Beautiful Savannah, Part 5

Sketching in the eerie Bonaventure Cemetery, and a ghost named Gracie

The famous gravesite of Little Gracie Watson. The lifelike statue was sculpted in 1890 by a recent German immigrant named John Walz.

Join me and my friends as we explore the gorgeous city of Savannah, Georgia, “The Hostess City of the South,” from the stunning historic district to the bustling waterfront, from the famous avenue of live oaks at Wormsloe State Historic Site, to the spooky Bonaventure Cemetery—here we go!

This is Beautiful Savannah, Part Five. Find the previous editions here, which include adventures in and around the historic district and Savannah’s waterfront, and a trip to Wormsloe State Historic Site.

Cheerful spirits

I’ll start off by saying, this story leans a bit toward the uncanny. But, it doesn’t start out that way.

Donna, Veronica, Max, Jake, and I had just come from Wormsloe State Historic Site, where we rode bicycles along the famous mile-and-a-half avenue of moss-draped live oaks. For me, this was a high point. The sun was out, everyone was in cheerful spirits, and the breeze felt good on my face as we coasted easily on the level ground.

Bonaventure Cemetery was our next stop, and Donna was especially excited about it. She and Veronica hopped on the stretch golf cart for a guided tour while the guys headed off to explore the 160-acre cemetery on foot. Jake and I had our sketchbooks in hand.

“You’ll never find Gracie Watson’s grave! This place is huge!” Donna shouted as we made our way toward the walking path, and she settled back into her golf cart seat. In retrospect, that cart looked like a mighty comfy and convenient way to see everything.

By trade Donna is a florist; well-kept graves with beautiful flowers might have had special appeal. In fact I used to work at her flower shop in Burbank (and so did Veronica), and we all spent a great deal of time around undertakers, funerals, and the deceased, delivering beautiful sprays designed by Donna or her assistant Karla, and placing flowers at gravesites.

Max on his bike at Wormsloe State Historic Site. Early in the day we enjoyed a carefree bicycle ride beneath beautiful, moss-draped oaks. Later, we would visit spooky Bonaventure Cemetery.

Cemeteries might creep some people out, but I got used to it. In fact, sometimes it was quite nice to see a few deer (even though you knew that they’d be eating the flowers as soon as you left). Or a sprinkler would turn on, and the mist would be so cool on your skin in the dry heat of Southern California.

It’s true that I’ve had sad experiences with cemeteries; but I honestly did not mind walking around alone, placing flowers for work. The cemetery in Los Angeles was clean and relatively new; grave markers were flat, offering unobstructed views of the sunny hillside. Sometimes my flower placements at the regulars’ graves felt like visiting old friends.

It was somehow easy and light.

A sense of gloom pervades

Let me tell you something. Bonaventure Cemetery definitely does not feel “easy and light.”

Laid out during the Victorian era, Bonaventure is claustrophobic, thick with darkness in the broad daylight. Imposing monuments of granite and marble are darkly patinated with age. Statues’ frozen faces weep tears of mildew. Lichens creep into eyes and noses of stone, and cold, impassive lips. Hanging moss—romantic and charming just hours ago at the Wormsloe Estate—is now an ominous and foreboding symbol, a phantom gliding through gnarled branches of ancient trees.

Not that I’m suggesting you shouldn’t go.

Bonaventure is a perennial favorite among tourists. Everything is quite beautiful and mysterious to behold. And my travel-mates seemed to take it all in stride. But I believe it is eerie. So very, very eerie. Few places in my life have harbored such an atmosphere of palpable heaviness. The air is dense; a sense of gloom pervades. I’ve been to at least two strange houses that made me feel this same way.

On one occasion I was asked by a friend to help housesit her parents’ cabin, deep in a wooded valley of its own. To get there, we pushed open a metal gate that groaned on its hinges, pulled in the car, and locked the gate behind us. We drove slowly down a bumpy, twisting trail through the shadowy, wooded valley, and finally reached the cabin. Inside, we found the television on, and the radio off—the opposite of how it had been left. My friend turned to me with a pained expression on her face and threw her hands up. “OK, I have to admit something—I definitely believe this place is haunted…”

On another occasion I was renovating a house where I always felt watched when I was alone. I later learned that a deadly fire had consumed part of the same structure in the 1960s. Bizarre.

Photo by Alla Kemelmakher on Unsplash

The sad, heavy, unsettling feeling in my gut at Bonaventure really surprised me. But it is said that Savannah is among the most haunted places in America. If that’s true, the one place where I felt it most acutely was at Bonaventure Cemetery.

Gracie Watson

Donna had predicted that Max, Jake, and I would never find Gracie Watson’s grave without assistance from a tour guide, but by dumb luck it was almost the first thing we encountered.

John Walz was a German-born sculptor who was commissioned in 1890 to carve a life-size statue of six-year-old Gracie Watson. The lifelike sculpture was based on a photo provided by the child’s parents, and it replaced the plain tombstone that had once stood over Gracie’s final resting place.

“Little Gracie,” the legend goes, was the life of every party at the renowned Pulaski House Hotel at Johnson Square, Savannah, on the northwest corner of Bull and Bryan Streets. She would greet guests as they arrived, or while skipping through the rooms where elegant soirées were thrown. When she grew tired, she would retreat to a favorite hiding spot beneath the rear staircase. A childish giggle beneath the stairs signaled that Gracie was surely there.