Haunted Sites
Summoning the spirits…
Photo: JeffersonLH · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Eliza Thompson House
An 1847 Jones Street house, now an inn, whose former residents are said to have 'never left', according to Genteel & Bard.
- Address
- 5 W Jones St, Savannah, GA 31401
- Hours
- Check the official website or call ahead for current hours.
- Admission
- Check the official website.
- Access
- hotel (inn)
The real history
About the place
The Eliza Thompson House at 5 West Jones Street was the first house built on Jones Street, in 1847. Joseph Robert Thompson, a developer, cotton trader and bank director, built it for his wife, Elizabeth 'Eliza' Shaffer Thompson, and their seven children. Joseph died in 1855. Instead of handing his investments to a banker or lawyer, as widows were then expected to do, Eliza managed them herself and kept entertaining in her home until her death in 1875. She is buried in Laurel Grove Cemetery.
The family knew grief here. Their son Joseph Jr. died at nine in a fever epidemic. His twin, James Couper Thompson, was kicked by his horse in Forsyth Park in 1861, carried home, and died in the house on November 23. Two daughters lived here until the early 1920s, when they sold it to a doctor who used it as his home and office. In the 1950s a dentist did the same.
Jim and Mary Widman bought it in 1977 and turned it into an inn, rebuilding the collapsing carriage house as courtyard rooms. Later owners expanded and restored it. Today it is a bed-and-breakfast inn open to overnight guests.
Local legend
The Ghost Story
Told here as local lore, the way guides, books and visitors tell it. These are legends, not established fact.
The inn doesn't hide its reputation. In its own words, the house has 'just enough creaks and nuances' to fit into the most haunted city in America. Over the years, guests and local storytellers have described two recurring figures.
The first is a Confederate soldier, seen standing quietly at an upstairs window, looking out over Jones Street. The second is a young girl in a white dress, whose soft laughter is heard drifting through the hallways late at night. The inn says it can't explain either. The house is included among Savannah's haunted inns on local ghost tours, and the inn says writers from South Magazine once stayed up all night for a 'Fright Night' investigation and gave it 4.5 out of 5 on their 'Fright-O-Meter.'
Some guests wonder whether the family's sorrows linger. Eliza, widowed in 1855, outlived several of her children here, and one of her sons died in this house after his accident in Forsyth Park. The inn itself doesn't name its ghosts.
Tips
- Featured on 2 ghost tours; see the links below.
