Hello, All! And, thank you so much for your welcome messages! About 3-4 weeks ago, I did watch a Paranormal show "Haunted Towns," which truly intrigued me. The very first episode of this series was shot in the Savannah area, and that is where I initially heard that Savannah is literally built on it's dead. I am from the Savannah area, and I have lived here all of my life. Being raised a very strict Southern Baptist, I never believed in the Paranormal until I had this experience. Since my experience, I have had a few other Paranormal experiences in different areas of Savannah. The business that I was working at that I described in my original post was located in what is considered part of the "Historic / Conservation District" of the Downtown Savannah area, and it is near Historic River Street. I have never really told my story previously, because I felt many people would find me to be crazy. I have a few close friends who are aware of my experience. At least a couple of them said that I must have been "experimenting" with a Quija Board or with "demonic activities," which is absolutely ludicrous. I don't dabble in thing like that. That particular time in my life is the only time I ever worked in the downtown Savannah area, and I have lived my entire life on the southside of Savannah. I know that the particular location in which I worked in Downtown Savannah was featured in the Margaret DeBolt book, Savannah Spectres. At one time I had a copy of the book, but I never read it and cannot locate it so I may have loaned it to someone and never got it back. As far as I am aware, no one has ever actually done a paranormal investigation of this particular building and, I'm not hopeful that anyone can at this point as it is has fallen into disrepair since the company I worked for closed sometime between 2007 and 2009 and is scheduled for demolition. It has been a couple of other similar businesses since that time. There were just so many unexplained happenings in that building! Like I said, things would go missing, be moved around, light bulbs would blow out for unexplained electrical reasons, equipment used in the business would come on and go off by itself, particularly at night, I was tapped on the shoulder that one morning with no one else in the building but me. While I had to start my day early in the morning, I didn't walk into the place and leave the doors unlocked. I locked the doors behind me and get started for the day. Lights in the front of the storefront portion of the building were always kept on at night, but the back of the building, which was built in the late 1800s would all be off and had to be turned on when I came into the building. As soon as I walked into the building, I always felt uncomfortable - it was that feeling of being watched. We had no security cameras, but we did have a motion-activated security system. So, the first order of business was to unlock the door and lock the door behind you, and deactivate the security system. I knew that no one (living, at least) was in the building besides me. If I started at 5:30am to get everything up and running and get my daily paperwork completed, my first employee would typically arrive around 6:45am to 7:00am, depending on their scheduled arrival time and the city bus schedules. After the time that I got tapped on the shoulder when there was no one else in the building, I felt super-weird. When alarm calls would come during the middle of the night, my father would go downtown with me (with his firearm with him) to address the alarm calls. There were multiple times when we found that equipment that could NOT automatically turn itself back on had indeed reactivated itself. Like I said before, things were constantly being moved around as if someone thought it was a game. We finally gave up on trying to keep certain areas lighted due to the lightbulbs constantly blowing out for no reason and, consequently, the bathrooms, which were little wooden stalls that were added-on to what appeared to have been an old "sauna" of some type, were unlighted. I wouldn't go into the bathrooms at all. They were so creepy. In fact, most of the place was creepy. I would work a full day of typically between 8 and 10 hours and would never use the bathroom. Sometimes, I could find a restaurant to use the bathroom in if it was absolutely necessary. It wasn't until after I saw the apparition and moved to another store location and spoke with another manager who saw the same thing that I realized I wasn't totally and completely crazy. When the next store manager saw the apparition, based on his description, it was a lot larger than what me and my employee saw. Most of the strange activity took place within a certain area of the almost 3500 foot usable section of the structure. There were two large worktables in the very back, and that seemed to have the most prolific "activity," such as things moving themselves and equipment turning off and on by itself. This is also where the other manager saw the "apparition." My employee and I saw the apparition quite a ways away from that area. Being that this was a structure that was not heated or air conditioned, one would think that, in the middle of summer in the South that it would be 100+ degrees inside, which was the case in some areas of the building, it would be ice-cold for no apparent reason. I always looked for reasonable explanations as my father did, but, unfortunately, there were none.
In the 29 years since I left that particular location (I worked for the company for several years after this, by the way), I have had several other experiences. One of these was close to my home. There is a park called "Lake Mayer" near my home, and there have been many paranormal events in a subdivision close to this park. While driving one evening, I saw an "apparition" of a woman dressed in a long white dress - almost like something you could equate with Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind - carrying a lantern walking down the road near the park. I had to do a double-take on this and looked in my rear-view mirror. I could still see her for a second or two, and then she just literally evaporated. Some years later, I read where this is, apparently, a common sighting in both the subdivision close to the park as well as near the park itself. According to local legend, the entire area area nearby this park, including the area where my house is as well as the subdivision near the park, used to be an old Pecan and HIckory plantation, from what I've been told. This would explain the prevalence of both Pecan and Hickory trees in the area. There is a story attached to the "Woman with the Lantern," but I don't recall the details.
Also, near an area of Southside Savannah named Sandfly, I was driving home from a friend's house one night. I saw this man in my headlights - clear as day. He had on what appeared to be a white shirt and overalls and was walking a dog. He looked like he was real - just like any real person with a dog. Suddenly, the man just walked out in front of my car, and I slammed on my brakes. If he would have actually been real, I would have killed him AND the dog. But, when my car "hit" him, he literally evaporated, and the entire inside of my car got ice-cold. I had to pull my car over to side as much as I could and get out to investigate to make sure I didn't hit anyone. Not a thing was there - living or dead. I spoke with a friend who has lived for quite a long time on Isle of Hope, and she told me that she had heard many stories similar to this. Apparently, it was a "ghost-man" walking his "ghost-dog."
Another strange thing that I have experienced occurred between 2013 and 2018 and was in the Port Wentworth/Pooler area near Savannah. My father was living with some friends in this area in a very large new home - approximately 5000 square feet. Everytime I was at the house in the upstairs, I felt strange - like I was being watched. I was always looking over my shoulder. I never could explain it. One Sunday night, I was visiting my father in the upstairs portion of the house, and I saw what appeared to be a shadow moving quickly down the hall. I had to get up and check to see what was going on, but I didn't see anything. My father and I were the only ones in the home at the time. After I went and sat back down, I saw another dark shadow that appeared to be moving across the ceiling - again, very quickly. So, I get up and check things out again, and, of course, nothing. My father passed away a few days after this, and, a couple of weekends after he passed, I was over visiting with these friends one night, and one of their cats got out of the house. I went outside with my friend's husband to held him get the cat in, and, at one point, I looked up and saw what I thought was my friend, the man's wife, standing in an upstairs bedroom looking through the curtains at us trying to locate the cat. I waved at her, and the curtains closed. After we finally corralled the cat and we went back inside, I told my friend that I saw her at the upstairs bedroom window and waved. I asked why she didn't wave back, and she said that she hadn't been upstairs - she had been downstairs the entire time. This is when she told me that she thought that the house was haunted. Honestly, since those houses were built near a very famously-haunted plantation, supposedly one of the most harrowing, haunted areas near Savannah, I think it's the land that's haunted. Within about 2 months of these events happening, my friends moved out and into a different nearby subdivision. The huge house that they lived in, which was VERY, VERY nice and, as I said new, has been on the market at least 4 times since they moved out in 2018.