Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

Still recovering from the "Bobos go Camping" experience, Rachel and I decided to get our supernatural on during a Savannah Ghost Walk tour. The city is known for being the most haunted in America. With Spanish moss hanging off every tree as though it were weeping, and graveyards, marked and overlaid alike, underneath half the city's historic district, there's a distinctly eerie, ethereal quality to Savannah.

And while there were no crazies walking dog-less collars or pre-op transvestites with semi-mystical abilities, the movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil did a good job of capturing a certain essence of the city. Even Forrest Gump, sitting chattily on a Savannah park bench, embodied an inherent, friendly slowness about the city's preferred pace.

It helped that we were there on an overcast, intermittently rainy day. But the evening was dry and almost clear. The wide, flat streets gave the illusion of endlessness and somehow made the stories of the supernatural more plausible. The whole town feels like one big murder mystery dinner theater and I kept expecting the Ghost Tour guide to pull out a card saying I was found dead in the foyer of a knife wound.

Here she is looking a little ghostly herself without flesh, er, I mean, flash:

The other people on the tour was a couple in their 30s. The woman, tiny and with a hat covering most of her face, proudly outed her companion as a real, live Ghost Hunter 10 minutes into the tour. They were from DC, too, headed to Disney. The Ghost Tour was purely recreational, but at home, her companion owned the scientific instruments and devices necessary to track ghosts and spirits.

The Ghost Hunter himself was a squat, round man in jeans and a leather jacket who chewed at his gum nonchalantly while he explained that eddies were merely, usually just wind, NOT ghosts. And that people got excited about them irrationally. He said this, of course, as though disbelieving in the supernatural origin of eddies proved the supernatural origin of shadows and white spots in photographs. As though disbelieving in leprechauns made the rainbow's pot of gold real.

I shouldn't jest, though. We enjoyed the Ghost Tour immensely. It was one of the highlights of the trip. The cool-weather walk, the history, the well-recited stories of the tour guide, and the prospect that if I, too, died in Savannah, I'd have a better opportunity to haunt, and a wider social network to boot.

Here is the Haunted CVS that stands where an 18th-century jail once stood:

It housed the first woman to be hung in Georgia. She was imprisoned for murdering her rapist and watched the gallows outside her cell being built, while the baby she carried grew in her, knowing she'd be hung as soon as it was born. She haunts the store now, looking for her baby, overturning cotton balls and body wash in her quest.

Also, I caught a ghost on camera:

Outside the upper-right window. You know you see it. The spirit of a sailor's widow who jumped from the third floor upon learning of her husband's death. SUCK IT, Ghost Busters.