Haunted Sites
Summoning the spirits…
Photo: JeffersonLH · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Old Chatham County Jail (Habersham Hall)
The 1887 county jail, later a SCAD building, that once held about 600 prisoners and had an execution cell. Tours tell of the criminally insane once confined there.
- Address
- 235 Habersham St, Savannah, GA 31401
- Hours
- Check the official website or call ahead for current hours.
- Admission
- Check the official website.
- Access
- exterior only
The real history
About the place
The old Chatham County Jail at 235 Habersham Street was built in 1887 and took its first prisoners in 1888. The Georgia historian Charles C. Jones Jr. called it 'large and costly.' The McDonald Brothers Jail Building Company of Louisville, Kentucky built its 117 brick-and-iron cells, each five by ten feet, with local architect DeWitt Bruyn and contractor W. F. Bowe. The Savannah Morning News described the plans in 1886, including a cell for condemned prisoners with a trapdoor for executions by hanging.
Its original 93-foot octagonal Byzantine-style tower burned in 1898. It was replaced by the 106-foot Moorish Revival tower, with small cast-iron balconies, that still marks the skyline. The jail was renovated in 1957 and closed in 1978, when the new county jail opened on Montgomery Street, and the empty cell block slowly decayed.
The Savannah College of Art and Design acquired the building in the late 1980s and restored the jailer's residence and tower as Habersham Hall. It is not a public attraction. You can view the tower and facade from Habersham Street.
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 ninety years this building held Savannah's accused and condemned, and ghost tours that pass at night say it never quite emptied out. Dr. Buzzard's Goodtime Ghost Tour stops here to describe the jail as it was: home over the years to some 600 prisoners, with separate areas for the violent and the criminally insane, and an execution cell.
The Moorish tower, a fanciful crown on a grim building, still rises over Habersham Street. The sources here record no specific named ghost, only the jail's reputation as one of the stops where Savannah's harder history is told after dark.
Tips
- This is viewed from the street: please respect the residents and the property.
- Featured on 2 ghost tours; see the links below.
