What happened
The handsome house on Madison Square was built in the early 1840s for Francis Sorrel, a wealthy merchant who had come to Savannah from Haiti. In 1860 his wife Matilda died after a fall from a window – the family spoke of a fainting spell, while the town whispered of suicide. Ghost tours built a story on that tragedy: Francis supposedly had an affair with an enslaved woman named Molly, and Matilda, on discovering it, threw herself from a balcony; days later Molly was found hanged in the carriage house. Since the house opened for night tours in 2005, it has been billed as the most haunted place in Savannah. Visitors and TV crews tell of a woman’s screams, cold spots, footsteps in empty rooms and figures at the windows of the carriage house, where enslaved people once lived.
Witnesses
Night-tour participants and television ghost-hunting crews; the story was recorded and examined by historian Tiya Miles, who took her first ghost tour here.
Explanations and hypotheses
Matilda Sorrel’s death is recorded in the newspapers of the day, but the affair and the figure of Molly rest solely on tour-guide tradition – no document has been found showing that Sorrel owned an enslaved woman of that name. In Tales from the Haunted South (2015) historian Tiya Miles showed that such Southern ghost-tour stories often turn the violence of slavery into romantic sensation, casting enslaved women as willing lovers and avengers. She suggested that such houses tell the stories of the real people who lived and worked in them. The phenomena described by visitors have not been independently investigated.
Legend A story handed down through generations – it can be neither confirmed nor disproved.
Sources
- WBUR Here & Now – How Ghost Tours Often Exploit African-American History (2015)
- Tiya Miles, Tales from the Haunted South: Dark Tourism and Memories of Slavery from the Civil War Era (2015)
- Louisville Public Media – Strange Fruit: That Ghost Was Not A ‘Mistress’ (2017)
More: Wikipedia (en)