17Hundred90 Inn

The name promises you something the building can't quite prove... and that, in itself, is a very Savannah kind of mystery.

The 17Hundred90 Inn calls itself the oldest inn in the city, and it may well be, in spirit if not in exact brick and mortar. The ground floor beneath you, with its slate and soft old brick, is believed to sit on the footprint of a structure that may date back toward 1790... possibly lost, at least in part, to one of the fires or fever years that reshaped so much of this district. What you're standing in today, though, was largely built between 1821 and 1823, with a smaller wing added later, in 1888. So the honest answer is... this building has been rebuilt, patched, and expanded across a full century, wearing that early date like a name it's never quite let go of.

That kind of layered history is exactly the sort of place where a story likes to take root. And this one has a name. Anna.

The story passed down through generations of staff and guests tells it this way. In the early 1800s, a young woman... some versions call her a new bride, promised into a marriage she hadn't chosen... fell in love with a sailor passing through Savannah. When his ship left port without her, the story says she waited in her upstairs room, watching the harbor from her window, hoping for a return that never came. Grief, in the way the legend tells it, finally became too much to bear, and she is said to have gone out that same window, falling to her death on the ground below.

I want to be honest with you about this one. There's no record, no name in a ledger, no grave marker that confirms a woman named Anna ever lived or died exactly this way in this building. It's oral history, the kind Savannah tells and retells so often that it eventually feels like fact. But feeling like fact is exactly why guests still ask for her room by name.

That room is 204, on the top floor, and it has built its own reputation independent of whatever really happened here two centuries ago. Guests staying in 204 report their sheets tugged gently in the middle of the night, as though someone were trying to wake them. Others describe the unmistakable sound of a woman crying, soft and close, after the lights go out. Jewelry left on the nightstand has turned up on the other side of the room by morning. Clothing folded one way is found refolded, or simply moved, with the door locked the entire night.

Nobody staying in 204 sleeps entirely alone, or so the inn's own staff will tell you with a knowing smile. Whether it's Anna, waiting still by a window for a ship that sailed two hundred years ago, or simply an old building settling into its many lives... you may want to double-check where you left your rings before you turn out the light.