Haunted Sites
Summoning the spirits…
Tondee's Tavern
No photo of this place yet.
A Bay Street tavern named for the Revolutionary-era tavern where Georgia's patriots met. Ghost City Tours has run paranormal investigations in its basement and used it as a pub-crawl meeting point.
- Address
- 7 E Bay St, Savannah, GA 31401
- Hours
- Check the official website or call ahead for current hours.
- Access
- restaurant (tavern)
The real history
About the place
Today's Tondee's Tavern at 7 East Bay Street takes its name from one of the most important buildings in Revolutionary Georgia. The original Tondee's Tavern, also called Tondee's Long Room, stood at the northwest corner of Broughton and Whitaker Streets. Peter Tondee built it between 1766 and 1770 and ran it with his wife, Lucy. It was the largest public building in Savannah, popular with sea captains and social clubs such as the Masons and the Union Society. Beginning on July 27, 1774, Georgia's Sons of Liberty, the 'Liberty Boys,' met there to discuss the Intolerable Acts, and it later became the first meeting place of the new state government. The original tavern burned in the great fire of 1796.
The Bay Street building that now carries the name dates to 1853, according to Ghost City Tours. Its ground floor was used by the Central Railroad and Banking Company. Upstairs, reached from the rear, were the offices of Joseph Bryan, who was Savannah's largest slave broker in the 1850s. The slave pens stood just behind the building in Bay Lane. During the Union occupation of 1864–65, the building was used by General John Geary, who commanded the city after its surrender.
The building now houses a restaurant and tavern, and it has been a meeting point for Ghost City Tours' haunted pub crawl.
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 ghost stories at Tondee's Tavern don't come from old legend. They come from modern paranormal investigators. A Ghost City Tours investigator recorded sessions in the basement for the web series The Dead Sessions, made with Chris Allen of Haunted Savannah Tours. The investigator says an electromagnetic-field meter sat silent in the basement for almost an hour, then began responding again and again during a question-and-answer session, with the same questions asked several times to rule out coincidence. The company says it is convinced 'there are certainly ghosts' in the building.
Much of the building's grim reputation comes from what happened upstairs and out back. A rumor repeated on tours says enslaved people were sometimes held in the basement before sale. The investigator who filmed there doubts it, noting that the actual slave pens were only steps away in Bay Lane and that the basement had no room suited to confining anyone. The rumor persists, and it is a reminder of the real suffering that passed through this block.
Tips
- Popular restaurants fill up at peak times: reserve where the restaurant takes bookings, or arrive early.
- Featured on 1 ghost tour; see the links below.
