Oglethorpe Square

This square was the last of its kind.

Laid out in 1742 and originally called Upper New Square, it was the sixth and final square in Oglethorpe's original design for this city, later renamed to honor the founder himself.

Before this ground held a square at all, part of it served as burial ground for Savannah's small Jewish community, among the first Jewish settlers anywhere in the American colonies.

Ground given over to grief has a way, in this city, of never quite forgetting what it once held... and Oglethorpe Square, more than most, seems to carry that memory.

On the square's northeast corner stands the Owens-Thomas House, one of the finest examples of English Regency architecture in the entire country, completed in 1819 for a wealthy shipping merchant.

But it's not the grandest house on this square that draws the most attention after dark.

It's a smaller one, at number 12 West Oglethorpe.

That house has worn many lives.

As a child, Juliette Gordon Low... Daisy, the future founder of the Girl Scouts... spent time there before her family's fortunes carried her elsewhere in the city.

Later, it served as a lodge meeting hall, then a performing arts school, before sitting abandoned for years, empty and decaying, until a careful restoration finally brought it back as the restaurant it is today.

During those long vacant years, this city built quite a reputation around it.

The most famous version of the story tells of a doctor and his family, said to have lived on this site during one of Savannah's yellow fever epidemics, and to have never truly left.

I'll be honest with you, though... historians researching the property have never been able to confirm a doctor actually lived in this particular house at all.

Some believe the story simply attached itself here because the building sat empty and eerie for so long, an empty house being an easy place for a city's imagination to settle.

True or not, the reports haven't stopped.

Visitors and staff describe unexplained voices drifting through empty rooms, footsteps on stairs with no one on them, and a persistent, uneasy feeling of being watched from the upper floors.

Across the wider square, especially near the fountains after dark, others describe the same restless energy... cold drafts with no explanation, footsteps that seem to follow at a distance, and the simple, unshakable sense that this square remembers far more than any single plaque can explain.

Some connect it to the yellow fever years that devastated this whole city, when squares like this one likely saw more grief pass through them than any building's walls could hold alone.

Whether it's Savannah's earliest Jewish dead, a doctor who may never have existed, or simply the accumulated weight of three centuries in one small square... something here keeps visitors looking back over their shoulder long after they've moved on to the next stop.