Creek Indian Hauntings in Savannah

Stereograph of Tomochichi's tomb in Wright Square, Savannah

​Named "America's most haunted city" in 2002 by the American Institute of Parapsychology, Savannah, Georgia, has a reputation for being one of the most haunted cities in the world.

Much of the city's historic district rests upon haunted Yamacraw bluff, named after the Yamacraw Creek Indians, the last native tribe to occupy the land before the arrival of James Oglethorpe and the English in 1733. In 1728, under the leadership of the 7-foot-tall Indian mico, or chief, Tomochichi, the Yamacraw settled near the 35-foot high bluff overhanging the Savannah River, which had been the resting place of the tribe's ancestors for hundreds of years.

The Yamacraw believed the spirits of their ancestors remained with their bones. A belief in the relationship between the proximity of hauntings to human remains is an element of many Savannah hauntings even today. Thousands of graves lie under most of Savannah’s historic buildings, squares, and parks, including two Indian burial mounds. The largest of these was built in what later became the Trustees' Garden, located the Pirates House. Another was located under the parking lot of the Board of Education building near Chippewa Square. These native burial mounds were sacred to the Yamacraw, and their desecration by the English could well have disturbed the spirits that haunt the bluff.

Tomochichi died in his nineties in 1739, and his body was laid to rest in haunted Wright Square (a place now famous for the ghost of Alice Riley, who in 1735 was hanged there for murder.) The great chief was buried with military honors, befitting his role as peace-maker and liaison between the English and the Creek nation. General James Oglethorpe, founder of the Georgia colony and a Freemason, ordered a pyramid of ballast stone to be placed over Tomochichi's grave. But the mound was not tended, and over the years it gradually settled and became overrun with grass and weeds.


​A 1757 map shows “Tamachychee’s Tomb” as around 15 feet wide on each side; but recent research by Robin B. Williams, chair of the Architectural History department at Savannah College of Art and Design, shows that the tomb “remained in the middle of Wright Square until at least 1757, " and then gradually became indistinct.  According to Williams, around 1868 “decorative mounds” were commissioned by Savannah alderman John Ferrill in the style of Tomochichi’s tomb in Wright, Madison, and Oglethorpe squares, which by the 1930s gave rise, he believes, to the local myth that Tomochichi’s tomb was destroyed in 1883 when the monument to William Washington Gordon was erected over it.
No account has yet been found to establish with certainty when Tomochichi’s mound was dismantled, and no account has been given as to whether his remains were relocated or what happened to the ceremonial objects that were certainly buried with him. But if spiritual energy does reside near human remains, as the Yamacraw believed, then the negligence or desecration of graves must surely disturb that energy! Given the thousands of disturbed, plundered, destroyed, and built-over graves in Savannah's historic district, coupled with its violent history, it is no wonder that mystery inhabits the streets and lanes, history and haunts, of "America's most haunted city."
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