Bonaventure Cemetery

Bonaventure Cemetery's most famous resident is six-year-old Gracie Watson, whose lifelike 1890 marble statue draws piles of toys and trinkets from visitors who believe it will cry tears of blood if the gifts are removed. The 100-acre Savannah cemetery also gained fame from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and draws reports of phantom laughter, crying babies, and a girl in white who vanishes near Johnson Square.

If you take one of the toys left at Gracie Watson's grave, her statue will cry tears of blood. That's the legend, anyway. Visitors leave stuffed animals, trinkets, and coins at the feet of the life-sized marble sculpture of a six-year-old girl, and nobody touches them. The offerings pile up around Christmas especially, surrounding a stone child who has been sitting in the same spot since 1890.

Gracie Watson was born in 1883, the only daughter of W.J. and Frances Watson. Her father managed the Pulaski Hotel in downtown Savannah, one of the city's finest, and little Gracie became a favorite of the guests. She died of pneumonia two days before Easter in April 1889. She was six.

Her father commissioned sculptor John Walz to carve her likeness from a photograph. The result is startlingly lifelike, a little girl sitting in a chair with her hands folded, her expression somewhere between patience and sadness. The detail is precise enough that you can see the individual buttons on her dress. An iron fence surrounds the grave now because visitors kept touching the statue and the marble was wearing away.

People see Gracie around Savannah. A girl in a white dress playing near Johnson Square, where the Pulaski Hotel once stood, who vanishes when approached. A child's laughter near the grave with no children present. The stories always describe her as happy, which sets her apart from most cemetery ghosts. She isn't a warning or a tragedy replaying itself. She's playing.

There's also the quarter trick. Place a quarter in the statue's hand, walk around her three times, and the coin will have disappeared when you return. People swear by it, though the iron fence makes this harder to pull off than it used to be.

Bonaventure sprawls across 100 acres along the Wilmington River, about three miles east of downtown Savannah. The land was originally purchased in 1762 by British loyalist John Mullryne, seized after American independence, and changed hands several times before Savannah acquired it in 1907 and declared it a public cemetery. Spanish moss hangs from the live oaks in heavy curtains, and the grounds slope down toward the river in a way that makes the light do strange things in the late afternoon.

The cemetery became internationally famous in 1994 when photographer Jack Leigh shot the cover image for John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil here. The statue in that photograph, called the Bird Girl, was sculpted by Sylvia Shaw Judson. It became so iconic that it had to be moved to the Telfair Museum of Art to protect it from the crowds.

Gracie isn't the only notable grave. Grammy-winning songwriter Johnny Mercer is buried at Bonaventure, along with Conrad Aiken, a former U.S. Poet Laureate. The cemetery also has a connection to Minerva, the voodoo priestess character in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, who would collect cemetery dirt for her rituals.

Beyond Gracie, visitors report hearing crying babies at night, packs of dogs barking from somewhere in the trees, and laughter with no visible source. The cemetery closes at sundown, which means most of these accounts come from people who were already breaking the rules by being there.

Bonaventure is one of the most photogenic places in the American South, and the ghost stories almost feel beside the point. The moss, the river, the light through the oaks, Gracie's impossibly detailed statue. It would be haunting even without the ghosts.