Moon River Brewing Company (City Hotel)

The three-storey building at 21 West Bay Street opened in 1821 as the City Hotel, Savannah’s first hotel. It was built for Eleazer Early, to a design attributed to the Regency architect William Jay, and survived the great fire of January 1820 while still under construction. Besides its thirty-three rooms it housed the city’s first branch post office and a branch of the Second Bank of the United States. Guests included General Winfield Scott, the Marquis de Lafayette and John James Audubon, and one proprietor drew custom by charging admission to see a caged lion and lioness.

The hotel saw violence too. On 10 August 1832 a feud between two young men, James Jones Stark and Philip Minis, ended in the City Hotel bar when Minis shot Stark dead; Minis was tried for the killing. In 1854 the hotel stayed open through a yellow fever epidemic that killed some 650 Savannahians. It closed as a hotel shortly before General Sherman’s army reached the city in December 1864, and over the following century the building served as stores, a lumber and coal warehouse, general storage and an office-supply business, until Hurricane David tore off its roof in 1979.

After years empty, the building was renovated in the late 1990s and opened as the Moon River Brewing Company on 10 April 1999. Its ghost stories took hold during that period. Staff named the basement presence “Toby”; others told of a “Lady in White” on the unrestored upper floors, workers chased off by unseen forces during construction, and people pushed on the stairs. The brewery embraced the reputation, describing its home as one of Savannah’s “genuinely haunted” buildings, and it became a stop on the city’s ghost tours and on paranormal television – Ghost Hunters in 2005, Ghost Adventures in 2009 and BuzzFeed Unsolved in 2018.

Some of the darker claims attached to the building – that it served as a yellow-fever hospital where hundreds died, that its basement was a morgue, or that enslaved people were held there – circulate on tours without documentation; one Savannah ghost-tour company itself says there is no evidence for the basement story. Moon River Brewing closed on 16 June 2024, after twenty-five years. The building survives on Bay Street, but its haunted brewpub era has ended.

Staff and visitors described a presence nicknamed “Toby” in the basement, cold spots and indistinct voices there, a Lady in White on the upper floors, people being pushed on the stairs, and construction workers driven off the upper storeys by something unseen. Some tellings link activity to the 1832 shooting of James Stark.

The basement, the bar on the ground floor where Stark was shot in 1832, and the long-unrestored upper floors of the old hotel.

The brewery featured on Ghost Hunters, Ghost Adventures, BuzzFeed Unsolved and Most Terrifying Places, and was a regular stop on Savannah ghost tours. Its beers also won medals at the Great American Beer Festival.