 1927.

Our guide told us his own story; one night he woke up to hear footsteps coming upstairs towards him. He stayed awake for almost an hour, scared and waiting, but nobody appeared at the top of the stairs, so eventually he rolled over and went back to sleep. Now if I lived somewhere where I heard unidentified footsteps or after-hours thumping, I'd move. But in Savannah they just leave the office before dark and go back to sleep.

Madison Square is one of the 20 pretty parks in Savannah - pretty, but with some dark edges. The Sorrel Weed house, on one side of the park, is where a wife found her husband "with" a slave; wife committed suicide by jumping from the 2^nd story and slave hanged herself. . . maybe. Another version is that the husband hanged the slave, after the suicide. Either way, not a happy home.

On another side of the park is the Green Meldrim House. This is the most expensive house in the city - it cost $93,000 back in 1853. Hoping to save it from those @#!% Yankees, owner Charles Green offered it to General Sherman as his headquarters while he was in Savannah. The General took him up on the offer, stayed there, and was suitably impressed. Charles Green has another footnote in history; when Sherman sent Lincoln a telegram to present him with Savannah and 25,000 bales of cotton, that was Green's cotton.

Nearby is the Colonial Park cemetery. I almost called it the DAR cemetery because the beautiful entranceway is labeled DAR, but it turns out that is a reference to the Daughters of the Revolution who donated the entranceway. I love old cemeteries. This one was started in 1750 and the city has grown up around it - and over it. Moving graves is such a troublesome business, so when the city needed more room, only the headstones were moved. There is no way to know where all the bodies are but they are definitely not all in the cemetery. Even this mausoleum isn't all the way inside the cemetery.

The cemetery is supposed to hold about 10,000 bodies, including a lot of victims from yellow fever in a mass grave near the back. One story is that there were 666 yellow fever victims but the local church rounded that number up to "about 700". There are about 600 headstones in the cemetery now, and even allowing for some missing stones, it's hard to understand that 10,000 number. Our guide offered one solution; the mausoleums can hold a lot of bodies. It was common for a family to use one mausoleum for many generations, and just keep adding to it as needed. Nowadays you can just barely see where the mausoleum doorways used to be - the small brick archway at ground level is the top of the doorway. Back in the day there would have been an open space there, with steps leading down to the door. Over time, as the mausoleum was no longer used, the stairways filled in.

And they didn't use a fresh coffin for each person. When someone in the family died, they opened the mausoleum, moved the coffin's last resident aside, took the coffin out and and reused it. If there are only one or two coffins in there, you really can fit in a lot bodies. By the way, this practice of reusing coffins is how the family learned they had buried someone alive; if you opened Aunt Ida's coffin and the inside lining was all scratched up, you knew.

Well, there are less gruesome sights and stories in town. The original Girl Scout house is here, with a small, beautiful formal garden in front and stone lions by the door, lying down instead of sitting up. And Savannah is home of Pinkie's Lounge, where Jimmy Carter stood on the bar to announce his run for the Presidency. The country's oldest continually-operating theater is here, open since 1818. The oldest house in Savannah is a little one-story house that was built in 1734. At some point the little wooden house was raised up and another little brick house was built under it. So now it is the second story of a two-story house.

And there is something else special here - actually, it is something special all over the South. The trees contribute so deeply to the unique Southern atmosphere. I'm from the Midwest, where the beautiful deciduous trees of the plains, such as maples, oaks and elms, live; they grow tall and round and in large groves that line the roads and cover the hills. Here, especially by the roads and in town, the great Live Oaks grow. They demand room and can cover a whole city block. Their branches twist and turn, as if mimicking the wrought-iron railing of the old houses under their boughs, and Spanish Moss softens their silhouettes. I find it impossible not to be affected by these beauties; every one seems to be a piece of history.