Savannah's Haunted Hotels: What's Real and What's Tour-Bus Theater

A guide on River Street once told my tour group, with total conviction, that a specific cobblestone was “always cold, even in August,” and invited us to touch it. It was August. Every cobblestone was cold. That’s what stone does at night. I bring this up because it’s the perfect example of what you’re up against in Savannah: a city that has built an entire tourism vertical on the difference between things that are creepy because they’re true and things that are creepy because someone in a cape said so with a straight face.

Here’s my hot take after a week of doing this properly: Savannah’s real history is disturbing enough without embellishment, and the embellishment mostly exists because the real history doesn’t come with a jump scare built in. Bones under a floor is a fact you have to sit with. A woman in white gliding past a window is a fact you can photograph, or claim to. Guess which one made it onto the tour company’s Instagram.

So this is my attempt to sort it: which Savannah hotel ghost stories are backed by something you could show a historian, and which ones are tour-bus theater dressed up as history. I stayed at several of these, walked past the ones I didn’t stay at more times than I can count, and read enough about 19th-century Savannah medicine to ruin a few dinners.

1. The Marshall House — 123 E Broughton St (built 1851)

The Marshall House is the one I’d point to if someone asked me to prove Savannah’s haunted reputation isn’t purely marketing. It opened in 1851 and has been more or less continuously operating since, which already makes it a rarity. What makes it something else entirely is what happened to it during the Civil War: it served as a Union Army hospital, twice, and during those stretches surgeons performed amputations in what are now guest rooms. Amputated limbs were reportedly disposed of in the courtyard out back — the same courtyard where, a century and a half later, guests now sit with coffee and look at their phones.

That alone would be enough. But in 1999, during a renovation, workers pulled up the floorboards and found human bones underneath — not a stray fragment, but a significant number of them, dated to at least the 1860s. This is not tour-guide folklore. The hotel confirmed it happened, had the remains reinterred with an actual ceremony, and then continued the renovation, which is either admirably transparent or the most Savannah sentence I’ve ever typed, possibly both.

I stayed on the second floor in February, off-season, no ghost tour crowds outside. Nothing dramatic happened to me — I want to be honest about that, because the guests-and-staff reports here (faucets turning on by themselves, lights flickering, children heard playing in empty hallways) are consistent and long-running enough that I expected something. I got a perfectly good night’s sleep and an excellent breakfast. But I kept thinking about the floor. Original 1851 pine, refinished, gleaming. You don’t forget what they found under it.

Rooms: ~$220/€202/£173 per night, ground-floor rooms lean more atmospheric, upper floors are quieter if you’d rather not think about it.

There’s no dedicated Booking.com listing I’d point you to with confidence here, so use the general Savannah search and filter for it: Check Savannah hotels on Booking.com →

2. Kehoe House — 123 Habersham Street (built 1892)

The Kehoe House is an 1892 Italianate mansion built for William Kehoe, an Irish immigrant who made a genuine fortune running an iron foundry, and the building itself is worth the visit regardless of what may or may not be haunting it — the ironwork on the facade came from his own foundry, which is the 19th-century equivalent of putting your own logo on your house and being completely justified in doing so.

The ghost story attached to Kehoe House is one I want to flag clearly as legend rather than documented fact, because the sourcing gets fuzzy fast: local lore holds that twin infant sons of a Kehoe family member died in a chimney-related accident in the house. I’ve seen the story told several different ways by several different guides — different chimneys, different ages, different circumstances — which is usually a sign you’re dealing with oral tradition rather than a coroner’s report. I’m including it because it’s the story you will hear, repeatedly, if you spend any time in Columbia Square. I’m not including it as verified history.

What is verifiable: it’s now a genuinely lovely 13-room boutique inn, and having breakfast on that porch watching Columbia Square wake up is one of the better mornings I’ve had in Savannah, ghosts or no ghosts.

Rooms: ~$324/night at time of writing.

Check availability at Kehoe House →

3. Eliza Thompson House — 5 West Jones Street (built 1847)

Eliza Thompson House is one of the oldest inns operating in Savannah’s Historic District, built in 1847, and it sits on a block that has that specific Savannah quality of looking exactly like it did a century and a half ago except for the parked cars. The inn’s own lore holds that it’s haunted by the spirit of Eliza Thompson herself, and there are additional stories connecting the property to Civil War-era soldiers said to have stayed or recuperated in Savannah homes during the war. I want to be clear-eyed about this one too: this is inn lore and ghost-tour material, not documented history the way the Marshall House bones are documented history. Nobody’s produced a ledger.

That said, the property earns its reputation honestly in a different way — it’s simply old, and beautifully kept, and the kind of place where you believe every creak has a story even when you can’t confirm which one. I sat in the courtyard at dusk with a glass of the house wine (they do a nightly wine hour, which is a genuinely nice touch) and didn’t see or hear anything I couldn’t explain. I also wasn’t trying particularly hard to be spooked, which might be the whole trick.

Rooms: ~$259/night at time of writing.

Check availability at Eliza Thompson House →

4. 17Hundred90 Inn & Restaurant — worth knowing, even if you don’t book it here

I’m including 17Hundred90 because if you spend any time on a Savannah ghost tour, this address will come up, probably more than once. It’s one of the oldest operating inns in the city, built on foundations dating to the 1820s, and its best-known story involves a young woman the tours call “Anna,” said to have died after jumping from a window following a broken engagement sometime in the 19th century. It is, without question, the single most repeated haunted-hotel story in Savannah — I heard some version of it from three separate tour guides in four days, each one slightly more dramatic than the last.

I’ll be straight with you: I couldn’t confirm it as a Booking.com listing when I went to link it here, so treat this entry as background knowledge rather than a booking recommendation. If you’re building a Savannah ghost-tour itinerary in your head, though, this is an address worth knowing before you’re standing outside it at 9pm listening to someone tell you about Anna.

Things Ghost Tours Never Tell You

• The best-documented haunted story in Savannah involves the least amount of ghost in it. The Marshall House bones are a matter of hotel-confirmed record. The twin infants, Anna’s window, the woman in white on River Street — those are oral tradition, repeated and reshaped by dozens of tour guides over decades. Neither category is “fake,” exactly, but they’re not the same kind of true.

• Yellow fever, not murder, built most of Savannah’s “haunted” reputation. Epidemics in the 1800s killed a large share of the city’s population in a handful of terrible summers. Bodies were buried quickly, sometimes in what later became building foundations. Most of the unease you feel walking Savannah’s squares at night has more to do with this than with any specific ghost.

• Tour guides get paid to make you feel something, not to fact-check the 1890s. This isn’t a knock on them — a good guide is a genuine performer and worth the ticket price as entertainment. Just know that “and this is documented” and “and legend has it” get delivered in the exact same tone of voice.

• October triples the crowd and does nothing for the accuracy. If you actually want to hear the more careful, historically grounded version of these stories, go in January or February when the guides aren’t racing four other tour groups through the same square.

• The hotels with real documented history are usually calmer about marketing it. The Marshall House doesn’t need to embellish. The properties leaning hardest into ghost branding are often the ones with the least verifiable material to work with.

The Catch

• Some of this is genuinely upsetting, not spooky-fun. The Marshall House amputations and the bones under the floor are real 19th-century medical horror, not campfire material. Go in with the right expectations.

• The legend-versus-fact line is blurrier than any tour will admit. Kehoe House’s twin-infant story and 17Hundred90’s Anna are both compelling and both thinly sourced. Enjoy them as folklore. Don’t repeat them as history at a dinner party unless you enjoy being corrected.

• These are small historic inns, not resorts. Kehoe House and Eliza Thompson House were private homes first. Expect charming, slightly retrofitted bathrooms and stairs that were not designed with modern luggage in mind.

• If you actually want to sleep well and skip the whole genre, stay somewhere in the historic district that isn’t selling you a ghost with your room key. More on that below.

Is It Worth It?

If You’d Rather Skip the Ghost Stories Entirely

Not everyone wants their hotel stay to come with a backstory involving amputations or infant mortality, and that’s a completely reasonable position. If you want a comfortable, modern stay inside Savannah’s historic district without the ghost-story baggage, the AC Hotel Savannah Historic District is the move — it’s a Marriott brand inside a 1921 building, with a rooftop bar and none of the pre-Prohibition medical history hanging over the rooms. I’ve stayed there too. Nobody discovered anything under the floorboards during that renovation, as far as anyone told me, and I slept fine both times.

For the full non-ghost history of Savannah’s hotel scene — the Mansion on Forsyth Park, the Gastonian, and more on the Marshall House’s excellent breakfast — I wrote a separate guide: Historic Hotels in Savannah. And if Savannah’s just one stop on a bigger haunted-hotel tour, Most Haunted Hotels in America covers six properties coast to coast, Marshall House included.

Practical Info

• Historic District basics: All four properties above sit within Savannah’s Historic District, walkable from one another in well under 20 minutes
• Best months: January–March for a quieter, more historically-focused version of the ghost-tour scene; October if you want the full theatrical experience at a premium price
• Ghost tours: Numerous companies operate nightly, roughly $25–35/person; ask specifically about historical sourcing if you want the more accurate version
• Getting there: Savannah/Hilton Head International Airport (SAV), ~20 minutes by rideshare, ~$30/€27/£23
• Parking: Expensive and inconvenient across the district — park once, walk everywhere
• Explore the neighborhood: See our full Savannah city guide for restaurants, squares, and getting-around tips

Final Verdict

The honest version of Savannah’s haunted-hotel reputation is this: one property, the Marshall House, has a documented history disturbing enough that it doesn’t need a single invented detail. A couple of others carry ghost stories that are compelling, widely repeated, and genuinely under-sourced — good folklore, not good history. And if you’d rather not have any of this competing with your sleep, there’s a perfectly good modern hotel two blocks away that will not ask you to think about amputations before bed.

Go for whichever version of Savannah you actually want. Just know which one you’re getting.

Browse Savannah hotels on Booking.com →

Prices start at ~$180/€165/£141 per night in the historic district; expect a significant premium in October.

Affiliate Disclosure: Some links in this article are affiliate links. We may earn a small commission if you book through them, at no extra cost to you.

Written by

Thomas Waverly

Travel Correspondent

Thomas covers East Coast, Southern, and Western grand hotels. He has personally stayed in over 80 historic properties and considers a properly aged lobby bar essential to any review.