The Olde Pink House

The Olde Pink House in Savannah, Georgia is a candlelit restaurant on Reynolds Square, and the staff say a dead man helps run it. A waiter turns away from the dining room for a moment, the story goes, and turns back to find every candle on every table lit and the room empty. They blame James Habersham Jr., the merchant who built the place and, by their account, never fully moved out.

He built it starting in 1771 — a Georgian mansion, originally called Habersham House, where he lived until his death in 1799. He's described as a pin-neat gentleman in colonial dress who straightens table settings and squares up chairs at empty tables when no one is watching, mostly down in the basement, where the Planter's Tavern is now.

That basement carries the rest of the lore. The story goes that it belongs to children — said to be enslaved children who died of yellow fever, though no record names them — playing their games in the dark. In the women's restroom, guides tell it, a stall door will hold itself shut against a woman trying to leave.

The grimmest version of the Habersham story is the one the record argues against. Ghost tours say he hanged himself in that basement after learning of his wife's affair. There's no historical evidence for it, and it sits badly with the plain fact that he was given a burial in consecrated ground at Colonial Park Cemetery, a few blocks east. No source records how he actually died.

The house itself turned pink by accident. Red brick bled through the white plaster in Savannah's rains, and owners fought it for over a century before a 1930s owner, Alida Harper Fowlkes, gave up and painted it pink on purpose. (One account puts that surrender in the 1920s.)

So the haunting is almost a side dish. People come for dinner in a pink mansion, and Habersham keeps tidying up around them.