SAVANNAH, Ga.--There are allegedly ghosts here; they bump into people all the time. A presence is felt, there is gathering and motion, a confusion in the air. Sometimes there is no ambiguity, the apparition stands there searching your face for sympathy.
People say they see them. They see their freshly dead brother, their long-departed mother. They see strangers dressed in period costume. These people are not mad and they are not insincere, but I am skeptical. They say no one believes until they see for themselves and I imagine that is how it must be, though I think I might question my lying eyes were I to encounter something eerie. Attribute it to a paucity of imagination.
So it is not surprising we encountered no ghosts in the 17 Hundred 90 Inn. I am not disappointed by this, I neither expected nor wished for any sort of paranormal encounter. It was only days later when we considered that the clock radio snapping on at midnight might have been the result of some supernatural mischief. And then we only wondered if the maids were instructed to play the occasional trick on guests primed for some encounter. Our first thought was, "Who sets an alarm for midnight?" not "What turned on the radio?"
The woman who had this room before us came equipped with an electromagnetic field (EMF) detector and a digital recorder for conducting electronic voice phenomenon (EVP) experiments. We know this because there is a guest journal in room 201, where we are encouraged to leave our thoughts on our stay for management and fellow travelers. Our predecessor reports when she played back her recording she heard a male voice whispering "Never." This was not her boyfriend, who she writes communicated only through head nods while she recited her list of questions to the entity she hoped was listening.
Aside from the "never" and her EMF detector "going crazy," she didn't find much spookiness in the room. Apparently the radio didn't come on by itself while she was in residence. All in all, she said, it wasn't terribly satisfying, but she was hopeful because she was moving to Room 204, which she identified as "Ana Powers'" room.
Room 204 in the 17 Hundred 90 Inn has a claim on being the most haunted room in the most haunted house in the most haunted city in America. It was featured on the television series Ghost Hunters. There are YouTube videos about it. People tell of being uncomfortable in there, of hearing voices and feeling a strange, cool touch in the night. A lamp is said to flicker when the ghost--usually called Anne but sometimes Anna--becomes annoyed. She is said to push female guests out of bed and to rearrange their make-up.
There are several stories about this Anna or Anne Powers (or Powell). In one of them, she is a servant girl who was beaten to death by her faithless husband, who then threw her body from the window to make it look like a suicide. In another version she is a heartbroken wife, distraught over her husband's affair, who hurls herself from the window. In another she is a 16-year-old who falls in love with a German sailor and kills herself when he returns to the sea. Or maybe Anne was distraught because her sailor husband returned to the sea. Or maybe it was Anne who was having an affair. Maybe she was pregnant. It probably depends on who is telling the story.
Anyway, an Anne Powers did live here, at 128 Lincoln St., for more than 30 years. Her family purchased the building in 1890, and census records indicate she was still living there with her husband, Patrick, in 1920, when she was 82 years old. That doesn't preclude the possibility she was beaten to death by her faithless husband, or that she plunged to her death. As the Amazing Criswell--the psychic, not the painter--would ask, "Can you prove it didn't happen?"
Well, no. And there is another documented Anne associated with the building: Anne White, the wife of Steele White, who built two of the three buildings that now comprise the 17 Hundred 90 Inn. Steele was thrown from his horse and died in 1823, presumably leaving behind a heartbroken widow. But this Anne couldn't have thrown herself out of 204's window, because that part of the 17 Hundred 90 Inn wasn't built until 1888. And she moved away shortly after Steele's death, to the Isle of Hope, south of town.
There probably were other Annes and Annas associated with the building. Maybe one of them became a famous ghost. Or maybe we've got the name wrong. Some paranormal investigators say there are at least five other spirits hanging around Room 204. All I know is things were quiet in Room 201.
Nor did we hear the kid who allegedly runs up and down the halls. We didn't hear the voodoo woman in the kitchen rattle pots and pans.
But because we didn't see them doesn't mean they don't exist. Science does not preclude their existence, "ghost" is not a scientifically valid concept. EMF devices and EVP experiments notwithstanding, the study of ghosts is not rightly the province of the scientist but of the philosopher. I wonder less about whether people see what they claim to see than why they see these things.
A dream is no more or less real than a ghost, and maybe they're made of the same stuff. I do not believe the dead occupy themselves with the fortunes of the quick but I don't doubt that we are able to conjure our own ghosts and gods. We all have our invisible companions--our tulpas, our consciences, our intuitions--and small inner voices we feel compelled to attend.
And walking through a graveyard feels differently than walking through a city, at least until you begin to realize that the city is a graveyard, built over the bones and rubble of a past that in its day was just as blue-skied and bullet-proof as a Sunday morning stroll. All these ghosts were once solid as these cobblestones. They all thought of breakfast, they all heard the birds singing and marveled at a light rain on a sunny afternoon, how each drop sparkles and shines for a moment before pooling and draining away.
I don't believe that places are haunted. But I know that people are.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 07/18/2017