In 2005, Jessica and I went to Savannah for Halloween 2005.  The following story is true, and happened during our visit.  I told it on the air right after our visit, and a replay is requested each Halloween.  Here it is:

Jessica and I went to Savannah for the weekend and decided to take a ghost tour and made a reservation for one that was advertised in the hotel lobby.

After dinner, we started our tour at one of the many town squares.  One of the stories told that night was about a young girl named Joni.  Joni was a slave girl that lived in the mid-1800s, and was owned by a wealthy Savannah family.   Because she was too young to work in the fields or stables, her main job was to be a playmate to the children of this family.  Back in the mid-1800’s, there were no playgrounds or jungle gyms or school yards or parks.   The only large grassy area where children could play in was the  cemetery.  So Joni would play every single day in a cemetery.

If you go to Savannah and visit the cemetery today you’ll see that many of the tombs are built a couple of feet above ground, with what looks like a cemented over doorway leading down into the earth.  Back in Joni’s time, these passages were wide open!   If you were a child playing in the cemetery you could climb down into the tombs.  You could hide on the shelves where bodies would someday lie, and you might even find a bone or a skull among the rotted caskets.  This is where Joni played.  And according to legend, she knew the cemetery better than any of the other kids in the neighborhood.

Only a year and a half after Joni was brought to Savannah, she died in a tragic accident at her home — she fell out of a window and hit her head on the brick road beneath.   She never woke up and was buried in a part of the cemetery reserved for slaves … tragically, this was the same cemetery where she used to laugh and play almost every day!

The ghost tour guide said that if you went to the cemetery at night and started running around, jumping, cheering, playing, laughing and doing other silly things as a seven or eight-year-old might do then Joni might just join you, as long as you were inside the cemetery.  The legend said Joni would never leave her beautiful, grassy playground.  Senior citizens who were just kids in Savannah in the early 1900’s talk about getting called home to dinner and standing on their front porch waving at the little girl in the tattered clothes just inside the cemetery gates.  Their Mom and Dad would look on puzzled, because there was no one there.

Our tour guide told us to make sure we wave to Joni behind the gates after we play with her, so she knows we had fun.

After the ghost tour, Jess and I stopped at a bar for a few drinks, and then walked back to our hotel.  We intentionally passed the cemetery, because it was Savannah and Halloween weekend and that’s what you do.  We wanted to see if we could see anything – not necessarily a ghost or Joni — but even some of the freaky ghost hunters holding a seance or doing whatever they do.

Next to the cemetery is a children’s playground with all the usual toys: a swing set, a jungle gym, a slide, a teeter-totter, monkey bars.  I was standing at the iron fence, looking into the cemetery.  Jessica was behind me.  I was studying the shadows and the tombstones, looking for activity.  I could hear Jess goofing around on the playground stuff.  At one point, she asked me if I would ask Joni become over the fence and say hi or push her on the swing.  I laughed at that and promised that would let her know if I saw any little girls.  I reminded her that she would have to go INTO to cemetery to play with Joni.  She responded with a definite ‘no, way!’

It was probably less than two minutes later, when Jessica broke the silence again.   But this time, it was a startled scream.  I turned toward her to see her backing away from the playground equipment, staring at something on the ground.   Her gaze was fixed on whatever was before her, and she almost tripped on some tree roots as she moved quickly backwards.  I thought for a second that she was screwing with me, but she had the look of real concern on her face.  I made my way over to her, studying the ground to find the snake, bug, or whatever else it was that freaked her out.

I reached her in only a few seconds and asked her what was wrong.  I could tell by the expression on her face that what she was going to say was not a joke and was more significant than a bug running in front of her.   She told me that she was swaying from the monkey bars.  Nothing elaborate, just pulling herself up and taking her feet off the ground and moving one from one end to the other end.   At the end, she’d jump down, turn around, and go back the other way.  Standard issue monkey bar activity.  She doesn’t remember how many times she went back and forth, but she soon became bored and started to walk over to where I was standing.  She insists that as she was walking away, she felt a small hand slip into her own and pull her back towards the jungle gym — hard.  She knows lost her breath at this point, and despite wanting to scream, she couldn’t.  She instinctively yanked her hand away and looked towards where a child should be standing, and of course, no one was there.  Her first thought was that Joni was with her, and that she shouldn’t be scared.  She swears that she heard a child speak the words “I just want to play with you.  Please don’t be scared.”  But she was, and she couldn’t help herself, and she screamed.

I initially laughed, but there was no reasoning with her.  The ghost tour, the alcohol, the long day in the car, Halloween weekend in America’s most haunted city.  Nothing would make Jessica believe this was only in her mind.  We walked briskly back to the hotel and fell asleep talking about Joni.  Luckily the alcohol helped us doze, or else we would have been up all night.

Of course, our little adventure was the main topic of conversation at breakfast the next morning.   Well rested and sober, Jessica was much more willing to dismiss the entire incident as a mind trick … something she just imagined and made real because of where we were, when we were there, and what we heard.   There is no such thing as ghosts, and if the story of little Joni’s life and death was true, we were certain she was resting comfortably, six feet underground.  If she could haunt, we decided it was quite unlikely she’d be trying to play with a drunken woman too tall to swing with her on the monkey bars after one in the morning.

The next night we’re doing some exploring on our own, mainly searching for the bench Forrest Gump sat on to eat his box of chocolates.   We found where it used to stand — it’s now been replaced by a cement wall — and Jessica recognized the church from the beginning of the movie just down the street.   This is the church with a tall steeple that the feather falls out of at the start of the film.  I don’t remember it, but decided to snap a picture anyway.  The first picture came out okay, but as I’m still playing with my new camera, I took a couple more, making minor adjustments each time.  About three pictures in, I noticed two distinct orbs floating near the steeple.

If you’ve seen any pictures on the Internet of what a ghost on film supposedly looks like, this is it.  They often appear as random orbs floating in a picture, and that’s exactly what this was.  I showed it to Jessica asked if she thought I just caught a ghost on film.

She replied “Maybe it’s Joni.”

I continued taking pictures and Jessica, as a joke, cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted toward the steeple “Joni, if that’s you, tell all your friends to get in close so we can take a group picture.”

If I wasn’t the photographer I would not believe these pictures at all.  In the next shot, there were several more orbs floating around.  In the shot after that, even more.  If these orbs really are ghosts, then there were maybe twenty to thirty ghosts in my picture.   I was no longer making any adjustments to the camera.  I was shooting one picture after another, and will offer these photographs for anyone to inspect in their unaltered format.

Jessica suggested I take some pictures of the side of my car – a completely black surface – to see if the orbs appear there as well.  They didn’t.

Pictures shot of other parts of the sky yielded no orbs.  It was spooky, and unexplainable.  Again, the spirits of Savannah dominated the conversation during our walk back to the hotel.  As we were both sober, it was a bit harder to fall asleep.

Sunday morning we got up early to make our way back to Atlanta.  By 9:30 we were checked out, and at the Savannah Starbucks so Jessica could get her mocha venti whatever.

When she came back to the car, she was not alone.  She had with her an older gentleman who was headed down to River Street to hand out brochures for his night-time ghost tour.  He was in line ahead of Jessica, and they struck up a conversation.   In the time it took her milk to foam, she managed to tell him about the steeple orbs and convince him to come out to the car and look at our pictures.

He was quite sure that the images in our pictures were spirits.  He was also impressed that there were so many of them.   I told them that Jessica had asked Joni to gather her friends around for the picture, and maybe that’s what happened.  I made a joke about staying in Savannah one extra night and jumping the fence of the cemetery so we could go in and thank little Miss Joni in person when she appears to play with us.  Our new friend laughed told us a story.

He explained that Savannah is literally a city that’s built upon its dead.  They don’t treat graves with the respect they deserve.  For example, the new high-end hotel in town couldn’t put in their underground parking garage because when they started digging, they found hundreds of graves.   So instead they just fill them back in and poured the cement over and build upon the dead – or in that case, park upon the dead.

Unfortunately, most of the slave graves of the 1800’s were unmarked, and therefore built upon when space to expand the city was needed.  So, to thank Joni, you don’t actually have to walk through a gate.  You simply have to go to where the slaves were buried, just outside the cemetery of today’s walls.

“It’s easy to find,” said the ghost hunter.  “It’s where the children’s playground now stands.”

(Click the map for locations mentioned in this story.)