The City Built on Its Dead: Savannah, Georgia & the Mercer House

In Episode 6 of Really Scary Real Estate, Amanda Jenee takes on an entire haunted city. Savannah, Georgia is built, literally, on top of its dead, from the ten thousand bodies beneath Colonial Park Cemetery to the squares paved over forgotten graves. At the center of it all sits the Mercer House on Monterey Square, the mansion where antiques dealer Jim Williams shot Danny Hansford in 1981, the subject of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Amanda breaks down how a famous killing destroyed a mansion's value as a home and turned it into a thriving museum, why Georgia's stigmatized property law is the polar opposite of California's disclosure rules, and how Savannah's dark history quietly became one of the most valuable real estate engines in the South. 

https://mercerhouse.com/

https://www.savannahga.gov/879/Colonial-Park-Cemetery

Book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil:

https://a.co/d/0j5xOUq3

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

There is a city in this country where you can walk through a beautiful park on a warm afternoon, sit on a bench under a live oak dripping with Spanish moss, eat your lunch, watch the tourists take their photos, and never once realize you are sitting directly on top of about 10,000 bodies. That park has a little over 500 headstones, 500 markers, 10,000 people underneath them. You do the math on where everybody else went. Spoiler. They did not go anywhere. The headstones moved, the people stayed. Because in Savannah, they did not build around the dead. They built on top of them, paved the road, put up a plaque that rounds the number down so it does not upset the tourists. Today we are going to walk those squares. We are going to step inside one specific mansion with one of the darkest stories in the American South. A house so notorious. It has its own book, its own movie, and its own gift shop. And then we are going to do the thing nobody else does with Savannah. We are going to talk about what all of this death did to the real estate. Because the answer will surprise you, and it is not what you think. Welcome back to Really Scary Real Estate, the only show where the property history matters more than the property line. I am your host, Amanda Janae, and today we are leaving the single haunted house behind and taking on an entire haunted city. So pour something, get comfortable, and let me take you to the most beautiful, most haunted, most quietly morbid city in America. Let me start with a fact that reframes the entire episode. There is a cemetery right in the middle of downtown Savannah called Colonial Park Cemetery. It opened around 1750. It stopped taking burials in 1853. For just over a hundred years, it was the main public burying ground for the whole city. Today it is a tidy six-acre park. You co-walk in for free, eight in the morning to dusk, and when you walk in, you will see a few hundred headstones. The most generous amount is somewhere around 500 markers. But the records say more than 10,000 people were buried there. So where did the other 9,500 go? Here is the answer, and it is the most savanna answer imaginable. As the city grew, developers wanted that land, prime downtown real estate, even in the 1800s. And moving a body is expensive, slow, and frankly disgusting work. Moving a headstone is easy. One man, one cart, done before lunch. So that is what they did. They moved the markers, they left the people, which means every building, every sidewalk, every road that surrounds that cemetery today is sitting on top of the dead who were never relocated. Walk down Abercorn Street on the west side of the cemetery, and you are walking over graves. There is no sign telling you that. There is just the street. Savannah's own ghost tour guides have a phrase for this. They call it the city that lives upon her dead. And the wild part is that it is not a marketing line, it is a description of the zoning. The dead in Savannah did not go anywhere. They are underneath the city, underneath the squares, underneath some of the most expensive historic property in the southeast. And in a few minutes, I'm going to show you what that does to a market. But first, how does a city even end up like this? Savannah was founded in 1733 by James Oglethorpe, and Oglethorpe did something almost no other American city founder did. He laid the whole place out on a strict grid of wards, and at the center of each ward he put a square. An open public park. Savannah still has 22 of these squares today, and they are the reason the historic district is one of the most beautiful places you will ever walk. Hold on to that word, ward. It is going to matter enormously when we get into the real estate because the entire modern market is still organized around these 300-year-old squares. The grid Olgathorpe drew is still the grid the money runs on. Now the death. So they rounded it up to nearly 700 and moved on. So you have a port city repeatedly devastated by plague, burying its dead faster than it can mark them on land that developers were already eyeing. That is the recipe. This is how you get 10,000 people under a 500 headstone park. Then the soldiers came. Then during the Civil War, after Union troops occupied Savannah at the end of 1864, several hundred soldiers camped inside the cemetery. They sheltered in the burial vaults, and some of them, for entertainment, altered the dates on the headstones. That is why, to this day, you can find markers in the colonial park claiming a man lived to be over 400 years old, or that a son was born a thousand years before his father. Now, the house. That is the city built on a plague, dwelling, and desecrated graves. Now let me take you to one specific square, a one specific house, because Savannah's most famous dark story is not a yellow fever grave, it is a mansion on Monterey Square, the Mercer House. The house was designed by a New York architect named John Norris for a Confederate general, Hugh Mercer. And here is a fun thread to pull. Hugh Mercer was the great grandfather of Johnny Mercer, the songwriter who gave us Moon River. So this very dark story has Moon River humming faintly in the background the whole time. Construction started in 1860, got interrupted by the Civil War, and the house was not finished until around 1868, after the general had already sold it. It passed through hands, it served for a while as a shriner's temple, and then it sat vacant for nearly a decade. A magnificent Italian mansion taking up an entire block of one of the prettiest squares in America, just empty, waiting. Understand something about this house before anyone ever dies in it. It was conceived in violence. Construction began in 1860, and within months the country tore itself in half. The civil war came, the work stopped, and Union soldiers occupying Savannah stripped the unfinished building from materials, hauling away pieces of it to shelter themselves in the very square it faces. General Mercer, the man it was built for, sold it before a single window was finished. He never spent one night under its roof. The house was empty before it was even a house. Think about that. A mansion that began as a dream of a grandeur and was abandoned mid breath, picked over by soldiers, sold off by a man who could not bear to live in it. Some houses are built. This one was survived, and it would go on surviving, long after the people inside it did not. By the 1960s, after a long stretch as a shriner's temple, the Mercer house sat vacant again, hollow, boarded, the kind of empty grandhouse that pulls children toward it like a held breath. In 1969, a boy was drawn to it. His name was Tommy Downs. He was 11 years old, and he climbed up onto the roof of the abandoned mansion the way eleven-year-old boys have always climbed towards the things they are told not to touch. And somewhere up on that roof, in the heat and the height of it, he slipped. The raw iron fence that wraps the Mercer's house is beautiful. It is also a row of vertical spears. Tommy Downs fell from the roof and the fence below caught him. He did not survive it. Eleven years old. To this day, the guides on the night tours will slow as they pass that fence, and they will point to a single iron spike that say is missing from the row, and they will tell you that is the spot. Whether that gap is real or whether it is the kind of detail a city like Savannah grows around a wound the way an oyster grows a pearl, I cannot tell you. What I can tell you is that the house had now taken a life, and it was only getting started. The Prince of Savannah. And then that same year, 1969, the house finally found the one man it had been waiting for. Jim Williams. Williams was magnetic, self-made, sharp-eyed, a collector with flawless taste who had clawed his way up from a small Georgia town to become the most glittering host in Savannah. He bought and restored more than fifty historic homes in that city. He understood beautiful things, and he understood that most beautiful things are usually the ones somebody else is dead and gone from. His whole fortune was built on antiques, on the gorgeous possessions of people who no longer needed them. He was, in the truest sense, a man who made his living off the dead. He poured two years and a fortune into the Mercer's house, and he made it dazzling. He then filled it with people. His Christmas parties became the social event of the Savannah year. An invitation so coveted that Williams kept two lists, an inbox and an outbox, and your name moved between them depending entirely on whether you had pleased him lately. He was a king holding court and restored palace. And like a lot of kings, he kept dangerous company close. The dangerous company had a name. Danny Hansford. He was also a storm. Volatile, reckless, prone to rages that came up out of nowhere, like weather off the coast. Years later, a writer named John Barnett would pour this whole story into a book, Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. That became one of the biggest nonfiction sellers in American history and a Clint Eastwood film. In Savannah, they do not even say the title. They just call it the book. And one of its characters describes Danny Hansford with the line so perfect it has outlived everyone involved. A good time not yet had by all. Williams hired him to work on the antiques on the house. The two men became involved, and Hansford moved into the Mercer house. And from the outside, it looked like the prince and the beautiful wild boy. From the inside, it was something darker. Screaming matches that empty dinner parties, threats, properties smashed in fits of fury, two people circling each other inside a perfect house, getting closer and closer to a line that, once crossed, cannot be uncrossed. It crossed on the 2nd of May, 1981. In the dead of night, by Williams' account, the two of them had been fighting, and Hansford's temper had gone over the edge. He shoved over an 18th-century English grandfather clock in the hall, sent two centuries of craftsmanship crashing to the floor. Williams was in his study, and by his telling, Hansford came through the doorway with a gun, leveled it at him, and pulled the trigger. And the gun jammed. In that frozen half second, Williams reached into his desk drawer, pulled out a pistol, and fired. He did not fire once. Danny Hansford was hit in the chest, in the back, and above the right ear. Twin years old, dead on the floor of the study, surrounded by Williams' priceless and beautiful things. Williams waited. The records show he did not call the police for something like half an hour. And when the officers finally walked into that study, what they found did not look to them like a man who just survived an attack. It looked arranged. There was a chair leg resting on top of the dead boy's pant leg, as though the chair had been set down on him after he had already fallen. There was a bullet hole in the floor that suggests a shot fired down into the body that was no longer a threat. And the gun, supposedly in Hansford's hand, left no gunpowder on his skin. The police looked at that room full of exquisite antiques and one young man cooling on the rug. And they did not see self-defense. They saw a stage that had been dressed. What came next is unprecedented in the state of Georgia. Jim Williams was tried for the killing of Danny Hansford not once, not twice, but four separate times. Four trials for a single death. No one in Georgia history has ever been put through that machine so many times for the same act. Guilty the first time. Life in prison. Overturned. Guilty again the second time. Overturned again. The third time collapsed into a mistrial, a hung jury, one room of the strangers unable to agree on what happened in that study. And finally, in 1989, after the case was carried out of Savannah entirely to find 12 people the city had not already poisoned with gossip, the verdict came back. Not guilty. The jury needed about an hour, eight years of trials, and they were home before dinner. And here is the detail that lifts the whole story out of true crime and drops it into something older and stranger. Somewhere in the middle of those trials, Jim Williams, the cultured prince of Savannah Society, went looking for help that does not come from lawyers. He turned to a voodoo priestess. In the book, she's called Minerva, and the scene is unforgettable. Williams and the writer follow her into a savannah graveyard at the witching hour because she had instructed him on how the dead keep time. Dead time, she calls it, lasts one hour. The half hour before midnight belongs to doing good. The half hour after midnight belongs to doing evil. And on this particular night, she tells him they're going to need a little bit of both. Out there among the graves in the dead time, she works to bend the trial his way and to lay a hex on the district attorney hunting him. And she tells Williams one more thing that he must ask Danny Hansford's spirit for forgiveness, that the boy is owed that much. And Jim Williams, proud to the last, refuses. He will not ask a dead boy for anything. So Williams walks free, acquitted, vindicated, the king restored to his palace, back in the Mercer House, surrounded again by his beautiful dead things. He lasted eight months. On the 14th of January 1990, Jim Williams collapsed and died inside the Mercer House. He was 59, and he died in the study. The same study. The same room where Danny Hansford had bled out on the floor nine years before. Some accounts placed him almost exactly where the boy had fallen. He had refused, you will remember, to ask for forgiveness. And in Savannah, people do not really argue about what happened to him. They just say it plainly, the way you state the weather. The boy did it. So what haunts the Mercer house now? The family that owns it today keeps the tours locked tight on the architecture and antiques. They will not discuss in their own chosen word the unpleasantness. But the guides and the guests still talk. Await in the air of the study that does not lift. The feeling of being watched from the top of the staircase. The plain, unarguable arithmetic of it. Two men dead by the violence in the same room of the same house. A child dead on the fence outside, and a building that has now outlived every single person who have ever tried to possess it. That is the thing about the Mercer House. Everyone who has walked through those doors believing they owned it, the general, the boy, the prince, the beautiful wild thing he loved, every one of them is gone. And the house is still standing on Monterey Square, perfect and patient, selling tickets to the people who come to feel what is left behind. Quick real estate hit because this is still that kind of show. Two things about this house that will stick with you. One, after Jim Williams died, his family tried to sell the Mercer house. The asking price got up to around nine million dollars, then dropped to about seven. And as a private home, it did not sell. Think about why. With that kind of money, you could buy any mansion you want. Are you buying the one where two people died in the front study? The one stranger's photograph from the sidewalk every single day. The fame is the exact thing that kills its value as a home. So the family stopped selling it as a house and turned it into a museum. Tours, a gift shop, year-round admission. The stigma destroyed it as a residence and built a business in its place. They did not beat the curse, they put it on a payroll. Two, and this one's actually useful if you ever buy anywhere. I am licensed in California myself, where I have to disclose any death on a property within the last three years. Georgia is the opposite. It is a buyer beware state. And the law literally says a seller does not have to tell you a homicide or any death happened on that property. So legally, the Mercer House killing never has to come out of the seller's mouth. The only catch, if you ask directly, they have to answer truthfully. Silence is legal, lying is not. The whole thing comes down to whether you think to ask the question. So make sure you ask that question. And that is the bigger picture in one line. Savannah did not hide its dark history to protect its property values. It leaned all the way in, sold tickets to it, and became one of the most desirable cities in the South because of the death, not in spite of it. Sometimes the stigma is not the liability, sometimes it is the whole business model. So here is my verdict, haunted or hype, on the literal ghosts. I'm going to stay exactly as skeptical as I always am. I cannot prove a single shadow figure in Colonial Park, and I cannot prove Danny Hansford pulled Jim Williams down into that study. Nobody can. That is the deal with this whole genre. You know I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But here is what is not hype. Not even a little. Savannah is a city that made a deliberate, sophisticated decision to face its darkest history instead of paving over it. Well, instead of paving over it twice, because they literally paved over it in the first time. The point is, modern Savannah chose to preserve the squares, protect the buildings, tell the stories, and yes, profit from them. And in doing that, it became more beautiful, more valuable, and more alive than almost any other historic city in the country. The Mercer House could have been demolished, the squares could have been ripped up for parking. The whole place could have buried its past a second time. Instead, Savannah looked at 10,000 bodies under a downtown park and a murderer in a mansion and said, This is who we are. Come see it. And the people came. So my verdict is this The ghosts are unproven, but the value of remembering is not. Savannah is the clearest proof on this entire show that a property's history, even its most terrible history, is not something to fear on a disclosure form. It is the most interesting thing the property owns, haunted or not, that city understands something most sellers never will. That is episode six of Really Scary Real Estate. I'm Amanda Janae. If you want to walk where we walk today, links are in the show notes. The Mercer Williams House Museum, Colonial Park Cemetery, and a few of the squares worth your time if you ever make it to Savannah or if you live there or live nearby. Go ask a tour guide a question they cannot answer. Tell them I sent you. Next week we are checking into a hotel. And we talked about this hotel very briefly in the last episode. A real one. One you can actually book a room in tonight if you are brave enough, where a struggling writer spent one freezing night as the last guest of the season and woke up with the nightmare that became one of the most famous horror stories ever written. We are going to the Stanley. Bring a jacket. Room 217 runs very cold. If today's episode made you look at your own city a little differently, or made you want to ask one more question before you sign anything, do me a favor and leave a review just two minutes. It is the most single, most powerful thing that you can do for an independent show. I will see you next Tuesday or Wednesday. Stay curious, stay skeptical, and always, always read the full property history before you close.