Haunted Sites
Summoning the spirits…
Photo: Seasider53 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Churchill's Pub
An English-style pub on Bay Street where patrons report the silhouette of a man said to have hanged himself from the beams, and beer taps turning on by themselves.
- Address
- 13 W Bay St, Savannah, GA 31401
- Hours
- Check the official website or call ahead for current hours.
- Access
- restaurant (pub)
The real history
About the place
Churchill's Pub stands at 13 West Bay Street, in a building that, according to the pub, dates to Savannah's rebuilding after the Civil War in the late 1860s. At that time this stretch of Bay Street was the center of the city's shipping and cotton trade.
The pub's story began a block away. Churchill's first opened at 9 Drayton Street, in an 1853 building believed to be the city's oldest continuously operated saloon site. It appeared there in the 1996 filming of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and it closed after a fire some seven years later. That building has been The Fitzroy since 2018. The Bay Street space was once Wally's Sixpence Pub, a British-style tavern popular in the 1980s and early '90s, and the pub's own history dates its transformation into Churchill's to 1999.
Today Churchill's is a multi-level English-style pub with dark wood, brass and a massive handcrafted bar, plus a brick cellar wine room, an upstairs event space and a rooftop terrace. It is open to the public for food and drink.
Local legend
The Ghost Story
Told here as local lore, the way guides, books and visitors tell it. These are legends, not established fact.
For an English pub, Churchill's has a very Savannah reputation. Visit Savannah, the city's tourism office, passes on the best-known rumor: the figure of a man can be seen hanging from the high wooden beams. Its advice to diners is to try not to look up while eating.
The pub itself acknowledges decades of ghost stories, including shadow figures and its most famous night in 2013, when the beer taps reportedly turned themselves on overnight with no one in the building.
Paranormal investigator and author Ryan Dunn drank here for years before asking a bartender whether the place was haunted. He learned that many patrons had experiences in the ladies' room in the basement. A couple of weeks later he came back after hours with two other investigators, focused on that basement, and wrote that he came away with a fair amount of evidence that spirits still linger. The pub is a regular stop on Savannah's haunted pub crawl.
Tips
- Popular restaurants fill up at peak times: reserve where the restaurant takes bookings, or arrive early.
- Featured on 3 ghost tours; see the links below.
