WHAT HAUNTS SAVANNAH
"Ghosts are real. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win." - Stephen King
[photo of Savannah stolen from Visit Savannah’s ghost tours webpage]
dark tourism
James Caskey loiters outside Moon River Brewing Company in Savannah, Georgia, his long fingers crunched around a to-go drink while a lit lantern sits on a ledge nearby.
A tall figure with a scrappy beard and long graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, Caskey is dressed as a dead Civil War soldier: blue, red-striped pantaloons, a blood-red smock, suspenders, a blue chasseur cap and a belt buckle with the initials C.S.A. embossed in fake gold. For nearly 20 years, Caskey’s lantern has revealed the city’s dead to thousands of tourists, who visit with an itch for an other-worldly experience in America’s most haunted city.
Founded in 1733, Georgia’s first city was built on a bluff, on land gifted by Tomochichi, chief of the Yamacraw tribe. Over its first hundred years, the port city raised a crop of two dozen well-manicured public squares lined with houses, churches and schools often on top of dead soldiers, murdered enslaved peoples, and thousands of yellow fever victims. While no different than many other American cities, Savannah is set apart by the plethora of surviving structures from its past spanning one of the largest historical districts in the country. Many of the structures were renovated in the modern age to house bars, college classes, restaurants and businesses. Within those structures, stories of murder and nefarious behavior fill pages of books, newspapers and are passed down through oral history—fuel for a Golden Age of historic and dark tourism.
We stand outside Moon River, fighting the noise of the traffic to hear Caskey’s soft voice suggest we grab a drink at the bar inside before starting our tour. Tonight, his trainee Kelly Mary Sullivan, will dictate which of 14 establishments we will venture to. It’s Tuesday, so a slow evening at the bars downtown. Joining myself and the guides are three middle-aged ladies from Virginia, and a young couple from Nashville. The City Hall clock tower strikes 8 p.m., but Caskey assures us that nothing in Savannah starts on time. This is Slowvannah.
Caskey has only recently returned to giving tours after a three-year hiatus following a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. One of the most visible ghost tour guides, the proverbial “godfather,” Caskey has appeared in a number of television shows on the Discovery Channel, CNN, History Channel and Travel Channel as the city’s expert voice on spectres. His 2005 book, “Haunted Savannah,” followed one of the first books about ghosts in Savannah, Margaret Wayt Debolt’s 1984 publication “Savannah Spectres.” Both have become bibles for the massive ghost tour industry. Over the last 20 years, nearly a dozen more books on hauntings and ghosts in Savannah have been written—a cottage industry within a cottage industry.
After everyone has a beer and all agree it’s time to start the tour, Caskey tells us we’ll take an odd route through the bar to the first haunted location. We walk inside, around the far side of the bar and to the stairs, tactfully avoiding diners in mid-bite. We head down into the basement. The brick walls and scuffed-up red concrete floor encloses us like an ancient tomb. The basement is divided into three portions by two walls, each with column archways made of brick. In the other room, a group of 15 or so people on another ghost tour are finishing up. We are instructed to pull a chair from a table and have a seat. This expansive bottom floor, with numerous nooks and rooms, acts as storage for the restaurant and brewery above.
These rooms, according to several ghost tour narratives, three books on Savannah’s ghostly habitats, nearly every blurb on ghosts in the city, as well as the American Institute of Paranormal Psychology, are the most haunted places in the city.
The building that houses Moon River Brewing Company was once the city’s first hotel, built in 1821. Known simply as City Hotel, it closed just near the end of the Civil War. The building was used for storage for years and office spaces until the roof was dismantled by a hurricane in 1979. It essentially sat unused for several decades until the late 1990s when the first floor was restored to house a restaurant and pub. The top three floors have never been fully restored.
Caskey waits patiently as the other tour finishes up and we take our seats in front of him. Though he now fights for space and time, at one point he led the only ghost tour to come through this basement. Then, only a few locals knew Moon River was haunted. He stands with his back to the stairs and sits his antique lantern, on the table, its small flame at the end of its life. Caskey has a vast stable of stories. He builds each with a full narrative arc punched at the end by a pun and a toast, ensuring his ghost pub crawl tour, and the violent stories, are coupled with heavy drinking and some tepid laughs. As the other tour finishes and the group exist upstairs, Caskey casually walks to the front of the room by the stairs and flips off the lights.
noisy ghosts
The first time Caskey had an experience with a spectre, he was just a lowly painter and innkeeper at Tybee Island Bed and Breakfast. It was 1997 and the 24-year-old’s hiring came with a caveat from his boss: “If you don’t believe in ghosts, you will by the end of your stay here.” A skeptic at the time, Caskey didn’t mind the omen too much; after all, he was being paid to live at the beach.
During the off-season, Caskey guarded an empty house. One late night, nearly early morning, Caskey was down in the basement, in a front corner at his small art studio, painting. Between the stairs to the second level and his studio were three pull chains attached to bare bulbs with a metal washer at the bottom, weighting them down. All of the lights were on. He heard the front door of the house open and footsteps walk across the floor. There were no guests in the house and no one else had a key. He thought perhaps he had an intruder or his boss had returned early from a trip. He yelled a hello upstairs to no reply. The door at the top of the stairs opened and he heard footsteps coming down to the basement. He waited for someone to emerge, but saw no one. Then the first pull chain near the stairs started swinging like a pendulum, as if someone or something had batted it out of the way. He tried to explain the experience to himself: maybe it’s a pipe above that made the pull chain move. Then the second pull chain jumped and swayed in the open air. Whatever was moving them was moving towards him.
Caskey bolted around the pull chains and up the stairs—in a move he recalls was similar to the Green Bay Packers’ sweep. As soon he reached to the top of the staircase, before he could exit onto the next floor, all the lights went out and the door slammed shut in his face. He sat down at the top of the stairs in the dark. He knew there was a back door he could escape from but he’d have to go back through the basement. He dashed down the stairs, taking two lunges to reach the bottom and ran directly into a boat propeller. He scrambled and got to the back door of the basement, and ran outside. Then he ran to the front of the house and had to open the locked front door—the same door he had heard open a few minutes before. Inside the house, the locked basement door that had trapped him downstairs, was unlocked. He jiggled the handle. It locked forcefully on its own. He left the house. In the final dark moments before sunrise, Caskey sat on the porch swing, watching dawn and trying to make sense of what had happened.
Caskey had no where else to go. In the weeks that followed, he decided to make peace with the spirit. He talked to her. And reassured her he meant no harm. He didn’t feel threatened by the haunting, but came to understand that the spirit simply wanted attention.
The experience sparked an idea. In 2001, he formed Cobblestone Tours. He grew tired of hearing tour guides talk about monsters or simply make up stories. Caskey launched his business with true stories he researched through the Georgia Historical Society and several other local archives, as well as his own experiences. He helped give birth to the walking ghost tour in Savannah as it exists now.
the business of ghosts
In the dark, in Moon River’s basement, the tour guests twist their heads around looking for an experience as Caskey goes through his nightly routine of stories about City Hotel. One lady falls asleep and will later explain she’s been traveling all day and was simply worn out.
In the second room, just as Caskey finishes his story, we all notice a shadow moving behind a curtain. The tour freezes in place. A man appears from behind the curtain and walks directly through our group. We all jump. The man, seemingly annoyed by our presence, has come downstairs through a back staircase from the kitchen, heading to a food storage area behind us in another room. He is not a ghost. Just a restaurant cook, looking for supplies with exceptionally poor or perfect timing. The group takes a collective breath. Everyone is hoping for an experience. Our hearts are racing.
Our tour heads back upstairs to the dining room and then up another flight of new stairs to the third floor that once housed the rooms of the hotel. The walls are caked in the original plaster, cracked and peeling, exposing some of the original timber construction. The architecture is beautiful with half-moon doors possibly designed by infamous architect William Jay.
Caskey retells stories he’s heard from construction workers who attempted to renovate the space but were attacked by unexplained events, often dropping their tools mid-work and leaving never to return.
Connie Pinkerton, who co-owns Moon River with her husband John Pinkteron, has a simpler explanation for the un-renovated upper floors: money. The building’s owners are unwilling to shell out the millions it would take to complete renovations on the top two floors, especially when the main floors hold a thriving bar and restaurant.
Ghosts are good for business. These days, there is a never-ending list of walking ghost tours, ghost tours in the back of a used funeral hearse, ghost tours in a trolley, and ghost tours of the old houses, often led by a guide in period dress holding a lit candle. Patrons often buy drinks and food at the bars and restaurants they explore.
In 2019, Savannah’s tourism numbers grew to record levels as 14.8 million visitors, generating $3.1 billion dollars, according to the Savannah Chamber of Commerce. People often wander into Moon River asking for a ghost tour. Some guests ask for the “most haunted table,” which generates eye-rolls from the owner and servers.
However, Pinkerton, whose offices are on the third floor, has become so accustomed to unexplainable events she simply talks to the spirits, like Caskey. Every night before she locks the bar and heads home, she says an audible goodbye to whatever may be listening.
Hundreds of people who have entered Moon River have had some sort of unexplained experience. Tonight, however, our tour strikes out. We exit Moon River with a few new historically accurate stories to tell friends who haunt us about it.
haunting history
Outside Moon River, we march in time behind Caskey as passersby glance at him in his strange period garb, sometimes whispering “That’s a ghost tour!” At first glance, his period costume could easily be mistaken for a Confederate soldier. But he doesn’t solely wear Confederate clothes. He mixes both Union Army and Confederate outfits. The idea to wear period clothing came to him when he noticed that often his guests had trouble recognizing who the tour guide was. Now, period dress is a ubiquitous aspect of Savannah tours.
At Pour Larry’s, a few blocks away, we head downstairs to the basement bar. It’s well lit and mostly empty tonight. Caskey suggests we grab another drink, loiter and then meet back upstairs in the middle of Market Street for the ghost stories. But he gives us a homework assignment. While we are in the bar, we are asked to imagine what the building looked like in 1855 and take a guess what it was originally used for.
We gather back outside and share our wrong guesses. According to Caskey’s research the room was used to house enslaved people. He goes into one particularly terrible story about how an entire group of enslaved people were left to burn to death in the basement. It’s a horrific tale, punctuated by all the cruelties of slavery that perpetuated the South and especially Georgia when cotton was king and white men ruled with impunity. The story shifts the direction of the tour as we we all face the horrors of real history.
As we walk to our next stop, just around the corner, Mallory and I begin a conversation. She tells me how much she loves history, but feels tours have for too long not told the full story. The stories of enslaved people often act only as ornaments to the richly woven stories of the white owners and founders. But things are changing. Tours are changing.
At Molly McPherson’s we stand in the middle of the mostly empty bar and continue the conversation. Then outside on the curb, Caskey tells a ghost story that took place in a recent century. We venture, to our final stop, El-Rocko Lounge but never get to the ghost stories as our conversation continues around real history and our own histories and the conversation that we are all having, the reconciliation long overdue.
On another Friday night, Caskey finishes his story of the enslaved people’s deaths outside of Pour Larry’s. This time, four Black people have joined the tour. As they head to the next stop, one gentleman pulls Caskey aside and thanks him for telling the story. He says, “So many tours white wash those stories. But that was true. And it was brutal. And that’s what makes people remember.”
The story is incomplete. The history is incomplete. And now tours, have been reckoning with that. The dark tourism industry in Savannah is largely occupied by white people, both as guides, ghosts, and guests. Caskey admits that.
Under the moon, Caskey’s face illuminated by candlelight, on any given night of the week, you will probably find him, dressed as a Civil War soldier and guiding another group of people through Savannah’s history, where the only thing that truly haunts the city is its past.