The Pirates' House

Built on the site of Georgia's first botanical garden in 1734, this Savannah seaman's tavern was notorious for shanghaiing sailors through a tunnel from the basement to the river. Staff encounter ghostly figures of long-dead seamen and hear boots on the plank floors when the restaurant is empty.

The most famous ghost at the Pirates' House is a fictional character. Captain Flint, the fearsome pirate from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, dies in an unnamed Savannah inn in the novel. Locals decided that inn was this one, and the legend stuck hard enough that ghost tours have been telling the story for decades. Stevenson may or may not have visited Savannah. Flint definitely did not exist. But something in this building does.

Staff working late describe turning around to find a figure standing behind them. Not a shadow, not a blur. A seaman from another century, staring them in the eyes, then slowly dissolving into nothing. The distinct sound of boots on the plank floors echoes through empty dining rooms on quiet evenings. These aren't Captain Flint stories. These are employees describing what happens when they close up the restaurant alone.

The building sits on what was once Trustees' Garden, ten acres that General James Oglethorpe set aside in 1733 as America's first public agricultural experiment. The garden was modeled after the Chelsea Physic Garden in London and planted with grapevines, mulberry trees, peaches, and cotton. The Herb House, the oldest surviving portion of the building (constructed around 1734), housed the gardener who tended those crops. It may be the oldest standing structure in Georgia.

By the 1790s, Savannah was a thriving seaport and the garden had become a residential district. A tavern for visiting sailors opened sometime in the mid-to-late 1700s at 20 East Broad Street, one block from the Savannah River. It attracted exactly the kind of clientele you'd expect. Fights, brawls, and worse. The building became infamous for shanghaiing: sailors would drink themselves unconscious, then wake up on a ship miles offshore, conscripted into crews for voyages they never agreed to take. Many never came home.

The tool for this was a tunnel. A passage ran from the Rum Cellar in the basement to River Street, where ships waited. Drunken men were dragged through it and loaded onto vessels in the dark. The tunnel exists, or at least a sealed passage does. A Savannah stormwater management official confirmed a tunnel ending under Randolph Street, though some experts believe it was used for rum running rather than kidnapping. Either way, before it was sealed, people going near it described hearing voices and moaning from inside.

The building sat neglected for years until the Savannah Gas Company bought the acreage in 1945 and marked it for demolition. Mary Hillyer, wife of the company's president, organized a group of volunteers and fought to save it. A seven-year restoration followed. In 1953, Herbert Traub Jr. and James T. Casey opened the Pirates' House as a tearoom. Demand pushed them to expand to 23 dining rooms. The upper level became Hannah's East jazz club in 1990, where Emma Kelly, known as "The Lady of 6,000 Songs," performed. Clint Eastwood came to hear her play after she was featured in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

Today the restaurant seats about 120 guests across fifteen dining rooms. The Rum Cellar in the basement carries the heaviest atmosphere. Staff avoid going down there alone if they can help it. The building has nearly 300 years of violent, chaotic, booze-soaked history packed into its walls, and whatever energy that leaves behind, it hasn't gone quiet. Boots on plank floors, figures in the corners of old rooms, voices from a sealed tunnel nobody wants to open.