In Brief
The Mercer-Williams House on Monterey Square in Savannah is where Jim Williams shot Danny Hansford in the study in 1981 — and where Williams was found dead in that same study's doorway nine years later. The family who run it as a museum will not discuss ghosts.
The Full Story
The Mercer-Williams House on Monterey Square in Savannah is best known as the murder house from "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." Two men died in the same room of it, a decade apart, and the people who own it would rather you didn't bring it up.
The room is the study. In the early hours of May 2, 1981, the antiques dealer Jim Williams and his 21-year-old assistant Danny Hansford argued in the house. Hansford pushed over an 18th-century grandfather clock in the hallway and walked into the study. Williams pulled a 9mm Luger from his desk drawer and shot him in the head, the chest, and the back, and said it was self-defense.
It took the state of Georgia four trials to settle it — a record. Williams was convicted twice and saw both verdicts overturned; a third trial ended in a mistrial with the jury 11-1 for guilty. The fourth, moved to Augusta, acquitted him in May 1989.
He had eight months to enjoy it. On January 14, 1990, Williams was found dead at 59 — of pneumonia and heart failure — in the doorway of the same study, near where Hansford had fallen.
The grim symmetry is what keeps the ghost stories attached to the pink mansion. Staff and visitors say they've seen Williams himself walking the hallways after hours, and Hansford's spirit lingering in the study. On the night Williams used to throw his lavish Christmas party, some claim the chandeliers light the whole house and figures in formal dress move through the windows.
There is older grief here too. In 1969, the same year Williams bought the place, an 11-year-old named Tommy Downs fell from the roof and was impaled on the iron fence below. Tour guides point out a missing spike on the West Gordon Street side, though that part rests on retold local lore.
John Berendt's book turned all of it into legend. The family who run the museum today refuse to entertain any of it — their official site mentions neither the ghosts nor the book. Just a preservationist who restored the house, and nothing of what happened inside it.
