Laurel Grove North Cemetery

By the 1850s, Savannah's oldest cemetery had simply run out of room. Colonial Park was full, its ground packed tight with a century of the city's dead. So in 1852, the city dedicated a new burial ground on the site of a former plantation... sixty-seven acres, laid out around a natural ravine, with winding roads and a central green designed to feel less like a graveyard and more like a garden. They called it Laurel Grove.

I want to tell you plainly what this cemetery was, and not soften it. Laurel Grove was built racially divided from its very founding. What you're standing in now, Laurel Grove North, was reserved for white Savannahians. A separate section, Laurel Grove South, was set aside for enslaved and formerly enslaved people from across the Georgia coast. For much of the twentieth century, the two were even more sharply separated when an interstate connector was built directly between them. That division is real, documented history, and it shaped who could be remembered here, and how.

Within these gates, though, rest some of the names that shaped Savannah far beyond its cemetery walls. Juliette Gordon Low, founder of the Girl Scouts, is buried here. So is Florence Martus, remembered as Savannah's "Waving Girl," who spent decades greeting every ship that passed her family's lighthouse post on the river. James Pierpont, the composer who wrote "Jingle Bells," rests here as well... a Christmas tune written, oddly enough, under Georgia's warm sun.

By the height of the Victorian era, every available plot in Laurel Grove North had been sold, and families competed to build the most elaborate monuments money could buy. The result is widely considered the richest collection of Victorian cemetery architecture anywhere in the Southeast... marble angels, weeping figures, obelisks reaching for the sky, each one a family's final, permanent statement.

Given how much grief this ground has held, it's little wonder Savannah has built an entire body of legend around it. For years, back when a trolley line ran directly past these gates, riders swore they could hear a child crying somewhere among the graves... never seen, only heard, and by local memory, audible only to passengers riding one particular trolley car, day or night, for years on end.

Visitors more recently describe a woman in a wedding gown, glimpsed wandering between the headstones before simply vanishing. Others report heavy, deliberate footsteps crossing the grounds when no one else is in sight, or the unsettling sensation of a hand reaching toward them from somewhere near the ground. Some locals also claim quiet spiritual rituals still take place here after the gates close at dusk, though with the cemetery locked overnight, such claims are difficult for anyone to confirm.

Whatever you believe walks these grounds after dark, one thing about Laurel Grove needs no embellishment at all. It holds Savannah's history exactly as that history actually happened... beautiful, unequal, mourned, and remembered, all within the same sixty-seven acres.