Ghosts do not exist.
This was my attitude, anyway, for the first five years that I called Savannah, Georgia my home. Cocky, right? Yes, and borderline rude. Back then I didn’t believe a word of ghost stories. I would hear them whispered at dinner parties, sworn to be true, and worked expertly into that conversational lull between cocktails and dessert. I would listen politely, but to me it seemed a trifle ridiculous: from a shuddery chill wafting up the back stairs during the height of Savannah’s prolific summers, disembodied voices issuing forth from deserted rooms, objects vanishing and then reappearing in odd places, all those old chestnuts. I treated the tales with a generous dose of storytelling sea salt.
Despite my naivete, I was a man ensorcelled with my adopted city, but for me it was like being in a romance with a beautiful woman who also had what I considered some flaw deep down inside of her. She possessed some trait which you managed to overlook rather than embrace. I thought it was like dating a conspiracy theorist or a Flat Earther. Ghosts? Ridiculous! But she was still hot, so…
When cornered and asked my own beliefs about the paranormal, I would be dismissive to the point of arrogance. “I don’t believe in ghosts because GHOSTS DON’T EXIST,” I would say. “I’ll believe in phantoms when I meet one face to face. I want a full-on haunting, not this ‘I felt chilly on the stairs once’ stuff. Not creaks in an old house, I want to hear unmistakable footsteps and be chased by Casper!”
I had no idea that in just a few months my life was about to change. I had made challenges (with unearned confidence) denying an unseen world that I didn’t understand. I was about to have those ignorant words answered. Every. Single. One.
To put it another way: I was about to become the punchline in my own arrogant joke.
My conversion in this matter, if I am to play the part of St. Paul, started with my new job at the beach. A friend of mine owned a bed and breakfast out on Tybee Island, a quaint little resort town less than a twenty-minute drive from Savannah. Unfortunately, my friend’s relationship with his extended family was facing some difficulties. Some distant relatives were unhappy with some aspect of an inheritance. These were people he barely knew, but when money is at stake, sometimes things get complicated fast. This was forcing him to temporarily move back to Texas to ensure the proper distribution of assets. He needed someone responsible enough to run his inn for him. When none could be found, he settled for me.
What began as an interview turned into him narrating, in free form, about how perfectly I was suited to this job. He sprinkled that with mild dissatisfaction about his extended family. I tried to keep track of what he was talking about, but it was difficult. He was entertaining in a boisterous, exhausting way.
He explained in detail why he needed my help, but I only absorbed a bit of the legalese. What I heard was: bonk wonk LIVE AT THE BEACH wonk donk GET PAID zonk bonk PROBATE COURT chonk donk wonk BLOODSUCKING RELATIVES zonk gonk clonk PLACE IS HAUNTED. Wait, what did he say?
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “This place is unbelievably haunted. If you’re scared by ghosts, this won’t be a great fit for you.”
I studied him carefully to try to detect the set-up for a joke at my expense. “Dude, I can’t be bothered by ghosts because they don’t exist. Unicorns and leprechauns don’t scare me at all, either. I’ll be sure to keep an eye out for all three.”
“Okay,” he said, laughing. “You’re a skeptic. But maybe you can explain that to the two innkeepers who worked here before you? Neither of them believed in ghosts, either, at least when they took the job. Both quit in the middle of the night, no notice. One of them wouldn’t even come back for her final check.”
“The only spirits I’m uncertain about,” I said, “Are located on the bottom shelf.” Still, I distinctly remember some part of my brain feeling like there was something familiar about this scenario.
He laughed. “Fair enough. I’m not trying to scare you out of the job. Can you start right now?” I could. I thought of past due notices, the latest taped to my apartment door. When your landlord begins communicating in sheets of paper affixed to your front door with masking tape, the end is near.
He continued, “I’m going to take a couple of days to teach you the ropes of the job, and then I leave for Texas. When I return, the first question I’m going to ask you will be: Do you believe?”
“We do get the occasional reservation in the winter, but for the most part you’ll be on your own,” he said. “The most important thing in the morning is fixing breakfast for your guests. As long as the place is clean and you have completed everything on the list, you can hang out or go to the beach if the weather’s right. Just forward the land line to the cellphone, and you’re good to go.” I learned the practical side of the gig (such as the difference between refreshing and turning a room) and the diplomatic (never correct a guest who believes that the broken oyster shell they found on the beach is a shark’s tooth).
As I trained, my new boss talked about the history of the inn. It dated from 1897, and the structure only existed because of growing tensions between the United States and Spain. The mounting conflict would eventually boil over into what became known as the Spanish-American War. The US Army engineers devised a series of reinforced concrete fortifications, erected to protect us from any assault on our coastal cities and waterways. Protecting Savannah and her vital role in shipping, the army hid several large gun batteries were nestled into protective dunes along the northern tip of Tybee Island. Any nation’s navy which decided to assault the mouth of the Savannah River would encounter a nasty surprise in the form of Fort Screven’s twelve-inch cannons ‘greeting’ them as they tried to slip past our island defenses. The fort needed a hospital, so they built one due south, out of the line of fire but close enough to easily transfer any wounded. It was among these secondary buildings that the inn eventually came into being.
The fort served during the Spanish-American War, and both World Wars. In exactly one hundred years of service, Ft. Screven never fired a shot in anger. As I would learn, just because a military fortification never faced an enemy bombardment did not mean that it was unacquainted with tragedy.
My boss left for Texas. And little by little, I nearly lost my mind. That nagging feeling that this scenario was familiar finally clicked: living in a building that rents out rooms, and being caretaker for the winter off-season? I was literally living the plot of the horror movie The Shining. Alone.
The first bizarre encounter began in the main hallway which ran down the center of the house. I could swear I detected heavy boots on a hardwood floor. I would get up and investigate and find nothing amiss. I heard these disembodied booted footsteps at least daily. Even weirder, I realized that the sound I was experiencing wasn’t possible, because that hallway was carpeted. Out of curiosity I pulled a bit of carpet away, which revealed that there was indeed a hardwood floor under there. I tried explaining away the phenomenon, trying out several potential explanations. I first tried to tell myself that the noises were simply from creaky foundations (nope, the house sat on a concrete slab). Then I blamed some water or sewer pipes (wrong again). My next theory was that some street traffic was somehow affecting the inn (I was running short of ideas). Nope, nope, and nope.
The next time I heard the footsteps, I was standing in the hallway. Something I couldn’t see treaded heavily down the narrow hall. When ‘it’ reached me, the air practically crackled in the tight space. I can only describe the unpleasantness as a combination of static electricity and bad vibrations. The sound then trailed off down the hall. This meant the unseen entity had to have walked right through me! Rather than take my dinner to the dining room, which meant I would have to venture close to the hallway several times, I would take my meals in seclusion in my tiny bedroom. I even locked my door. This place is getting to me, I decided. And I made the completely unrelated decision to start spending as much time as I could outdoors.
Which leads me to what is arguably the scariest paranormal incident I’ve ever personally experienced. That ‘scariest’ label is debatable, but I can say without question that this is the ghostly encounter where I lost the most blood. I still bear the physical scars, thirty years later.
To tell this part of the story correctly, I need to provide a little context beforehand. This haunting involves both the basement of the inn, and the basement door. The background I provide is extremely important. Bear with me, I promise that there is a payoff. Come on, you know you want to read what an idiot I am. You’re almost there.
While I was being trained, my boss had offered me the use of his basement as a painting studio. It’s the only house on Tybee, he said, that has a basement. I thought he was just interested in seeing my work. He himself was a bit of a tinkerer and would lose enthusiasm in his creative processes quite often. That just meant that the basement was nearly filled to capacity with interesting objects: a vintage tandem bicycle, a Matchbox cars collection, a wagon wheel, a ship’s propeller in the process of becoming a coffee table, a crashed Vespa. All it needed was a pair of antique roller skates and a badminton racquet and you could have decorated a T.G.I. Friday’s Restaurant.
My ‘studio’ was at the front of the basement, meaning it was underneath the front porch, both of which were oriented facing north, toward the beach. There was no escape if anything (or anyone) entered the basement and cut me off from the south. The hospital building-turned-inn was built on a hill, meaning that the front (northern) part of the inn was buried, but the slope receding meant that the southern part of the basement opened into the cool night air of the backyard.
Additionally, there were three pull-string style lightbulbs, arranged from south to north. Nothing fancy, just three bare bulbs and a dangling string for each. My boss had smartly tied rubber thick washers (like a stout O-ring) to give the pull-string a little heft so you could find them easier in the dark. So there was a lightbulb and string up by my painting studio, one about midway down the basement, and one right by the stairs.
I can feel the question, Stairs? Yep. On the southern portion of the sublevel were wooden stairs which ascended from the basement to the central hallway. And yeah, we’re talking about that hallway. The basement door was the only access to the basement level, and it was located in the Hallway of Doom. I considered that hallway an area that was damaging my calm, perhaps permanently. But that basement door was proving to be just as problematic to my sanity.
I had specifically been instructed that the basement door was supposed to remain locked, if not in use. The locking mechanism was a tubular sliding lock known as a barrel bolt. Small and just about the lowest tech imaginable, the bolt is nonetheless insanely resilient. The only moving parts are the cylinder of metal that slides into place while locking it. My issue? The door began unlocking all by itself. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for this, because the door lock could be found open at morning, noon, or midnight. It would remain locked for four days in a row and then be found unlocked twice in a single afternoon. This relapsing lock made my obsessive compulsive disorder boil then bubble over.
One terrifying afternoon, I even relocked it as I carried my lunch to the front porch. I turned and took two steps before I heard the distinctive click of the lock disengaging by itself. When I turned, just to verify, yes. It was once again in the unlocked position. I was alone in the hallway, though. And suddenly I wasn’t very hungry.
Wow, that was a ton of exposition. Thanks for your patience. I promised there would be a payoff. I will now reward you with tales of my complete and total idiocy in three, two, one…
I was painting late one night in the basement when something felt… not quite right. Like the psychological equivalent to a maddening itch of pink fiberglass insulation in between my shoulder blades, just out of my reach. There was a growing buzz within my body—not painful but definitely not a healthy vibe. Then I heard the front door open and slam shut. Remember, I’m in the northernmost area of the basement, so this door is slamming closed just a few inches above my head. It took me a moment to realize that I had the front door key in my front pocket, so what I was hearing was impossible. A locked and fastened door had just opened and closed, but how? I then heard the heavy boots—one pair—clump-clomping down the main hallway. My chest felt banded with terror, and the sensation doubled the moment I heard the basement door open. Ready or not, I was about to receive visitors.
The heavy tread then began to walk down the stairs. I could hear it getting closer with every step. It slowly dawned on me that I should be able to see whatever ‘it’ was, based solely on how many steps I had heard. And then the string on the light bulb located right beside the stairs twitched. It swung wildly, as if had been batted aside by someone (or something) unseen. This meant that it was definitely moving in my direction. There was no wind, nothing to explain away the pull cord suddenly jerking like that.
When the second lightbulb string and the attached heavy rubber ring was also batted aside, it was oh so clear that whatever was down there with me in that Basement of Horrors would be upon me in seconds. The trajectory meant that its final destination was the last pull-string. Did I explain that I was standing right next to it? This meant that the next thing to get batted around might be my skull.
If you’re wondering whether that last pull string was batted away too, I have no idea. I was already running. I did an end-run around my invisible interloper and ran for the first thing that promised even a little bit of safety: the stairs leading up to the hallway. I pounded up the stairwell, thinking of nothing but the bright lights and implied security of escaping whatever had moved towards me with such implied aggression.
Then the basement door slammed shut, and I heard the barrel bolt loudly click to the ‘locked’ position. I was dashing at top speed and could not alter my trajectory. I smashed headlong into a closed and bolted door. Then every light in the basement went abruptly dark. Plunged into pitch black, I desperately twisted the door handle. I was locked in the basement with something. I screamed, and then I screamed even more. I tried to kick the door down, but it was too stout, too resolute. I also had the completely wrong angle, since there was no first floor landing. I sat down on the stairs, convinced that whatever was down in the sublevel space was going to eat me, or do whatever it is that malevolent spirits inflict on people as arrogant as I used to be. I took one long lingering look under the basement door and decided that I wasn’t going to die here, trembling and peeping at the shaft of light. I needed to make a run for the back door with every bit of energy I still had in me. So that was what I did.
I ran like a scalded possum, minus the critter’s grace. I think I touched three stair steps getting back to the ground floor, and then I turned and ran south towards the back door, arms and knees flailing. I felt a slight twang just below my left knee but I didn’t have time to investigate. I burst into the backyard and kept right on running, around the inn, and got to where the front porch met the parking lot. I had a choice to make: get in my car, which seemed safer. But I had to know what was happening. Besides, I had apparently stepped in a small puddle, and my shoe was a little squishy. Or it might have been urine. I would at the very least switch out my shoes.
Against my better judgement, I nevertheless re-entered the inn. I had to unlock the front door (even though I had heard it open). On the first floor, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Looking around you’d have had no idea that just a couple of minutes ago I had been screaming under one of the hallway doors.
Speaking of doors, I thought, now’s the time to figure out what the heck is going on with that lock. It was still in the ‘locked’ position. I reached out to test it. My fingers got within a few inches from the lock, and it unlocked by itself, right before my very eyes. Almost imperceptibly, the door itself slowly began to open. It was clearly an invitation. You know, as houses sometimes do?
I went to my tiny innkeeper’s room and began packing my meager belongings. As I packed it slowly started to dawn on me that I had no idea where I was going. My lease had already ended at my old apartment. I was going to wind up sleeping in the back seat of my Ford Escort in a Wal-Mart parking lot. I wouldn’t get paid if I left the inn.
I also had a much more immediate reason for staying. I discovered the real explanation why the inside of my left shoe felt wet. That “slight twang” I had felt just below my left knee was caused by me blundering into that large boat propellor, the one destined to become a base for a low table, during my panicked run through the basement. I was bleeding from a deep gouge which had torn open my pants and sliced me down to the bone. My pants and shoe beneath the wound was sticky with blood. I probably needed stitches, but I just grabbed a roll of paper towels, various meds, and a bungee cord, walked out the front door and sat in the porch swing. In the predawn gloom, I began to treat my wound. Here were the foundations of the weirdest Workman’s Comp claim in recorded history. Is there a box on the form for “the injured party nearly severed his leg while running from a ghost in the pitch darkness”?
I reached a sort of epiphany in those wee hours I spent waiting for the light to creep back into the world. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say I established a working theory. No entity, whoever or whatever ‘they’ might be, had tried to physically harm me. I was scared at the time, but the only one who had injured me was myself, by blundering into a sharp object in the pitch black. I did not know what this paranormal being’s purpose was, or if it/they even had a conscious purpose. If you’ll forgive the on-the-nose observation, it literally dawned on me that I needed to be more open minded. There are no atheists in foxholes, and for the duration of my employment, there weren’t any nonbelievers working at the inn.
I began talking to the ghost. I really believe that my attempts to communicate seemed to ease whatever negativity was still percolating. Every time that I got a negative sensation, spiritually speaking, I would attempt to ease the vibe by speaking directly to the spirit. I acknowledged their presence in a calm, clear voice. This made the tension level seem to drop.
Which is not to say that I was in control of anything. There were still some unhappy paranormal outbursts. For instance, one of our amenities was a free canned soda, per guest, per day. I put them in the first level minifridge that was open to all guests to use. I couldn’t put too many sodas in the fridge: if I made the mistake of stocking the fridge full of Cokes, the guests who found them first would pillage them all (yes, people are awful sometimes. Don’t get me started on people who eat other guest’s saved leftover desserts).
I stored the sodas all the way across the kitchen, in the pantry. I kept them in the twelve-pack box they came in, with the ‘top’ of the box torn off for my ease of access. I walked into the inn one afternoon and for whatever reason, the bad vibes emanating from the building practically made my temples throb. As I drew near the kitchen, I suddenly heard a series of metallic bangs. What I saw next was impossible. Six of the twelve sodas had somehow escaped their box and had fallen to the kitchen floor. They were rolling in a slow, straight line of soda cans, evenly spaced. It took several moments for me to realize how bizarre this was, because the house had settled just a bit on its foundations. This meant that the Cokes which had escaped were rolling north, which was uphill.
I found myself retreating to what I considered my ‘safe space,’ the porch swing, until the inn’s negative energy finally lessened. When I thought it was safe enough to enter, I walked to the kitchen, where I found all six escaped sodas gathered haphazardly on the floor in the pantry. That, fortunately, was the end of my Coke problem.
Only one guest ever had an issue with ghosts at the Inn during my tenure. She arrived in the early evening, and once Christa was checked in and settled in, she re-emerged and was full of questions about Tybee and about nearby Savannah. I saw Christa’s well-worn guidebooks, dog-eared and full of notes jotted in margins, meaning she had studied and now just needed a local perspective. She was a solo female traveler, booked for three nights with us and then swinging north to experience Charleston SC among other spots on her grand tour of the South. I could see that the long flight and taxi had taken their toll, and that Christa was out of energy. I told her we could resume our discussions about her dining and touring options over breakfast, if she would like. She would like that, she said, very much.
The next morning, I was putting the finishing touches on breakfast when I heard her door open. Christa walked down the hallway, but she was carrying all of her baggage and wearing sunglasses and a long scarf.
“Did I misunderstand? Did you make other arrangements for breakfast, Christa?” I asked. But I correctly focused on her luggage.
I’m sorry,” she said. “I have got to leave.”
I asked her if there was an issue with the room, or the Inn itself? She had two more nights with us, I reminded her.
“No, I mean, nothing you have any control over. I don’t want a refund,” she said, pursing her lips. “But this Inn is haunted. I cannot stay here.”
I tried to talk her out of leaving. “No,” she said. “I know it wasn’t you, because I could hear you out here, making breakfast. But while I was in bed this morning, something pinned me down and then bit me on the neck.” When she pulled her scarf away, I could see the teeth marks (clearly human) deep into her skin.
Christa got a full refund for her stay. In my mind, at least, she’s still out there, getting in adventures.
My boss returned from his Texas and back again journey (he had nicknamed it the Texas and Taxes Trip). True to his word, he asked me whether I believed in ghosts. I was not embarrassed to admit that I had my mind broadened on the subject.
“The ghost got to you, didn’t it? Let me guess: basement?” He laughed. I asked him how he knew.
“The only building in a hospital complex that had a basement? I set you up so you were painting in the old fort’s morgue all those nights. Sure, Fort Screven never saw any real action, but over thirty soldiers died either by drowning or in training accidents. Ha!”
I helped him with his bags. As we walked down the hallway, the lights began to dim.
“Wow. I never knew this hallway had a dimmer switch,” I said.
“It doesn’t.” He stopped dead, looked up, and said, “Knock that stuff off!” The lights instantly resumed their former intensity.
UPDATE: A 2015 Tripadvisor review mentioned that the Tybee Island Inn is haunted. At 3 a.m. in late March, one member of the couple saw a woman in a blue, old-fashioned dress. The reviewer gave the inn four out of five stars. No word on whether the ghost sighting cost the inn a star.