Few houses in Savannah are more closely tied to ghost tours than the Sorrel-Weed House, and its central legend is one the house itself has been revising. As the story was long told, Francis Sorrel's wife, Matilda, discovered that her husband was involved with Molly, a young enslaved woman in the household. In her grief, the legend says, Matilda threw herself from an upper balcony and died in the courtyard below. About a week later, Molly was said to have been found hanged in her room in the carriage house. Some versions call it suicide, others murder, with the blame laid on Francis, another enslaved person, or a grieving Sorrel child.

Guides tell of a woman's presence in the main house and of Molly in the carriage house. Visitors have described sudden cold spots, a feeling of being watched, and voices on recordings. Paranormal TV built the house's fame. TAPS investigated it for a 2005 Halloween special of Ghost Hunters, the Ghost Adventures crew came in 2014, and it has since appeared on the Travel Channel's The Most Terrifying Places in America and on BuzzFeed Unsolved. The Wall Street Journal wrote about its haunted reputation in 2009, and travel lists regularly rank it among the most haunted houses in America.

For years, part of the legend was that Molly's remains lay under a sunken spot in the carriage house basement floor. In 2017 the house invited Armstrong State University archaeologists to excavate it, and the dig was open to the public. The researchers found a trash pit full of animal bones, metal, glass, ceramics and household objects, and no burial.

Today the house's own staff say there are 'about 50 different versions' of the story, and they have reworked their tours to stay closer to the documented history. That history includes the real cruelty of urban slavery, which the Molly legend reflects even though it can't be documented.