The Marshall House

Workers renovating the Marshall House in 1998 found amputated soldier limbs under the fourth-floor boards, left from the hotel's use as a Union hospital during the Civil War. Room 414 is the most active despite multiple blessings, and an amputee soldier walks the lobby asking guests to help him find a surgeon.

During a 1998 renovation, workers pulled up the floorboards on the fourth floor and found human bones underneath. They were amputated limbs from Civil War soldiers, left where they fell during surgery more than 130 years earlier.

The Marshall House opened in 1851 on Broughton Street, built by Mary Marshall on land she inherited from her father, an English cabinetmaker named Gabriel Leaver. It was designed as a hotel from the start, not converted from a residence like so many Savannah properties. Mary Marshall's creation is considered by historians to be her finest structure. It is also Savannah's oldest continuously operating hotel.

The building has served three separate stints as a medical facility. During the yellow fever epidemics of the 1880s and 1890s, it functioned as a hospital for the infected. Before that, from 1864 to 1865, Union troops under General William Tecumseh Sherman occupied the hotel and converted it into a hospital for wounded soldiers. Amputations were performed on the fourth floor specifically because it was the highest level, as far from the street as possible. People below could still hear the screaming.

Room 414 is the most active room in the building. It's been blessed multiple times. The activity hasn't stopped. Guests in Rooms 214, 314, and 414, stacked vertically in the same column, have reported a phantom smell of rotting flesh. Guests have also felt something take their wrist, gently, as though someone is checking their pulse.

The most specific ghost in the Marshall House is a Union soldier missing an arm. He walks through the lobby holding the severed limb, asking guests to help him find a surgeon. "Has anyone seen my arm?" is the line attributed to him, which would be darkly funny if you weren't the person standing in the lobby at 2 a.m. hearing it.

Children haunt the Marshall House too. The hotel served as a children's hospital during at least one of its medical eras, and the sounds reflect that history. Guests hear marbles and rubber balls rolling down hallways. Crying babies. Children laughing. One guest reported child-sized bite marks on their skin the morning after a stay. A young boy's been seen shouting at guests to get out of his room.

The adult ghosts are quieter. A woman in white's been seen locking bathroom stalls from the inside. Typewriter sounds come from the room where Joel Chandler Harris, the author of the Uncle Remus stories, once stayed. Mary Marshall herself may still be around. One young guest recognized her portrait hanging in the hotel and told staff she had seen the woman in the hallway.

The hotel appeared on the Travel Channel's Haunted Hotels in 2005. Faucets turn on by themselves. Lights flicker. Doorknobs wiggle as though someone on the other side is trying to get in. Toilets overflow for no plumbing reason. Loud crashes echo through the fourth floor in the early morning hours.

The Marshall House reopened in 1999 after its renovation, bones and all. One guest summed it up: "I've lived in many haunted houses but Marshall House creeped me out." She still said she enjoyed her stay.