Owens-Thomas House & Slave Quarters

This house was built to impress, and two hundred years later, it still manages to.

Construction began in 1816 for Richard Richardson, a wealthy banker and shipping merchant, designed by the English architect William Jay in a style Savannah had never quite seen before.

It was finished in 1819, and Richardson moved in with his wife, their six children... and nine enslaved men, women, and children, whose forced labor built and ran this household.

Out back, you can still see the carriage house that also served as their living quarters... one of the best-preserved examples of enslaved housing left in this city.

Look up at its ceiling, if you ever get the chance to go inside, and you'll find traces of a pale blue-green paint called haint blue.

It was applied deliberately, following a tradition carried from West Africa, believed to ward off restless spirits from crossing into the home.

That paint has survived on those ceilings for two centuries.

Whatever it was meant to keep out, it is still standing watch.

Richardson's fortune collapsed within a few years, worn down by financial panic, a yellow fever epidemic, a fire that tore through half the city, and the deaths of his wife and two of his children.

He sold the house and left for Louisiana.

In 1830, it was purchased by George Owens, a wealthy lawyer and landholder who enslaved an estimated four hundred people across his various properties.

The Owens family lived here for generations after, and it is their name, alongside the family who cared for the home after them, the Thomases, that this house carries today.

In between those two families, this house had one especially famous guest.

In 1825, the Marquis de Lafayette, hero of the American Revolution, stayed here during his tour of the country and stepped out onto the home's second-floor balcony to address a crowd of Savannah's citizens gathered below.

That balcony still stands.

So, some say, does he.

This house is often called the most haunted single building in Savannah, and whether or not that is a fair contest to judge, it certainly does not lack for company.

Margaret Thomas, the home's last private owner, is said to still be seen tending the garden, exactly as she did for decades in life.

A woman in a veiled hat and gray shawl has been reported drifting through upstairs rooms, along with the shape of a man glimpsed in an upstairs apartment.

Staff have described the smell of smoke and a flicker of flame in an empty room, gone before anyone could find its source.

And perhaps strangest of all, the dining room... carefully set each night before the museum closes... is sometimes found disturbed by morning.

Chairs pulled out.

Silverware scattered.

As if supper had been interrupted mid-meal by someone nobody saw arrive.

Two centuries of history, joy, forced labor, grief, and grandeur all still occupy the same rooms in this house.

It seems none of it has ever quite agreed to leave.