Sorrel-Weed House

The house on Madison Square was designed in 1836 by architect Charles Cluskey for Francis Sorrel, a wealthy shipping merchant and one of the richest men in Savannah. At about 10,000 square feet, with Greek Revival columns and English Regency touches, it is one of the city’s finest antebellum houses and in 1954 became one of the first two buildings in Georgia designated a state landmark. Sorrel’s son Gilbert Moxley Sorrel grew up there and became one of the youngest generals in the Confederate army; Robert E. Lee, an old friend of Francis Sorrel, visited in 1861–62 and again in 1870.

The household depended on enslaved labour. Records show Francis Sorrel held between three and eleven enslaved people a year and sold people including Minda, Louisa and Virginia – two women and a ten-month-old child. Henry D. Weed bought the house in 1859, and his family kept it until 1914. In the twentieth century it housed a clothing store, Lady Jane, run by the Cohen family; Stephen Bader bought it in 1996 and reopened it as a museum in 2005.

The house’s ghost legend took shape as Savannah’s ghost-tour industry grew. Its central tale says Francis Sorrel had an affair with a sixteen-year-old enslaved servant named Molly, that his wife, Matilda, discovered it and died by suicide, and that Molly was then murdered and hidden in the carriage house. Ghost Hunters investigated for a 2005 Halloween special, and the house went on to appear on Ghost Adventures, The Most Terrifying Places in America and BuzzFeed Unsolved.

The documentary record does not support the Molly story. Matilda Sorrel’s death is real, but when the Digging Savannah archaeology programme at Armstrong State University (now part of Georgia Southern) excavated the carriage house basement in the spring and autumn of 2017, the depression in the floor said to mark a hidden grave turned out to be a deep pit – probably a late-nineteenth-century trash pit – holding animal bone, glass, ceramics, corroded metal and a piece of jewellery, and no human remains. Student researcher Kelly Westfield did find that a young enslaved woman named Molly, owned by Francis Sorrel, was sent by steamship to New York in 1855: proof that a Molly lived in the household, but nothing that supports the tale of her murder. Historians note that the legend nonetheless echoes the very real sexual abuse enslaved women suffered – which is why the house’s real enslaved residents, whose names survive in the records, deserve to be remembered as people rather than as props in a ghost tale.

Tour guides, visitors and television investigators describe a woman’s figure taken to be Matilda Sorrel, voices and cries attributed to the carriage house, cold spots, the feeling of being touched, and unexplained sounds on audio recorders.

The carriage house and its basement, the courtyard, the main staircase and the parlours, especially on the nightly ghost tours inside the house.

The roof of the house supplied the opening shot of Forrest Gump (1994), and the house is one of the most promoted stops on Savannah’s ghost-tour circuit, featured in many “most haunted” lists and paranormal programmes.