Drinking and Telling Ghost Stories in a Haunted City

(Oct. 31) -- If you want to catch a glimpse of the real undead this Halloween, take a look at Savannah, Ga. -- you might not see any ghosts, but so many people around you will swear they did that you'll become convinced you have as well.

Savannah is the densest ghost tour site in the country, and around this time some companies are taking out up to 150 tourists in a night. You can find ghost tours in a lot of cities, particularly in the Southeast -- St. Augustine, Fla., Charleston, S.C., and New Orleans are some of the biggest spots. But stand in the historic district of Savannah on a typical night in tourist season and you can't swing a beer around without splashing some on a ghost tour (this is inadvisable).

This AOL News reporter got the inside scoop giving tours in the summer of 2009.

America's Most Haunted City

In 2002, in a survey that fell a bit short of a comprehensive study, the American Paranormal Institute declared Savannah "America's Most Haunted City." Ghost tours exploded -- a relatively small industry before that, there are now dozens of registered companies, all of them operating in the 2.5-square-mile historic district downtown.

But what makes Savannah so haunted?

I worked for Shannon Scott, who runs Sixth Sense Savannah, and he has an explanation. He says that the volcanic sands in the area make up a "geomagnetic anomaly" that has a way of messing with circuits and making people feel uneasy.

But that's a terrible ghost story.

A more spiritually compelling argument for the haunting might be yellow fever, the plague that killed off Savannah's residents for 150 years. My personal favorite explanation for why the city is so haunted was always the phenomenon of missing cemeteries -- when those yellow fever victims died, they were usually buried on the outskirts of town. When the town expanded, they would move the headstones, but not the bodies. Construction in Savannah has a way of turning up skeletons.

One important variant of the traditional ghost tour has been gaining steam in the past few years: the haunted pub crawl. Savannah visitors tend to stay away from sobriety, and the pub crawl ensures that they can hear their stories in a pleasingly spooky haze.

Gregg Proffit, an Massachusetts native with a thick Boston accent, runs Savannah by Foot, the original haunted pub crawl, which I gave for him on occasion. It seemed like a natural move to him.

"Next to New Orleans," he told AOL News, "Savannah is one of the bigger drinking towns in the country. In Savannah, drinking goes with just about everything except for going to church, and even the Catholics work that angle a little bit."

Since ghost tours have become more popular, however, the competition for prime spots and stories has become fierce.

"It gotten to be a little dirty pool," Scott said. "You have people taking one's copyrighted material and using it flagrantly, you have near fisticuffs between tour guides.

"The pigeons are fighting over the same breadcrumbs."

But one reason there are so many tours in Savannah is that the city doesn't make it that hard to start a company. To give tours, you just need to pass a test, get some stories, get some sort of distinctive hat, and then convince people to give you money and follow you around. In Savannah, that isn't that hard.

The Definition of Truth

Facts are important, but, as one guide told me, "never let the truth get in the way of a good story."

I got my history as accurate and detailed as I could -- it lent gravity to the stories. And many of the stories were Savannah classics. But artistic license has its place. I had heard they put one unfortunate man's testicles in his lapels, but jacket pocket just seemed classier to me.

One time, I had an old ghost tour veteran and friend of my boss's on my tour. I panicked -- I had no idea which house Dean Owens actually lived in and had been choosing one at random every night.

"This is really embarrassing," I told her, "but do you have any idea which house goes with that story?"

"Oh honey," she laughed. "Just make it up."

Another time I got lost and took some drunken patrons in a big circle. I told them it was spookier that way. Luckily I had recently purchased an iPhone with GPS.

Another story I told concerned Anna, a teenage bride who fell in love with a sailor. Her older husband beat her, the story goes, and finally threw her out of a second-story window. To this day, she is reputed to do an assortment of creepy things.

"I don't know what they're talking about," an elderly woman told me one time. "I knew that woman. She died in her 90s -- she wouldn't even have been able to walk up those stairs!"

We know that our ghost stories are embellished, but we want them to be true. For many people, even the scary ones offer spiritual comfort. They let us know that we are not dust. In the end, people listen to ghost stories because they are human stories -- they touch on some of the things that move us, and disturb us, the most: death, the afterlife, suffering, loss.

I was never a true believer -- I believed in the stories I was telling, at least in their value as stories. But I'd get customers for whom ghosts were clearly important as something more than just entertainment, and I tried to give them what I thought they needed. One person came up to me after a tour. She looked apprehensive.

"I've seen a ghost around my house," she said. "And I was wondering, if you have any idea, that maybe -- I've heard -- it's wearing black. Is that a sign of evil?"

I had no idea. I told her it wasn't. I hope she believed me.