If you do one thing in Savannah…let it be exploring the city’s haunted history. In particular, you should book the ‘Beyond the Good and Evil’ tour with Ghost City Tours. This spooky Savannah tour ranks up there among the best tours I’ve ever taken, if not the best. It was the perfect amount of unsettling and comedic.
For starters, I happened to be having a bad bit of anxiety that evening and was extremely uneasy about taking this tour for that reason. Hearing about death and murder usually makes my anxiety worse, maybe that’s just me, because, you know, I’m a normal person. After hemming and hawing about if I should cut my losses and skip the tour, I could not have been more thankful that I decided to go ahead with my original plans.
An Aussie Guide for Our Spooky Savannah Tour.
Our tour guide was an Aussie, and as such, had an incredible sense of humor and a lovable and sarcastic style. His wit was truly unparalleled. In fact, we were doubled over in laughter within the first five minutes of meeting him. He was theatrical, immersive, and kept the attention of our entire group the whole tour.
We met at a cemetery where he divulged the story of a strange man named Rene Rondolier who would sneak into the cemetery at night because he had no other place to go. Who knows why, I forgot. Anyway, he frightened the folks in town, and when a few of the neighborhood children suddenly went missing, the people in town assumed that he did it and murdered him. So, there.
But, even after he died, children went missing, so it clearly wasn’t him. I find mob violence especially unsettling. So, while the cemetery tale wasn’t the eeriest story of the night, it certainly turned my stomach. Or maybe that was just the dinner we had.
The Mercer-Williams Home.
A visit to the infamous Mercer House was just one of the many stops on our tour. Our guide explained the fascinating and intense horror-filled history of each place, but laced jokes and humor into every story. It was a touch exhausting to constantly vacillate between feelings of terror and being on the verge of pissing my pregnant pants from laughter in the next moment, but that’s the glamorous life of a travel writer, baby.
Anyway, the Mercer home is infamous because of a series of deaths that happened there, shocking. One tragically true tale is that when the house was abandoned for some time, an eleven-year-old boy named Tommy Downs went inside, for reasons still unclear, and fell to his death. He landed on a spike on a fence, thus being impaled.
Before that, a man named Jim Williams who had a reputation for throwing wild parties owned the home. His gay lover, Danny Hansford, was shot dead there. After being tried four times with a slew of verdicts that were always thrown out, Williams was found not guilty. Allegedly, one day he came home, had a heart attack in the spot where Hansford was shot, and then died.
Having been featured in the popular novel and film, Midnight in The Garden of Good and Evil, this is Savannah’s most popular haunted home.
432 Abercorn.
Our Savannah ghost tour also included the house at 432 Abercorn. That sounds like a football play, but it’s not. At least not that I know of. The history of this house in particular scared me a lot. It has the residual energy of slavery, Native American slaughter, war, disease, child abuse, and allegedly murder and suicide. I’m a pretty perceptive person, and I could feel the awful energy radiating from the home. It really made me jittery. Lately, I’ve been reading up on the home, and it’s very typical for people to feel that way around the place. Even though we were rather far away, I refused to walk anywhere near it. The aura just felt damning. DAMNING!
After hearing a slew of haunted history on the place, our guide finished the tale with a vignette about there actually being a nice family moving in recently, and putting up a Christmas tree in their window in December and them loving the house entirely. He joked that for the month of December, his credibility in bringing guests there to hear about the terror was just not as effective.
Highly Recommend This Savannah Ghost Tour!
To be honest, I’m not sure how much truth there was to ANY of the stories our guide told. But, I enjoyed every moment of this tour. The guide’s ability to work impromptu occurrences that unexpectedly happened throughout the night into his comedy bit was nothing short of genius.
Savannah is known for its pervasive haunted history and spooky vibe. So, I felt I had the best opportunity to see so much of that in a unique way on this tour. There were a ton more stories and places that we saw — I haven’t even touched the surface. Learn more by booking a tour when you visit this ghostly city!
Not into the spooky stuff? Check out Savannah’s most charming hotel instead.
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