A walk at the fence line: an introduction
Night gathers early beneath the oaks. The fence of Colonial Park Cemetery runs along Abercorn Street like a ribcage, each iron picket cool under the palm, each bar holding back an acreage of shadows and names. The air smells of river and wet leaf. Somewhere a bicycle ticks past on Oglethorpe Avenue. You listen, and the cemetery listens back: a soft shift of moss, a whisper of palmetto, the dry chatter of a night insect that seems far louder than it should.
This is where the stories begin. A towering figure in the gloom. Unnatural footfalls along the sandy paths. The suggestion of a body suspended among the limbs of an old tree. Guides tell it with a hush: Rene Asche Rondolier, the giant of Savannah. The name lingers like a chill, and the gate behind you seems to breathe.
What follows is a careful reckoning. The legend is gripping. The place is real. The record is stubborn. Together they show how Savannah’s ghosts walk the narrow path between what can be documented and what will not let itself be forgotten.
Orientation: where we are, and why it matters
Colonial Park Cemetery sits in the heart of the Historic District, address 200 Abercorn Street, bounded by East Oglethorpe Avenue to the north, Habersham Street to the east, East Perry Lane to the south, and Abercorn Street to the west. Six acres of ground cradle more than a century of burials. It began in the mid eighteenth century as Savannah’s primary public cemetery. In 1853, the city closed it to new interments; four decades later, in 1896, the grounds were shaped into the park-like space visitors know today.
To walk the interior is to read a condensed primer on the city’s early life: epidemics that stripped families, militia and statesmen laid with the common dead, markers re-sited along the back wall, dates that speak of childish ages and hard winters. In a city whose plan favors order and repetition, squares like beads on a thread, the cemetery is a pocket of human interruption. Its oaks are heavy with Spanish moss. Its open paths absorb small sounds. It has become, over the last century, a stage for stories told after dark.
The legend of Rene Asche Rondolier, according to many retellings, blooms in precisely this setting. The claim that follows varies in color and in detail: a very tall and deformed man, a child’s death or two near the grounds, an enraged crowd, a hanging near the cemetery, then a persistence of ghostly sightings within the fence line. In some versions, he lived adjacent to the cemetery. In others, he hid in “catacombs,” a word that does a lot of atmospheric work for a city with brick vaults and old drains, but very little descriptive work for the exact structures beneath our feet.
The cemetery matters to this story because it anchors Savannah’s memory. It also offers a paper trail of human events. That trail, tested carefully, is where the legend meets its first long shadow.
These waypoints are not atmospheric suggestions, they are the spine of the cemetery’s public record. The names on the stones are real. The boundary streets are precise. The closures and alterations are matters of city policy and past city action. The ground is the ground. This matters because any claim of murder, of lynching, or of exceptional public violence on or near this spot should ripple through the ordinary paper trail of a nineteenth century town: coroners’ inquests, church burial registers, court records, newspaper notices, diaries, or memoirs. For the legend’s most dramatic elements, that ripple has not surfaced.
Folklore and hauntings: what the story says
The Rene story appears in many tour scripts and popular articles, often with these recurring elements:
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The man: Rene Asche Rondolier, described as remarkably tall, sometimes “over seven feet,” often disfigured or “hideous,” a marginal figure whose strength frightened neighbors.
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The crimes: the killing of small animals in youth, then the murder of one or two young girls near or inside the cemetery.
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The capture: a crowd or mob seizes Rene, sometimes after “finding” him in underground tunnels or vaults.
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The execution: a hanging in or near the cemetery, occasionally shifted into the swamps by a few tellings, or placed in a nearby square.
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The ghost: a towering silhouette seen along the paths, or a figure glimpsed as if suspended among limbs in the rear of the grounds, the so-called “hanging tree.”
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The nickname: “Rene’s Playground,” sometimes offered as a colloquial moniker for Colonial Park due to repeated sightings.
This is gripping theater, and theater always carries seeds from something human: fear of the outsider, concern for children, the moral certainty of a crowd, the satisfaction of naming a shape you see at night. Stories with this shape thrive in American cities where nineteenth century records are robust but public imagination is richer still. They stick because they are vivid. They spread because they are easy to repeat and hard to disprove on a sidewalk at 9 p.m.
First print traces, and a hard look at the archive
So what do the records say. Research across city histories, cemetery policies, nineteenth century compendia, and modern historical summaries shows the following:
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The cemetery’s dates, boundaries, and closure year are well documented.
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The nineteenth century histories and chronological digests that delight in listing tragedies, fires, duels, and public crimes do not mention a giant child-killer named Rene, nor a pair of sensational child murders at the cemetery, nor a public lynching tied to such a case.
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Modern city resources and carefully researched essays lay out the cemetery’s real development and debunk common embellishments, including the notion that eighteenth century hangings occurred from specific, still-standing shade trees.
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The widely shared claim that Rene’s tale inspired Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” lacks any credible scholarly footing. It appears to be a late graft onto the legend, attractive because it flatters Savannah’s global reach and because the story of a misunderstood giant invites a literary echo.
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Tour companies, local blogs, and popular ghost storytelling sites repeat the Rene narrative frequently, often with minor variations in spelling and detail. Some of those same storytelling sources also caution that the Rene tale does not survive contact with the archive.
The absence noted above is not a trivial silence. Savannah’s newspapers in the early nineteenth century loved a sensational incident. The city’s church records pay close attention to deaths and burials. Major crimes generate noise in court records and local histories. A claim of two murdered girls in or near the public cemetery, followed by a lynching connected to the case, should leave multiple traces. That expected ripple is missing.
Does absence prove the man did not exist. Not absolutely. But it does place the burden solidly on the side of those who claim details, dates, and names. Until the kind of document that anchors a life appears, the story must be handled as folklore: powerful, instructive, and entertaining, yet not verified.
Where stories and soil meet: possible origins and reasons the tale endures
Legends are rarely invented in a day; they condense from different clouds:
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Landscape and sightlines: Colonial Park’s interior amplifies suggestion. Tall trees create layered darkness; the back wall of headstones gathers mismatched epitaphs; the paths of compressed sand whisper underfoot. Night adds weather, fog, and distance. This is ideal ground for a “tall man in the shadows.”
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Epidemics and young graves: the 1820 yellow fever season wrote many child deaths into Savannah’s burial record. The scale of that sorrow invites stories that try to explain it.
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Nineteenth century dueling and violence nearby: the city had its share of duels and street violence. Even if those acts did not occur in the cemetery, memories of sudden death near the grounds coat the place with hazard.
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The “tunnel” imagination: Savannah’s vaults, drains, and rumored passageways feed stories about underworlds beneath ordinary streets; once a story crawls underground, it often emerges larger than it went in.
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Tourism and the market for chills: from the late twentieth century onward, ghost walks became a staple. Stories that travel well on foot, that fit succinctly between lamppost and cross street, rise to the front. Rene’s tale is perfectly portable.
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A moral shape that satisfies: a frightening outsider, a threatened child, a community that responds, and a restless return after death. This pattern moves listeners and sticks.
When we coax the story back toward history, some features soften. The “hanging tree,” for example, is better treated as a symbolic device: a way to pin human violence to a physical limb. The claim that a particular tree in a particular square held eighteenth century hangings is not supported by the simple fact of the city’s arbor history, which places shade trees in the squares later than many storytellers suggest. Inside the cemetery, one can respect the power of the image while noting that official records do not confirm the execution site.
dusk inside the fence
Entry comes by the arch at Abercorn and Oglethorpe. The stone breathes out the day’s heat. You move past the gate into a soft decline of quiet, the city behind you filtered to an occasional brake squeak, a laugh, a bell. Moss dangles like gray script. On your right, a tablet leans at a respectful angle, its letters worn pale. To the left, a low vault with a brick barrel roof holds the measured air of an old cellar.
Walk toward the center path. The ground under your shoes sounds dry and faintly granular, as if someone sifted time until it fell to this texture. Midway in, pause to feel the temperature pocket change, a cooler swell where the shade gathers thick. A bird calls once, then refuses to repeat itself.
At the rear, the collected headstones face inward, rescued from disruption and arranged in a tidy melancholy. Dates leap, decades apart. Epitaphs contradict. The wall is a quiet museum of human error and vandalism, then of municipal repair. It explains a lot about how memory is curated in Savannah: sorted, saved, sometimes misread, then offered back to the public with care.
Stand along East Perry Lane a moment and look across the grass toward the large trees. Light slides along a branch, and the silhouette presents a familiar shape. This is where suggestion fills in gaps. At night, our eyes find what our minds have been told to seek. You can see why Rene’s story thrives here. The trees are large enough to invite an image; the scale of the place is small enough to feel close to whatever that image is.
Remember the iron fence that felt like a ribcage. Remember the hush far inside. Legends take breath from places like this because the places themselves tell us to lower our voices and listen harder. Rene Asche Rondolier, whether born from a misremembered nineteenth century figure or assembled by late twentieth century need, walks in that hush.
The historian’s job is not to banish him. It is to place him where he belongs: in the archive when documents appear, in folklore when documents do not, in the night air when the city’s leaves rustle and a human shape composes itself between light and dark. If you want to test the story, come stand at the fence as evening falls. If you want to hear it told with care, with a steady hand on the line between fact and feeling, join us. Haunted Savannah Tours knows the difference, and we know why both sides of it matter.