Bonaventure Cemetery and Little Gracie

Bonaventure Cemetery lies on a bluff above the Wilmington River, on what was once Bonaventure Plantation. On 10 March 1846 Commodore Josiah Tattnall III sold the 600-acre plantation and its private burial ground to Peter Wiltberger, and burials began in 1850. A private company ran it as Evergreen Cemetery from 1868 until 1907, when the City of Savannah bought it, made it public and gave it its present name. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001. Its Spanish-moss oaks and sculpted monuments have drawn writers since John Muir camped there for six days in 1867, and John Berendt’s 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil made it world-famous. Singer and songwriter Johnny Mercer and poet Conrad Aiken are buried here.

The best-loved grave belongs to Gracie Watson, a child whose family ran the Pulaski House hotel on Johnson Square. She was born on 10 July 1882 and died on 22 April 1889, aged six, of pneumonia complicated by blood poisoning, just after Easter. Her parents asked Savannah sculptor John Walz to carve a life-size marble statue from a photograph, and it was set over her grave in 1890. It is one of the few funerary monuments in Georgia made in a child’s exact likeness. Her obituary in the Savannah Morning News called her a general favourite among the hotel’s guests. Her parents later left for New York and are buried there, not in Savannah.

Folklore grew up around the statue. One story says that if toys or gifts left at the grave are taken, the statue weeps tears of blood. Another says rubbing it brings luck. Ghost-tour writers add that Gracie’s laughter was heard under the back staircase of the Pulaski House after her death, that staff there refused to go into the basement, and that a girl in a white dress has been seen skipping across the cemetery grass or at a window of the building at Bryan and Bull Street where the hotel once stood. One tour guide says that in spring 2002 she saw a four-storey building reflected in windows beside Johnson Square that was not there, and that a historic photograph of the Pulaski matched it. These accounts are undated or anonymous and have not been independently checked.

A Savannah Morning News columnist who walks past the grave several times a week reports that she has never seen the statue cry, and the Bonaventure Historical Society has a practical interest in the legends: gifts left on the iron fence have rusted it, and coins and toys can stain or chip the pink marble step. The society, which fenced the grave in 1999, asks visitors to leave nothing at the monument. As a real child’s grave, it is best visited quietly and with respect, and the cemetery itself is a working historic burial ground, not a place to be in after hours.

Visitors and guides report a child in a white dress skipping on the grass, a statue that “weeps” if offerings are removed, a child’s laughter near the old hotel site and cold or uneasy feelings at the grave. Rubbing the statue is said to bring luck.

Gracie Watson’s grave within the cemetery, the surrounding oaks and lanes, and the site of the old Pulaski House near Johnson Square in downtown Savannah.

Bonaventure appears in John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and Clint Eastwood’s 1997 film of it, whose “Bird Girl” statue was moved to the Telfair Museums. Gracie Watson’s statue is among the most photographed graves in Georgia, and Savannah ghost tours and volunteer history tours visit it.