Hotel Bardo Savannah

This 1888 Romanesque mansion on Forsyth Park served as Fox and Weeks Funeral Directors' flagship location for five decades, processing thousands of Savannah's dead including Danny Hansford from Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Since its 2005 conversion to a luxury hotel, guests have reported being held down in bed by an unseen force, unable to move until the pressure suddenly releases.

The restaurant at 700 Drayton Street serves dinner in the exact room where Savannah held its funerals for fifty years. The parlors where families sat with open caskets now have white tablecloths and a wine list. The building's transition from mortuary to luxury hotel happened in 2005, and not everything from the old tenants seems to have moved out.

Architects Alfred Eichberg and Hyman Witcover designed this 17,500-square-foot Romanesque mansion in 1888 for Lewis Kayton, a meat-packing magnate from Baltimore who made his fortune through Herman and Kayton, a company based just east of the city. The redbrick and terra cotta building with its tower and gothic arched entrance was one of the grandest private residences on Forsyth Park for decades.

In 1953, Fox and Weeks Funeral Directors moved in. Founded in 1882, Fox and Weeks was one of Savannah's oldest undertaking businesses, and the Kayton mansion became its flagship location. For the next five decades, this was where Savannah buried its dead. Among the funerals held here was Danny Hansford's, the 21-year-old whose shooting death by antiques dealer Jim Williams at the Mercer-Williams House became the center of John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Fox and Weeks left around 2001, and Richard Kessler of the Kessler Collection transformed the property into a boutique hotel by 2005. He filled it with Versace furniture, 200-year-old pink Verona marble columns, Brazilian mahogany, Italian onyx, and over 400 pieces from his personal art collection. It's extravagant in a way that makes you forget you're eating dinner where a corpse used to lie.

The ghost stories center on one recurring experience. Guests have reported waking in the night to find something pressing them down into the mattress, an unseen weight holding them in place. The accounts don't name a room or a floor. They describe an entity, not a person, applying pressure they can't fight against until it suddenly releases. Sleep paralysis is the obvious skeptic's explanation, but the pattern of reports from guests who had no idea about the building's history gives the accounts a little more texture.

There's no named ghost here, no Confederate officer pacing a hallway, no lady in white drifting through walls. The haunting at the Mansion on Forsyth is blunter than that. Something presses you into the bed. You can't move. Then it stops. The building processed thousands of bodies over half a century, and the current hotel restaurant occupies the exact space where viewing rooms used to be. Guests sip cocktails in the lounge where families once said goodbye.

The hotel was recently rebranded as Hotel Bardo Savannah, though the original Mansion on Forsyth name persists in local conversation. The property overlooks the 22-acre Forsyth Park, and the cooking school that operates inside the original mansion section is worth visiting even if you don't believe in ghosts. But if you stay overnight, you might want to know that the walls around you held open caskets for fifty years before they held art.