Johnson Square

This is where Savannah begins. Literally.

Johnson Square is the oldest and the largest of the city's famous squares, laid out by General Oglethorpe himself as the very first public space in his new colony. Everything else you'll see on this tour tonight radiates outward from this one patch of ground.

At its center stands a fifty-foot marble obelisk, honoring General Nathanael Greene... Washington's most trusted commander during the Revolutionary War, and the man most responsible for driving the British out of the South.

Greene died near Savannah in 1786 and was originally laid to rest in what's now Colonial Park Cemetery. For over a century, his exact resting place was actually lost, misplaced somewhere among that cemetery's crowded vaults, until his remains were finally identified and moved here, beneath this monument, in 1901.

The Marquis de Lafayette himself laid the monument's foundation stone back in 1825, five years before it was completed.

Off to one side of the square, you'll also find a smaller monument... a sundial, honoring William Bull, the surveyor who helped Oglethorpe lay out this entire city, square by square, starting right here.

This square also held one of Savannah's grandest hotels, the Pulaski House, where a little girl named Gracie Watson used to greet the guests as they arrived.

If her name sounds familiar, it should... her grave, and the lifelike statue her grieving father commissioned in her memory, is one of the most visited in Bonaventure Cemetery, out along the river.

But before any of that, before the statue and the flowers strangers still leave for her, Gracie was simply a child, playing right here in this square, in the shadow of General Greene's monument.

Maybe that's why so many ghost tours in this city choose to start exactly where you're standing.

Visitors have long reported the shape of a man in old Revolutionary War dress, walking slowly along the square's promenade near the monument, gone the moment anyone tries to get a closer look.

Some say it's simply Greene, still keeping watch over the city he helped secure, more than two centuries after his death finally gave him a proper resting place.

Others passing through after dark describe the faint, distant sound of a child's laughter drifting from somewhere near where the old hotel once stood... though the hotel itself is long gone, and there hasn't been a child living on this square in generations.

So take a moment here before the rest of tonight's tour unfolds.

Every square, every haunted house, every quiet grave you're about to hear about... all of it grew outward from this single patch of ground.

It seems only fitting that some of what came before might still be found waiting for you right where it all started.