Bonaventure Cemetery sits on a bluff above the Wilmington River southeast of downtown Savannah. It covers roughly 160 acres and is the city’s largest municipal cemetery. The grounds occupy the former Bonaventure Plantation, established in the early 1760s by English Colonel John Mullryne. The name means “good fortune.” In 1846, Commodore Josiah Tattnall III sold the plantation and its private burial ground to Savannah businessman Peter Wiltberger. Wiltberger set aside about 70 acres for a cemetery. The first burials occurred in 1850. After Wiltberger’s death in 1853, his son William formed the Evergreen Cemetery Company in 1868 and continued the development as a Victorian rural cemetery with curving paths, live oaks, and open lawns.
The City of Savannah purchased the property in 1907, renamed it Bonaventure Cemetery, and opened it as a public burial ground (initially restricted by race, consistent with the era). It expanded over time, including the addition of Greenwich Cemetery in 1933 and a Jewish section. The cemetery was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2001 for its landscape design, architecture, and funerary art. Notable burials include songwriter Johnny Mercer, poet Conrad Aiken (whose marker is a marble bench inscribed with lines including “Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown”), and sculptor John Walz. In October 1867, naturalist John Muir spent several days and nights “camping among the tombs” while waiting for money from home. He wrote a chapter on the site in A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf, praising the live-oak avenue draped in Spanish moss and the abundance of life among the graves.
The cemetery gained wider fame in 1994 through the cover of John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, which featured a photograph of the bronze Bird Girl statue (by Sylvia Shaw Judson). Crowds followed; the statue was removed for protection in the mid-1990s and has been displayed at Telfair Museums since 1997. The cemetery remains an active burial ground, open daily from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The City of Savannah does not permit tours marketed as haunted or paranormal.
Reported Hauntings and Folklore
Several stories circulate around Bonaventure, but most blend documented lives with later legend.
Little Gracie Watson. Gracie Perry Watson (born 1882 or 1883) was the only child of W.J. Watson, manager of Savannah’s Pulaski House Hotel, and Frances Waterman. She was a favorite of hotel guests. She died on April 22, 1889, at age six, of pneumonia (described in some contemporary accounts as complicated by blood poisoning), two days before Easter. Her father commissioned local sculptor John Walz to create a life-size marble statue from a photograph. Completed around 1890, the figure shows her seated in a sailor-style dress, one hand on a tree trunk. The grave (Section E or H, depending on sources) became a popular stop; visitors leave gifts, especially near Christmas. A protective fence was later added after damage (including to the nose). Some claim her spirit appears as a little girl in white at the former hotel site on Johnson Square or that her laughter was heard in the hotel after her death. These are reported visitor experiences and local tradition; no contemporary records describe supernatural activity tied to her death.
Corinne Elliott Lawton. Corinne (born 1846), daughter of Confederate Brigadier General Alexander R. Lawton, died on January 24, 1877, at about age 30, after a short illness (likely pneumonia or related to the yellow fever period then affecting the area). Her mother’s diary records that she died at home, surrounded by family. She was initially buried at Laurel Grove Cemetery and later reinterred at Bonaventure. A marble statue by Sicilian sculptor Benedetto Civiletti (c. 1879) shows her seated at the foot of a cross. The popular legend claims she fell in love with a man of lower social standing, was forced toward an arranged marriage, and drowned herself in the river on or near her wedding day. Variations place the suicide in the Savannah or Wilmington River. Primary sources do not support the suicide or the forbidden-love plot; the story appears to be later folklore that grew around the evocative statue and her relatively early death.
Other reports include phantom dogs (sometimes linked to a literary reference rather than local history), orbs or lights, a sense of being watched, and occasional claims of statues changing expression. These remain anecdotal. The cemetery’s atmosphere—live oaks, Spanish moss, river bluff, and Victorian sculpture—has long encouraged storytelling, but the documented record centers on its history as a plantation, private then public cemetery, and site of notable burials and landscape design.
What is documented is a 1760s plantation converted to a cemetery in the mid-19th century, public ownership from 1907, National Register listing in 2001, Muir’s 1867 visit, the documented deaths and monuments of Gracie Watson and Corinne Lawton, and the Bird Girl connection to a bestselling book. The ghost stories are the ones visitors and tour narratives supply.
Relevant links
- City of Savannah: Bonaventure Cemetery — official hours, address (330 Bonaventure Road), and overview
- Bonaventure Historical Society: History — Evergreen Cemetery period and city purchase
- Wikipedia: Bonaventure Cemetery — summary of ownership, Muir, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and notable burials
- Bonaventure Historical Society: Little Gracie Watson — details on her life, death, and statue
- Sierra Club: John Muir’s “Camping among the Tombs” — Muir’s 1867 account