Well, this doesn’t qualify as a PEI story but kind of interesting anyway. Last month my husband and I took a trip to Savannah Georgia, purportedly the second-most haunted city in the US (after Salem). The last night we were there I took a carriage ride ghost tour. For a number of reasons, a significant portion of Savannah was built over grave sites. According to this CNN article:
It’s not strange in Savannah to sleep on parts of a cemetery. The city’s unofficial saying, “Savannah was built on its dead,” pays homage to its grave beginnings.
Scott’s tour starts in the parking lot of a diner where the asphalt hides the past. “Beneath us,” the guide said, “is the corner boundary of an old slave cemetery.”
After Colonial Park closed in 1852, renovations salvaged headstones dislodged by hurricanes and vandalism, said Robert Edgerly of See Savannah Walking Tours.
Other stories detail how settlements and battlefields left unorganized colonial gravesites scattered around the city. Lile estimated the historic section of Savannah covers seven cemeteries, with at least 9,000 graves.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more,” said Robert Edgerly of See Savannah Walking Tours. “There’s at least 14,000 documented graves in Colonial Park Cemetery alone,” Edgerly said, but it is hard to know for sure as not all of them lie within the current boundaries of the cemetery.
And then there were battles, lots of public hangings, epidemics, pirates and other skullduggery-doers. All of which combine to make Savannah a ghostly hot spot.
The public squares in Savannah are gorgeous: huge, old Southern Oaks with incredible canopies of long, long branches aching over amazing areas.
Lots of Spanish moss hanging down, although not everywhere. It seems almost ubiquitous but there are some squares and some portions of otherwise moss-laden squares where Spanish moss refuses to grow. The story is that it will not grow where innocent blood has been spilled and our tour guide could give us historically-based theories as to why some areas had none: None growing, for example, in the area of the square where Rene Asche Rondolier was strung up.
Rene is said to be active, these days, as a poltergeist. His ghost has been rumored to haunt Colonial Park Cemetery.
And then there’s Little Gracie Watson
Gracie was the daughter of W.J. Watson and his young wife, Frances, who ran Pulaski House, at that time one of the best hotels in Savannah. Gracie was said to be a very endearing child and a little hostess, who was doted upon by her parents and guests alike.
Sadly, Gracie died shortly before her sixth birthday. Her distraught parents had a life-sized statue of their darling carved, to be situated in the Bonaventure Cemetery. It’s said that people visiting Gracie’s grave sometimes here a young child calling out for her parents. Visitors have reported seeing tears on the statue’s marble cheeks.
Pulaski House, in common with many historic buildings in Savannah, is now part of the S.C.A.D. (Savannah College of Art & Design). Students have reported seeing Gracie wandering the halls or skipping up the front walkway .
There were more stories, often with individuals wronged in one way or another still lingering, especially around those public squares.
As we passed the square reputed to be the most haunted in the city, I saw blue lights dancing around a bush. I said I’d seen them but the tour guide didn’t seem to be tremendously interested. Maybe focused on winding up the tour or maybe didn’t want to actually scare the clients.
As we rode on, up the next block, I saw blue lights around one of the horses. Just as I leaned forward to see if there was any common-place kind of explanation for them, the horses shied. “What was that?” said one of the people on the tour, obviously startled. The tour guide answered that one of the horses had tripped, which scared the other.
Maybe he didn’t see the blue lights around the horse. But I did.
