Colonial Park Cemetery—The Other Burial Ground
Image being on a ghost tour in Savannah and witnessing a rare sighting of a soul from the grave first hand. This is what happened in November, 2001. James Caskey, a tour guide is leading a group of tourists when he noticed several people looting intensely at something. Turning around the guide saw a mist, four to five feet high rising from the ground, swirling and then disappearing.
This is one of many ghostly appearances to have occurred in Colonial Park Cemetery—the other burial ground in Savannah. Consecrated in 1750, this is the oldest graveyard; located right in the middle of the city. There are 700 headstones in the cemetery but twelve thousand are believed buried here. When the community expanded, the boundaries of the cemetery shrank. So when Savannah’s population say the city is built on it’s dead believe them.
Along Abercrombie Street tourists will notices several “depression and humps” along the sidewalk. It is believed they are from buried coffins which have “ collapsed under the weight of the bricks and earth over them.” The cemetery would stop burying the dead in 1896 and includes yellow fever victims (please see post on the yellow fever epidemic on this site), Civil War veterans and several victims of violence. Colonial Park Cemetery is now a tourist memorial to the victims of Savannah’s history and their connection with the Belle of the South.
People who are buried here includes:
—Button Gwinnett— Signer of the Declaration of Independence. Killed in a duel with Lachlan McIntosh
—Lachlan McIntosh—a military and strategist. Buried a few feet from Button Gwinnett
—Archibald Bulloch—Signer of the Declaration of Independence and defended the colony of Georgia during the American War from Britain. The great-great grandson of Theodore Roosevelt, he died under mysterious circumstances.
There are also many headstones that have been changed and lists the names of the dead as much older than they were. An example of this is that of Susannah Gray. A young woman who passed at age 21 her tomb though, reads, age “121 years and 1,121 days” This and other changes to headstones are attributed to the Union Army, which camped here in 1864.
Thomas McGovern Jr 