Ghosts in the Gaslight: Victorian Séances in Old Savannah

The lamps are turned low in a Savannah parlor, casting flickering shadows on silk wallpaper. Around a mahogany table sit a dozen figures in evening dress, hand-in-hand despite the swelter of a coastal Georgia night. A medium in lace closes her eyes and sways as the air grows thick. Outside, Spanish moss drips from oak trees and a horse-drawn carriage’s hooves echo down the cobblestones. Inside, one question hangs in the hush: will the spirits speak tonight?

Spiritualism Sweeps the Victorian Era

The scene above could have played out in any number of Victorian-era homes, from London to New York – and indeed, even in Savannah, Georgia. During the mid-19th century, Spiritualism – the belief that the dead can communicate with the living – surged in popularity on both sides of the Atlantic. It all began in 1848 with two young sisters in New York (the Fox sisters) who claimed to communicate with a ghost through mysterious rapping sounds. In the decades that followed, séances (from the French word for “sitting”) became a fashionable pastime. By 1897, the Spiritualist movement boasted some eight million followers across the United States and Europe​. Parlors everywhere were hosting spirit circles, and even famous figures like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (creator of Sherlock Holmes) and magician Harry Houdini got involved – if only to expose fraudulent mediums riding the wave of this ghostly craze.

Victorian Spiritualism promised something tantalizing: proof of life after death, delivered not by clergy or scripture but by loved ones supposedly speaking from beyond the veil. The movement emerged at a time of great social and scientific change – a world suddenly straddling candlelight and electricity, superstition and science. Many earnest believers attended séances hoping for comfort or guidance from departed family members, while others treated these gatherings as sensational entertainment. Of course, not everyone was convinced. As reports of charlatans manipulating hidden trapdoors, glowing paint, or ventriloquism to fake ghostly phenomena spread, skeptics scoffed and church leaders condemned the practice. In October 1888, for instance, one of the original Fox sisters publicly confessed that their spirit communications had been a hoax, cracking toe joints to produce “rappings.” Newspapers everywhere – Savannah included – trumpeted this “Spiritualism’s Downfall” as the movement’s founder admitted it was all a fraud​. Yet even scandal and exposé could not fully squelch the Victorian fascination with the paranormal. People wanted to believe, and nowhere was that yearning more potent than in places acquainted with death.

Séances Come to Savannah

Savannah in the 19th century was just such a place. This genteel Southern city had seen more than its share of tragedy and loss – from yellow fever epidemics to Civil War battles and the everyday perils of a port town. Victorian Savannahians wore black mourning crape and tallied empty chairs at their dinner tables as often as any of their Northern counterparts. It’s little wonder that the Spiritualist movement quietly took root here, too, far from its upstate New York origins. In fact, Spiritualism found adherents across the American South, though often in a form tempered by the region’s religious culture. Unlike in the North, where Spiritualism became its own distinct religion, many Southern believers folded spirit communication into their Christian faith​. Communing with ghosts might occur in a parlor on Sunday evening after church – not in place of it. For the devout in Dixie, a séance could be seen as an extension of prayer: another way to reach heaven (or at least the nearby dead).

By the late 19th century, there were even organized Spiritualist meet-ups and visiting mediums in Georgia. Small Spiritualist churches and camps cropped up across the South. (A Spiritualist campground on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, for instance, drew notice in regional newspapers in the 1880s.) In Savannah, an esoteric religious group — the Church of the New Jerusalem (followers of Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg) — maintained an outpost by mid-century​. Swedenborgians were not Spiritualists per se, but they believed in communication with the spirit world and likely primed local interest in these mysteries. Savannah’s own First African Baptist Church even had symbols like a cosmogram in its basement for African-descended congregants to connect with ancestral spirits​, a reminder that seeking dialogue with the dead wasn’t entirely new to the region. In truth, this old city offered fertile ground for ghostly pursuits. Savannah was (and still is) literally built on its dead – cemeteries that once lay at the town’s edges were later absorbed by its growth, with homes and businesses constructed atop gravesites.. Now and then workmen would unearth a crumbling coffin or skull beneath a house, a grisly reminder of those restless residents beneath the foundations​. In such a haunted landscape, the living naturally wondered who might be lingering unseen.

Parlors of the Paranormal: High Society Séances

Behind the elegant facades of Savannah’s townhouses, parlors became theaters for the supernatural. It was usually after midnight, when the bustle of the port had quieted, that well-to-do residents might draw the curtains and gather a select few friends to “call upon spirits.” One can imagine a circle of fashionably dressed ladies and gentlemen seated around a polished table in a Greek Revival mansion off Chippewa Square. The gaslights would be turned down low to encourage any shy spirits to manifest. The medium – sometimes a hired professional from up North passing through town, other times a local hostess who discovered a “gift” – might invoke a prayer or play a somber melody on the piano to set the mood. Then the questions would begin in quavering voices: “Is Jack with us? Jack, can you hear me?” Perhaps a rap, rap, rap answered from the shadowy corner, causing someone to stifle a scream. Or the planchette of a writing board might scratch out a faint message from “beyond.” In some sessions, the heavy walnut table itself would tremble and lift off the floor, earning gasps in the dark. Table-tipping had become a popular parlor amusement by the 1870s, even among those who half-believed it – a whimsical test of gravity and ghost. And notably, these gatherings were one social arena in which women often took the lead. The Victorian era placed strict limits on women’s public roles, but as trance mediums or séance hostesses, women could speak with authority (albeit as vessels for someone else’s voice). In fact, for a time Spiritualism was one of the only ways women were allowed to speak in public and be taken seriously; many early suffragists and reformers got their start as acclaimed mediums, using the séance room to champion messages of hope and even women’s rights​. A Savannah newspaper in 1872 mused that the craze for spirit communication, with its “Babel of isms,” had drawn in all sorts of people, especially “the lunatics of Gotham” (i.e. New York) – but certainly some of Savannah’s own ladies and gentlemen were quietly conducting their own experiments in the occult​.

Not all seekers in Savannah were white or wealthy, of course. Spiritualism cut through social boundaries more than many movements of the day. After the Civil War, African-American communities in coastal Georgia and South Carolina had their own rich traditions of spirit contact. In Gullah-Geechee folklore, a person “born with a caul” (a veil of birth membrane over the face) was said to have second sight and the ability to see ghosts​. Local root doctors and conjurers practiced Hoodoo magic and might hold midnight rites at the edge of the swamp to consult spirits or lay restless souls to peace. These practices weren’t called “séances,” but they shared the same intent of bridging worlds. In 1870s Savannah, one might find a black spiritualist medium reading cards in the marketplace or a hoodoo practitioner leaving offerings at a crossroads – parallel forms of ghostly communication flourishing alongside the parlors of the white elite. The city’s haunted reputation was truly an egalitarian creation.

A Sensational Séance on Perry Street

Many of Savannah’s Victorian séance stories survive only as whispered local legends, but a few were vividly documented. One famous account comes from a nineteenth-century frame townhouse at Perry and Price Streets, where an attempt to contact the resident spirit yielded a frightful response. According to Margaret Wayt DeBolt, a Savannah historian of the supernatural, the family living in that home believed a ghost dwelled there and enlisted some intrepid friends to help investigate. One stormy night, the group gathered around a Ouija board in a candlelit room. Thunder rattled the windowpanes as they asked: “If a spirit is present, give us a sign.” For a long moment, nothing happened – the planchette refused to move. Then, as the winds outside rose to a gale, the room’s silence was shattered. A sudden freak gust tore through the oak trees on the street, and a heavy, gnarled branch came crashing down onto the ground just outside the very window where the séance was taking place​. Startled out of their wits, the participants regrouped and gingerly posed another question on the Ouija board: “Was that you? Please, give us a sign.” This time the planchette stirred under their fingers and spelled out a chilling reply: “I just did.”​

The blood drained from every face in the circle. The spirit, it seemed, had dramatically answered their challenge by nearly smashing their window with a fallen limb!

In the aftermath, that Perry Street séance became a bit of Savannah lore. For years, neighbors spoke of the old oak tree with a mix of fear and reverence. Decades later, Mrs. DeBolt interviewed a psychic who visited the house, unaware of its history, and reported feeling an overwhelming “discomfort” by the window where the branch had hit​. The sensitive claimed she sensed a presence there – perhaps the same spirit, still brooding by the scarred oak. To this day, residents exchange knowing glances when a violent thunderstorm rattles the window of that home. Was it merely coincidence, or did the restless ghost of Price and Perry truly flex its muscle that night? The tale certainly captures the dramatic flair of Savannah’s Victorian spirits.

Phantom Lessons: A Haunted House “Graduation”

Not all séances in Savannah’s papers were home-grown; sometimes the local press reprinted sensational ghost news from elsewhere. One 1894 Savannah Morning News article relates a hair-raising incident that sounds straight out of a penny dreadful. During a séance held in an old house (the account is from Allegheny, Pennsylvania, but Savannahians devoured it with glee), witnesses claimed a violent spirit interrupted the proceedings. As the circle of sitters sang a pleasant hymn in the darkness, the clairvoyants suddenly gasped: an apparition of an old woman had appeared in their midst!​

Without warning, this ghostly crone grabbed one lady and hurled her to the floor, then did the same to another​. Pandemonium broke out as chairs scraped and people screamed. The aggressive spirit then fled toward the cellar stairs. One brave female medium, gifted with clairvoyant sight, chased the entity – she later swore she followed a phosphorescent glow down into the pitch-black cellar!​ There the medium felt a tap on her shoulder and a cold breath on her neck, as if the unseen phantom had circled back behind her​. When she dashed upstairs, she found the rest of the sitters oblivious, now calmly chatting with more agreeable spirits that had come through the medium in trance. Only afterwards did they piece together what had happened: the rogue ghost was said to be an “earth-bound” spirit, the lingering shade of an old woman who had once lived in that very house and refused to move on​. In a curious twist, the Allegheny group resolved not to banish the spirit by force, but to educate her. They planned to hold further circles in the house to teach the stubborn ghost how to leave this world, hoping to “better its condition” so it would cease haunting the place​. The Morning News writer marveled that this was “a new and unprecedented move in the annals of spiritualism” – graduation day for a ghost, so to speak​. Savannah readers must have shook their heads in wonder at the idea of compassionate classroom séances for poltergeists. The story shows just how far Victorians would go in treating spirits as part of the family: even troublesome ghosts might be reformed with a little earnest guidance. Whether or not that Allegheny specter finally “saw the light,” the tale gave Savannahians much to discuss at their own tea tables (and perhaps a new idea if any local ghosts turned unruly!).

Socialites and Spiritualists of Savannah

Who were the people hosting and attending Savannah’s séances in the 1800s? Given the city’s size and prominence, it’s likely that many well-known families dabbled in the trend. The Cottons, Gordons, Sorrels, and Telfairs – the elite of Savannah – all suffered losses in the Civil War or to disease. Behind their mansion walls, some may have sought comfort in otherworldly conversation. Juliette Gordon Low, who would go on to found the Girl Scouts in the early 20th century, grew up in Savannah in the 1870s; while there’s no record that young Juliette joined any séances, she was certainly surrounded by the era’s spiritualist zeitgeist and later exhibited a lifelong belief in omens and fate. The Sorrel family, prominent merchants, experienced one of Savannah’s most notorious tragedies just as the spiritualist movement peaked. In 1860, Matilda Sorrel, the genteel wife of merchant Francis Sorrel, leapt to her death from a second-story balcony after discovering her husband’s affair with a young enslaved housemaid named Molly. Within weeks, Molly herself was found dead, hanging in the carriage house in an apparent suicide (though whispers of foul play swirled)​. The double scandal rocked Savannah society. We have no diary that tells us whether a grieving Francis Sorrel ever tried to contact Matilda or Molly’s spirits – but given the times, it isn’t impossible that someone in the Sorrel household attempted a quiet séance, desperate to apologize or understand. What we do know is that the Sorrel-Weed House, as the family home is now called, has been steeped in ghostly legend ever since. Visitors today routinely report uncanny phenomena in the house. Many have claimed to see a shadowy female figure in elegant 19th-century dress drifting forlornly along the upstairs hall – widely believed to be poor Matilda. Others swear they’ve encountered a second presence in the basement slave quarters, a woman overcome with despair, matching descriptions of Molly. Some guests even gasp for breath inexplicably, as if an unseen cord tightened around their neck – a chilling nod to Molly’s fate. These hauntings are so intense that paranormal investigators flock to the Sorrel-Weed House, hoping to record an EVP of Matilda sobbing or to capture Molly’s outline in flickering candlelight. The spirits of both women are said to linger, and a dark, oppressive atmosphere can envelop parts of the home​. Whether or not any Victorian séance ever summoned them at the time, today the mansion is a hotbed of ghostly communication. Modern psychic tours there sometimes feature “call and response” sessions in which visitors attempt to coax the two tragic souls to respond – essentially 21st-century séances carried out in the very rooms where Victorian scandal turned to horror. Savannah’s contemporary ghost lore thus reaches back to, and in a way re-enacts, the Victorian era’s own longing to commune with the restless dead.

Another of Savannah’s beloved haunts owes its legend to a tale of Victorian heartbreak. On a quiet corner of President Street stands the 17Hundred90 Inn, a rambling brick building partly dating to the 1820s and updated in the late 19th century. The inn is famous for housing the ghost of Anna, a young woman whose story is told with countless variations but always set in the 1800s. In the most popular version, Anna was a beautiful servant girl in the home, around the 1860s or 1870s, who fell deeply in love with a sailor. When her seafaring beau betrayed her – or simply sailed away never to return – the grief-stricken Anna threw herself from a third-floor window, plunging into the brick courtyard to her death​. Soon after, residents and neighbors began seeing a female apparition on the balcony, gazing toward the river where ships’ masts glide by. For over a century, unexplained activity has been attributed to Anna’s spirit in the inn: guests find their pillows inexplicably moved, windows opened, rocking chairs swaying with no one in them. Staff and visitors occasionally glimpse a forlorn woman in an old-fashioned dress flitting around the upper levels. Some nights, those walking past on the moonlit street have reported the sound of a sobbing cry and a sudden white flash above – as if Anna were re-enacting her fatal leap over and over in spectral form​. In recent years, ghost tour groups sometimes bring along Ouija boards or dowsing rods to Room 204 (said to be Anna’s favorite) to try and coax her into conversation. The results can be eerie: a flicker of the lights in answer to a direct question, or the faint scent of saltwater wafting through the closed room when a guide asks, “Anna, are you waiting for your sailor?” The legend of Anna shows how a single Victorian-era tragedy – whether fact or folklore – can spawn an enduring ghostly presence that keeps spiritualist practices alive in Savannah to this day.

And it’s not just human spirits that Victorians and their successors have tried to reach. Savannah has its share of animal ghosts as well, a peculiar but charming subset of local lore. The Davenport House, an elegant Federal-style home built in 1820 (and thus fully Victorian during its later occupants’ time), has long been rumored to host the apparition of a mischievous cat. The spectral feline has reportedly been seen darting around corners or felt brushing against visitors’ legs in empty rooms – much to the surprise of tourists (and the occasional real house cat that wants nothing to do with its invisible counterpart!). Mrs. DeBolt documented recurring sightings of this phantom cat, noting that no living cat was on the premises when paw prints appeared in dust or a phantom “meow” sounded from the upstairs bedrooms​. It seems even beloved pets might linger in Savannah’s ethereal menagerie, perhaps summoned by the affection of former owners who cannot let go. Meanwhile, over on Columbia Square, the grand Kehoe House (built 1892 by iron magnate William Kehoe) mixes romance with its hauntings. Visitors often speak of encountering the perfume of roses wafting through empty halls and sometimes catch a glimpse of a graceful lady in a satin gown gliding past a doorway​. One guest even recorded in the hotel ledger that they had a “pleasant ghostly experience” with a courteous presence. Could it be the spirit of Annie Kehoe, the matriarch, checking on her guests? Some say yes – that Mrs. Kehoe so loved her home, she chose to host eternally from the other side. During a Victorian séance in that house, one imagines, the table might well have quivered in recognition of her genteel spirit. Savannah’s haunted houses each carry such stories, blending history and legend until the living and dead feel oddly intertwined.

The Social (and Supernatural) Significance

Victorian séances in Savannah were more than parlor tricks; they were a reflection of the city’s soul in a time of profound change. The people who gathered in candlelit rooms to listen for taps and whispers were often coping with very real grief. The Civil War (1861-65) had devastated Georgia, claiming the lives of countless husbands, sons, and brothers. Yellow fever epidemics (such as the one in 1876) swept through Savannah’s streets, snuffing out life with terrifying randomness. Traditional mourning practices could be elaborate – heavy veils, mourning jewelry made from a lock of the loved one’s hair, months or years of societal withdrawal – but they offered no guarantee of emotional closure. The séance, however, dangled the thrilling possibility of immediate contact: one more chance to say goodbye, or to apologize, or simply to hear that familiar voice. It is easy to empathize with a bereaved mother on Oglethorpe Avenue in 1867, her eyes red from crying, who turns to a medium in desperation to reach the toddler she lost to fever. Or a businessman on Jones Street who has never recovered from his brother’s death at Gettysburg and finds himself, almost against his will, at a séance seeking reassurance that his brother rests in peace. For such people, Spiritualism in Savannah was not antithetical to Christianity but rather complemented it – a kind of emotional insurance that the preacher’s Sunday sermon about heavenly reunions was really true. Indeed, many local mediums framed their work in pious terms. They spoke of “the almighty God allowing spirits to commune” or described séances as “prayer circles” where those in heaven draw near. This made the practice more palatable in a God-fearing city. Still, there were ministers who railed against Spiritualism as the devil’s work. Some warned that a “demon in angel’s guise” might answer a mourner’s call instead of their loved one’s soul. Despite such warnings, interest in séances endured, often quietly, in polite society.

The cultural significance of Savannah’s Victorian séances also lies in their role as a form of social theater and intellectual curiosity. These gatherings were a chance for friends to bond through a shared eerie experience. Imagine the excited whispers among ladies at the market: “We tried the table-turning at Mrs. Habersham’s last night and you won’t believe – it moved!” or the skeptical laughter of men at the club: “Major Stephens swears his grandmother’s spirit rang a bell in his library. I told him he’d sampled one bourbon too many.” In a city that loved storytelling (a tradition that carries on robustly today), séances generated the best stories – intimate, speculative, and deliciously scary. They also sat at the intersection of science and mysticism. The late 1800s were the age of inventions, after all – telegraphs, X-rays, phonographs – wonders that made the unseen visible and the distant near. If electricity could invisibly illuminate a room at the flip of a switch (Savannah’s own Hamilton-Turner House was reputedly the first in the city to have electric lights in the 1880s, to neighbors’ awe), then why couldn’t an unknown energy also transmit messages from the dead? Some Savannah séance circles approached their “communications” with almost scientific rigor, logging knocks and table motions, experimenting with different séance protocols as if conducting laboratory trials. Others took a more whimsical, theatrical approach – hiring traveling stage mediums to perform feats of ghostly conjuration for an invited audience. In April 1876, for instance, an itinerant medium from New Orleans rented a hall in Savannah to demonstrate spirit trumpet calls and materializations for a fee; his show drew both enthusiasts and local reporters looking to debunk him. These events blurred the lines between sincere faith, entertainment, and charlatanism, making Victorian Savannah a microcosm of the wider Spiritualist movement’s impact on society.

Ghostly Legends and Lingering Lore

Moreover, Savannah’s ghost community today – from paranormal investigation teams to psychic mediums offering readings in quaint shopfronts – traces a lineage back to the Victorian spiritualists. For example, in the early 1900s (just after the Victorian era), a flamboyant medium named Madame Grace Gray DeLong made a splash in Savannah. In 1911 she announced her “First Public Appearance in Savannah” with a “Spiritual Séance identical to one she gave at The White House.”​(Whether or not she truly hosted a séance for a President, Madame DeLong used the claim to draw in local crowds.) She advertised her services in the Savannah Tribune and set up a shop on Broughton Street, where she offered palm readings and spirit messages to all comers. Her success – and the fact that Savannah had a thriving audience for her in the new century – suggests that the groundwork laid in Victorian times endured. Indeed, some of Savannah’s “haunted” families kept the faith in spirit communication across generations. Oral histories hint that in certain Savannah homes, a room might be set aside as a “spirit room” well into the 1900s, decorated with departed relatives’ portraits, where the family would occasionally attempt to contact those loved ones in the quiet hours. Thus, the city’s penchant for ghostly lore has been continuously stoked by real practices from the past.

A City in Two Worlds

Savannah’s Victorian séances occupy a special place in the tapestry of the city’s history: a golden-threaded embroidery of memory and mysticism. They remind us that the 19th century was not all starch manners and magnolia blossoms – it was also a time of deep spiritual questioning, of ordinary people reaching out for extraordinary answers. In those dim parlors perfumed with beeswax candles and fear, we see Savannahians engaging with the unknown in a way that was both uniquely Victorian and utterly timeless. The socialites, soldiers’ widows, merchants, and former slaves who sought out spirits were all, in their own fashion, trying to make sense of the mysteries of life and death that this beautiful, haunted city presented to them.

Today, if you find yourself wandering Savannah’s historic squares at dusk, you might catch yourself imagining what unseen presences drift among the gaslit flickers. The sigh of the wind in the live oaks sounds a bit like a whisper. A carriage lamp down the block blinks, and you wonder – was that the flicker of a long-gone lamplighter’s flame, or something more uncanny? The influence of those long-ago séances lingers in the very atmosphere here. Stand in the parlor of an old mansion on a quiet afternoon and listen closely; you might feel an inexplicable chill or hear the faint clink of what could be a teacup on a table – as if remnants of a ghostly gathering are still in session. Savannah lives comfortably with its phantoms, thanks in part to the Victorians who first invited them in for a chat.

In the end, the story of Victorian séances in Savannah is about hope and imagination as much as ghosts. It’s the story of people who refused to accept that the dead were truly gone. They turned keys in locks that perhaps were best left unopened, but in doing so they gave the city an enduring identity steeped in the supernatural. The next time you tour Savannah by night, when you hear a guide recounting how “Mrs. Johnson still walks these halls” or how “little Tim plays with his toys in the afterlife”, remember that these tales are the legacy of a 19th-century obsession. In those days, around a table lit by gaslight and belief, Savannah residents wove spooky, beautiful narratives to explain the unexplainable. Those narratives have never really left us. The Victorian séances may be over, the parlors empty – but listen closely, and Savannah’s ghostly conversation with its past is still very much alive, carried on the humid breeze and in every hushed tour guide’s tale. In this city, the veil between worlds remains thin, just as it was one hundred and fifty years ago when a circle of friends gathered in the dark and dared to ask the silence: “Is anyone there?”