Go Along for the Ride

A few weekends ago, my husband and I took our darling children to Savannah for a night over their fall break. We are not big Savannah fans. Way back before we had kids, we lived in Charleston, South Carolina, a port city also rich in history but with current industry as well.  Even though they are both popular destinations on the eastern coast, Savannah is more of a tourist attraction, a sleepier, dirtier version of the Holy City. People tend to prefer one over the other. We are Charleston people.

That being said, it isn’t fair for my children not to be able to at least once experience Savannah, if nothing else, to say they’ve been. Plus, it’s not a horrible drive from where we live, and we are running out of places to visit within a three hundred mile radius of home. I looked online and found a cool hotel, one that was in the historic district but tricked out with a hip, modern vibe. I didn’t really see anything we had to do during our stay. We didn’t need to tour the historic Mercer house because “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” isn’t really relevant to their generation. I didn’t want to wait in line for two hours to eat southern food with a table of strangers at Mrs. Wilkes, and I have a serious Paula Deen aversion because she looks too much like my mother. I decided we could just stroll around, do a little shopping, and take a ghost tour at night.

I could be wrong, but does every town have a ghost tour? Spooky walking tours. Haunted trolley drives. Sinister horse and carriage rides. Ghost buses. In my town, we have a haunted Segway night tour, which sounds like an accident waiting to happen. Every year, they could take stupid patrons around on their douchey Segways and tell them about the idiots who died the previous year on the tour. I’ll never know because I am not coordinated enough to use a Segway, which is why I am qualified to judge others who do.

The ghost tour I chose was a Haunted Hearse tour. It’s not unique to Savannah, as other historic or funky cities with a plethora of old hearses have it; Austin, St. Augustine, you get the idea. Anyway, here’s how it works. The company has a whole fleet of hearses that have been decommissioned and repurposed with a bunch of rickety seats for people to sit. Your feet rest on the rollers that were used to move the coffins, and your shoes can be seen through the little curtains on the side windows. The top of the hearse is raised up with a sort of open viewing area. You enter through the rear of the hearse by walking up a step ladder, take your seat, and wait for the drive to begin.  It looks like this:

 

Lucky for us, the tour picked us up right outside our hotel. Our tour guide had one of those ghost tour guide names. Let’s call him Ghoulish Gary; that wasn’t his name, but close enough. He looked like the kind of guy, and I mean this with the utmost respect, who spent his formative years masturbating to “Faces of Death” in his parents’ basement. He wore all black, a little pork pie hat, and he did this thing with his eyes where you couldn’t tell exactly at whom he was staring. I couldn’t tell if it was congenital or just like a special effect.

He proclaimed himself an expert in the local paranormal community and promised to tell us things that would keep us up at night. I had no reason to doubt him, but I also didn’t have much reason to believe him.  I only hoped he meant that he had lots of good Savannah ghost stories and not a litany of sad personal tales. We settled into our hearse seats and he drove to another hotel to pick up the rest of the tour, a foursome of elderly people that I admired for being so nonchalant about being in a hearse.

Ghoulish Gary drove us around the historic squares of Savannah, stopping every now and again in front of an old home to tell us about how someone died there or some similar sort of tragedy. Other hearses drove past us, a continuous loop of hearse traffic that took over Savannah’s streets after nightfall. He also spent a lot of time in front of a cemetery talking about how many people were buried on top of other people.

Basically, all of Savannah is a giant mass grave. Also, according to Ghoulish Gary, it was an ancient Indian burial mound before it was Savannah, so all of the spirits are angry and malevolent just like in “Poltergeist.” A couple of times he referenced some bullshit about how paranormal experts had taken soil samples here and there throughout the city, and they all came back at least 17% human remains. I thought if you tested soil samples everywhere from around the world, it would be around the same amount of dead human. People have been living and dying for thousands of years.

Ghoulish Gary ended every story with a long, drawn-out Yyyeeeaaasssssssssss for emphasis. Occasionally he would cough and choke on his cigarette. One of our stops was at a bar, where he encouraged us to go inside and order him a soda. We waited in the hearse, although I had a feeling the tour would have been better with an open container violation.

We drove around a little bit more and then pulled into an empty lot. Three other hearses were already parked there as their tour guides, Scary Sam and Creepy Carl or whoever the fuck else, told identical stories that just didn’t sound all that… believable isn’t quite the word. Hmm. Interesting, maybe? Our very own Ghoulish Gary left our hearse to go over to the other ones to give them the wall eye stare and make them as uncomfortable as he made us. I had this feeling he didn’t think we were all that great of an audience and needed to have a little more attention from a fresh group of hearse captives.

He finally ambled back over to us and took out his cell phone to show us images that would prove the very existence of spirits. One was a flying orb that looked suspiciously like a flash reflection on a window. Others were just blurry images.  I’m pretty sure one was his thumb. None of them spoke to Savannah specifically or any of the familiar legends you might expect. Then he stared at some of us, possibly, because I couldn’t tell for sure, before loading himself back in the driver’s seat.

We circled around a few more times to see if an apparition might appear. It wasn’t our lucky night, so he dropped off the party of retirees at their hotel before taking us back to our own. On the way, Ghoulish Gary told us about the history of the building where we were staying. Apparently, it used to be a stable, until one night when it burned down, killing all of the horses inside. He took a few pictures with us and then left us in front of the building and tootled on down the road and away into the dark night. As we walked the halls inside, we noticed that the walls were decorated with murals of horses. We just thought it was odd when we checked in, but after the tour, it made sense to us.

Later, as we got ready for bed in our room, the lights over our bathroom mirror blinked on and off. It wasn’t a flicker or a power surge. It was as if someone turned the lights on and off with a switch, slowly, and the four of us watched it from the comfort and safety of the hotel beds. None of the other lights went on and off, just the ones over the mirror. It only happened one time, for about ten or fifteen seconds, but for real, it did.  We didn’t hear any hooves down the hall, no whinnying, no neighing, nothing like that.

Savannah was kind of fun. We’re glad we went. You should give it a try. It’s no Charleston, but it’s good for a night. Yeeeaaaaassssssssss.