State file · GA
Haunted places in Georgia
What are the most haunted places in Georgia? The best-known are Sorrel-Weed House, Chickamauga Battlefield and Moon River Brewing Company (City Hotel).
Georgia’s ghost capital is Savannah, the city James Oglethorpe laid out around its grid of squares in 1733. Two centuries of yellow fever, fire, war and slavery, preserved in one of the largest historic districts in the country, have made it one of America’s busiest ghost-tour towns: on any evening, lantern-carrying guides lead groups past Greek Revival mansions, old hotels and taverns, and colonial burial grounds.
- 3 hauntings
- 12 recorded sightings
- 2 news stories
Haunted places in Georgia
Sorrel-Weed House
A grand Greek Revival house on Savannah’s Madison Square whose famous ghost story of a murdered enslaved girl named Molly finds no support in the records. Widely reported
Chickamauga Battlefield
The north Georgia battlefield of September 1863, where some 34,000 men fell – and where legend says a green-eyed figure still prowls at night. Regional legend
Moon River Brewing Company (City Hotel)
Savannah’s first hotel, built in 1821, later a brewpub whose staff and TV ghost hunters described thrown objects and shadowy figures. Regional legendThe ghost lore of Georgia
That popularity has a cost. Savannah’s ghost industry has produced stories that the record contradicts – an enslaved girl named Molly at the Sorrel-Weed House who appears in no family document, basements said to have held enslaved people or plague victims without any evidence. The real history behind these places, including the lives of the enslaved men, women and children who built and worked in them, is better documented and deserves to be told on its own terms.
Beyond Savannah, the most visited haunted ground is the Chickamauga battlefield in the state’s north-west corner, where the legend of “Old Green Eyes” stalks the site of one of the war’s bloodiest battles. Other ghost-hunting destinations include Macon, Milledgeville and Augusta, the coastal Golden Isles and the Civil War prison site at Andersonville, now a National Historic Site honouring prisoners of war.
Ghost-hunting hotspots
- Savannah Historic District
Oglethorpe’s grid of squares, lined with antebellum houses, inns and taverns, is the heart of Georgia’s ghost-tour trade.
- Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah
A Victorian garden cemetery under live oaks and Spanish moss, made famous by Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
- Colonial Park Cemetery, Savannah
The city’s eighteenth-century burial ground, including victims of the 1820 yellow fever epidemic, with many legends attached.
- Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park
The 1863 battlefield where the Old Green Eyes legend is told – open by day only.
- St. Simons Island
A Golden Isles resort island with a historic lighthouse and long-standing coastal ghost stories.
Timeline
- 10 August 1832A fatal shooting in the bar Moon River Brewing Company (City Hotel)
A long-running quarrel ended when Philip Minis shot James Jones Stark in the hotel bar. Minis stood trial for the killing.
- 1836Cluskey designs the house Sorrel-Weed House
Architect Charles Cluskey designed the mansion on Madison Square for merchant Francis Sorrel.
- 1862The Weed family takes possession Sorrel-Weed House
Businessman Henry D. Weed, who had agreed to buy the house in 1859, moved in; his family held it until 1914.
- 18–20 September 1863The Battle of Chickamauga Chickamauga Battlefield
Three days of fighting left about 16,000 Union and 18,000 Confederate casualties, including nearly 4,000 killed.
- 1876An early encounter Chickamauga Battlefield
Catoosa County historian Susie Blaylock McDaniel recorded a resident’s story of meeting a strange creature on the road home from Chattanooga’s centennial celebrations – often cited as the first account behind Old Green Eyes.
- 1890America’s first national military park Chickamauga Battlefield
Congress authorised Chickamauga and Chattanooga National Military Park, dedicated in September 1895.
- 1976 (as retold)A ranger’s account, as retold Chickamauga Battlefield
According to ghost-lore retellings, park ranger Edward Tinney said in a 1981 interview that a green-eyed figure had appeared before him in the pre-dawn darkness and then vanished. No newspaper or park record of the interview has been found.
- 10 April 1999Moon River Brewing opens Moon River Brewing Company (City Hotel)
The restored building opened as a brewpub, and staff stories about ghosts in the old hotel soon spread.
- October 2005Ghost Hunters Halloween special Sorrel-Weed House
TAPS investigated the house for a Halloween episode, the same year it reopened to the public as a museum with nightly ghost tours.
- 17 July 2009Ghost Adventures episode Moon River Brewing Company (City Hotel)
The Travel Channel series investigated the brewery, four years after a Ghost Hunters Halloween special had filmed there.
- 2017Archaeologists check the “grave” Sorrel-Weed House
Excavations in the carriage house basement, reported by Kelly Westfield for the Digging Savannah programme in spring and autumn 2017, found that a depression linked to the Molly legend was a trash pit, not a burial.
- 16 June 2024The brewpub closes Moon River Brewing Company (City Hotel)
Moon River Brewing served its last customers after 25 years, ending the building’s life as a haunted-tour stop.
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