Haunted Savannah, Georgia - Dead People Everywhere!

Savannah, Georgia, an incredibly haunted city. After what I learned on our ghostly trip there I have no doubt why. GhostStock2 included a very interesting midnight tour of Colonial Park Cemetery that is located in downtown Savannah at the crossroads of Abercorn and Ogelthorpe. Burials began in 1750 with cessation in 1853 as its land space became overused and exhausted. Among the many buried there are several Revolutionary War soldiers, one signer of the Declaration of Independence, Button Gwinnet, five governors of Georgia, and quite a few that died from gunshot wounds.

During the Civil War, Union soldiers camped out in the cemetery, as it is a very beautiful area with trees, Spanish moss and soft grass. It lent to some relaxation for war-weary soldiers. The soldiers soon became easily amused at changing ages and dates on the tombstones. One such change reads that the age of death was 1,710 years of age. Another creative entry revealed a 12-year-old died leaving behind a wife and several children. They also took fancy to rearranging tombstones and even removing them to accommodate enough area for their horses. Water troughs were constructed using tombstones as well.. Thus, many tombstones never made it back to where they belonged. After the soldiers left, the cemetery was in quite a state of disarray. It was unknown exactly where many tombstones actually belonged. There is a brick wall to the back of the cemetery where many of these tombstones are now mounted. It is said to be impossible to walk anywhere in the cemetery, or any part of Savannah for that matter, without walking over someone’s bones.

There were two horrendous fires one in 1796 and the other in 1820 which devastated 646 buildings leaving about half of Savannah in ruins. Later that year in 1820. a yellow fever outbreak claimed one-tenth of the Savannahian population. A second outbreak of yellow fever occurred in 1854 with an estimate of approximately 6,000 inhabitants of Savannah falling victim to the fever with 1,040 of those dying within three months. Many of the yellow fever victims are buried in mass graves behind this cemetery, that area is now the location of a playground and park. You may be wondering where they moved the graves…Why No!

Many brick crypts are located throughout the cemetery. Each crypt is owned by a different family. In the vault there are shelves from the floor up to lay the dead body onto. Rather than using caskets to save on burial space, a dead body was wrapped in cloth and then placed into the crypt. When the crypt was full, the oldest and most decomposed body would be removed from the shelf and deposited into a large container in the center of the floor. The newly deceased would be put in its place. There can be quite a few bodies in one crypt as this was done for approximately 100 years.

The cemetery is much larger than the area we see today. It extends out underneath Ogelthorpe and Abercorn streets that were built on top of the existing cemetery. Again, no the bodies were not moved. The cemetery extends under the parking lot of the police barracks next door. As above stated, there is a playground built over another section. Savannah is notorious for building over burial grounds. Underneath portions of the historic district, one finds old Native American burial grounds and no the bodies. To this day, when new construction is started in Savannah it is not uncommon at all to find human remains or other interesting memorabilia from long ago.

This little writing does not even scratch the surface of what Savannah has in store for the history buff, sight seeing, and ghostly travel.