 Yellow fever is a virus that is typically found in tropical areas around the world. It comes from the mosquito, a lot like malaria. Yellow fever has the name yellow fever because the virus attacks the liver. Now, when the liver is having problems, the skin tends to turn yellow. For most of Savannah's life since its founding in 1733, yellow fever was a deadly virus. Nowadays, we do have a vaccine for yellow fever and our doctors are better equipped to deal with the devastation that the virus causes a human. And since this disease is caused by a mosquito and typically spreads in tropical areas, Savannah is the perfect place for this virus to spread. Now, yellow fever, as I said earlier, affects your liver. It damages your liver, hence why your skin will turn to a yellowish color. But that's not all the damage that the virus does. Like most viruses, it will give you a really gnarly fever. It can cause people to hallucinate and to get the chills. It can also cause internal bleeding and issues with your kidneys. Now, we absolutely, your liver and your kidneys are vital organs. You have to have a working liver and at least one working kidney in order to stay alive. Between the years 1807 and 1820, it is estimated that about 4,000 people died in Savannah, Georgia of yellow fever. At one point, the deaths were so overwhelming that the city basically dug a mass grave in a local cemetery in order to pile up the dead bodies. Now, funny, if you were lucky, you were put into this mass grave because you see sometimes with yellow fever, a person may appear to be dead when they're not actually dead. For the people in Savannah that they presume dead that they put into coffins, it is now known that some of those people were buried alive. They know this because when they pulled up some old graves, there were marks on the top of the casket showing how the victim had tried to claw their way out of the grave. Now, of course, if your body was thrown into a mass grave, you probably had a better chance of getting out of your situation. But before we go any further, remember to hit that subscribe button and give us a like. Welcome to esoteric Atlanta. My name is Bryce and today we're going to be talking about Colonial Park Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia. To look at this cemetery, but this cemetery got started off in a pretty peculiar way. And to understand that, we have to look back at Puritan times when the colony of Georgia was being settled. So as we've said in other videos, General Oglethorpe settled Savannah in 1733 when it was still under British rule. Now, within the Puritan belief system, when a person died, it was superstition. It was belief. It was religious doctrine to make sure that their body was buried on hollowed ground. Now, what this means is that this ground needed to be blessed or be attached to a church. The local church at this point was the Christ Church. However, General Oglethorpe did not put the first cemetery in Savannah near or on Christ Church property. Now, we don't know why this is. Again, as I just said, this was a really big deal for the Puritan beliefs of afterlife. Kind of like how we know that the Puritans buried their bodies facing east, facing the rising of the sun, so that when the resurrection happened, their loved ones would be able to rise up out of the grave. Now, this point in history to our ancestors, if you're Western of Western descent, did not view death the same way that we view death. If you remember back to our Oakwood Cemetery episode here in Atlanta, we talked about how it became a park and a social place. I mean, most cemeteries today have landscaping. People go there often to spend time with their dearly departed. But during Puritan times, this was not the case. In Puritan times, death was kept far away. It was attached to the church. It was something that we didn't talk about. In fact, during Puritan times, things like art wasn't really accepted. The only time you would ever see art would be on somebody's tombstone. And so when Colonial Park Cemetery was founded, it was founded under Puritan beliefs. A lot of the older graves were not manicured and kept up with in the way that we monitor, manicure, and take care of graves and cemeteries today. In fact, our relationship with death changed around the Victorian era, which was the mid to late 1800s when Queen Victoria was the monarch reigning over England. This all happened when her husband, Albert, passed away. There was a deep mourning in almost what we now call a celebration of life. Now, what's pretty incredible about this particular cemetery as you can see the evolution of our perception of death from the Puritan views of it being a little bit more taboo to the Victorian ideas of celebrating and visiting the dead. Now today, Colonial Park Cemetery is absolutely packed solid. There is no place in the ground that you can step where you're not going to be stepping on a dead body. So the first part of the cemetery, as I said, was settled in 1733 by General Oglethorpe. The cemetery didn't become an actual cemetery until 1750. Now, as more and more people started immigrating into the new world, of course, that meant more and more deaths were occurring. So it wasn't long until they had to expand the cemetery yet again. And so the new land was added soon after it was established in 1750. Now, the third part of land was established in 1763 and this third section backs up to Abercorn Street, which is again our video with the demonic house of Abercorn Street. And that's the section of Colonial Park Cemetery that I have seen is the one that backs up to Abercorn Street. Now, again, they had to expand. So the fourth plot was added in 1770. And then once more, 1812 came around and they added the very last part of land to the cemetery. This cemetery, when it was founded, was considered to be outside of the city. If you're familiar with the city of Savannah, you know that this cemetery is right smack dab in the middle of the city. Very similar to our Oakwood Cemetery here in Atlanta, which again, that cemetery was also supposed to be outside of the city, but now is right in the middle of Atlanta. So just how many people are buried at Colonial Park Cemetery? Well, that's a good question. Again, as I said in the opening with the Yellow Fever outbreak in 1820, they just dumped a mass grave in the cemetery and put a bunch of bodies in there. Now, here's a little thing too that I found quite interesting seeing that my heritage is the low country as well. The ground in the low country is very different. It's got a lot of sand. So if your ancestor has a tombstone is one of the lucky ones to have a marker and you go to dig him or her up, chances are they might not be there anymore. You see, something really weird happens with the sand based ground and it tends to move the coffins. Now, a few years back, an archaeological group decided that they were going to try to figure out exactly how many bodies were in this cemetery. And again, bodies have been buried on top of each other. So what they figured out was there were about 550 marked graves and 8078 unmarked graves. That's a lot of damn bodies down there that have no identity attached to them. But you have to remember, like I said earlier, some of these bodies were buried during Puritan times. And because they were buried during Puritan times, the customs were very, very different than the customs that we started to see in the Victorian age and of course in our modern time as well. The idea of death was very different. So even though some of these graves are unmarked, it does not mean that these people were not loved or were just tossed aside. They could have very well been loved, honored, cherished people in their family. It's just that their interpretation of death was very different than ours today. But nonetheless, in 1924, the city of Savannah started to try to revamp this cemetery. And they first started by taking a man named Sam, Sam Elbert, who died in 1788. Now, he and his wife had been buried on his plantation. But the city decided to remove his body and bring it to this cemetery. And of course there is a marker on his grave site if you want to see Sam Elbert's grave. Now, Sam Elbert's grave is what we call a tabletop grave. And you'll see a lot of these in older cemeteries where they actually look like a tabletop. This does not mean that the body is inside. The body is under the ground. It was just the style of death back in those days. Now, of course, by today there are a ton of very famous and big names buried in Colonial Park. But I'm going to give you one more name. If you want to learn the rest of the people buried there, there are so many videos up about the people in the cemetery that you can refer back to. There's also tours in Savannah that you can go on specifically just for this cemetery. But the last big person we're going to talk about is someone we've already spoken about. If you can remember back into our first Evergola episode, we talked about a man named Archibald Bullock. I loved that name. Well, if you remember correctly, Archibald was the first ever governor of the state of Georgia. Now, again, he was born in Charleston, my family's hometown. And he ended up moving to Savannah to marry the woman that would become his wife. Now, Archibald is also the great, great grandfather of our late President Theodore Roosevelt. Another fascinating thing about Archibald Bullock is that even though he ended up spending most of his life in Georgia, he was not a loyalist. He was a patriot. He fought for our freedom. Now, in our last episode, we talked about this American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence. And we talked about how Thomas Jefferson wrote out the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, 1776. And there were 56 delegates from all of the different colonies who signed this Declaration of Independence, declaring the colonies to be a separate and independent country from Great Britain. Now, a few days after the Declaration of Independence was written and sent to England, he printed a bunch of copies and sent a bunch of copies out to all of the colonists. Now, Archibald Bullock was the one man in Savannah who stood and read out the Declaration to all of the citizens in Savannah. Now, you have to also remember that Savannah was the first capital of Georgia. So it makes sense that Archibald would have been living in Savannah as the state's first ever governor. So if you do find yourself in Savannah and you do go to the cemetery, I would suggest going and visiting all Archibald's place of burial. Now, you can't have a big cemetery like Colonial Park Cemetery without having a few ghost stories. We have talked about a few cemeteries over the course of this channel, and I still stand by my belief that most cemeteries are not haunted, except for the ones that we've talked about. And Colonial Park is one of the cemeteries that is definitely very, very haunted. Now, among the hauntings at this cemetery, there are a lot of children. This makes sense. It's kind of like Gracie Watson from Bonaventure Cemetery. I would imagine that most children who die probably are more confused about what's happening than the average adult. And with all the bodies from Yellow Fever, I definitely know that there are a lot of children in the mix. And of course, if children have passed away together and they're all in this cemetery together, they probably are having just a grand old time playing together in their new found home. However, before we move on to our main ghost of this cemetery, I do want to also reference that this cemetery is very, very, very much used by the local Gullah culture for their root doctors. Again, we spoke about this in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, where the root doctors refer to cemeteries as gardens, and they go there to do their root magic. Again, practicing magic from 11.30 to midnight is for the good. Practicing magic from 12 to 12.30 is for the evil, hence Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. Now, if you are interested in this side of Southern culture, especially I should actually probably rephrase that Southern low country culture, I would definitely walk by the cemetery at night. I believe in this stuff. I very much respect the Gullah people and their way of life, their faith has very much affected the way that I view the world in general. So if you do see this going on the cemetery again, please, please, please, please, please be respectful to the practitioners. Most people are pretty comfortable nowadays talking about this side of the low country. A lot of people who are native to Savannah, regardless of their race, will be able to kind of give you more information on what's actually happening during these ceremonies. Alright, so let's move on to our main ghost, the main attraction of Colonial Park Cemetery. Over the years, many people have claimed to see a very large spirit walking through the cemetery. This spirit is of a man named Renee. Now, he does have a last name. I'm not going to give it because there is speculation on whether this story is true or not. Who knows? You know, a lot of people need hard, fast evidence to believe something is true. However, if you are a child of the South like I am, you know that sometimes, especially if you come from a very prominent family, the little mishaps might just get pushed under the rug and there's no way to really trace through paperwork what actually happened. Now, Renee was supposedly a very, very tall young man. He was close to what I've heard, seven feet. Now, again, that part of the story could be urban legend. There could be a lot of parts to this story that are just strictly urban legend. Now, they also say that he might not have been completely there mentally. I don't know what was wrong with him, but he obviously didn't quite have the intellect of an average person that would be able to go on and take care of his or herself. Now, in life, Renee was known to kind of roam around the city. You know, like I said, people just kind of let him be because, again, he didn't seem to really be all there. Now, around this time, apparently, there were a bunch of murders of little girls happening. Again, there is no paperwork to trace back these murders, but then again, this is the past. You know, we didn't really keep up with every single person back then, so who knows? Well, the town got really angry about this, and it was thought that maybe Renee had something to do with these murders. I don't know. From what I, how the story was originally told to me, it sounded like he, Renee, just became a scapegoat because he wasn't all there, and he was kind of a giant compared to people's the average height of... I mean, seven feet tall is tall for us even now, but as we know over time, over evolution we have gotten taller as a society. So, vigilante justice at its best. Renee was hung from the hanging tree in Colonial Park Cemetery. Now, sad but true, I don't think this is just a Southern thing or an American thing. I believe that throughout most countries, especially in the Western world, there were hanging trees. I know Salem, Massachusetts during the witch trials had hanging trees where people were hung. Granted, it does, there is a lot of like physics and just science behind killing someone via the hangman. It has a lot to do with their weight, how high they go and needed to break their neck. Anyway, I'm not an executioner. I don't want to be an executioner, so I don't really know the full physics behind that, but I'm sure you can look that up. So, people will go into the park and they will actually see the shadow image of a giant man hanging from the hanging tree. They also see Renee roaming about the cemetery, this big glute of a ghost. Now, some people do explain that his ghost seems to be quite sinister. From my own experience of people telling me this story, they have said the exact opposite. That even in death, this person still isn't quite with it and doesn't necessarily know where he is or what happened. But confusion is another theme and commonplace in Colonial Park Cemetery. If you're in the cemetery and you go behind the back wall, you're going to see a lot of tomb markers stacked on top of each other. If you go to read the tombstones, they're not going to make sense. It's like somebody took a bunch of different tombs, broke them in half, and this next matched what they said. So, what happened? Well, during the Civil War, again, when Sherman came through Savannah, it is believed that his troops went through the cemetery and knocked down a bunch of tombstones. Now, some people say that Sherman's troops actually stayed in the cemetery. That was where they were hunkered down. I don't know if that's true or not. So, when they went to go clean up the cemetery after the Civil War, they tried to put as many tombstones back together as they possibly could. But because they had been broken down and pulled up, they didn't know where the bodies that belonged to these markers were. So, they just lined them up along the back wall. I know that all is fair in love and war, and I understand that there was a lot of conflict happening in the United States during the Civil War. However, Sherman was a real asshole. I mean, he came through, maybe it's because I grew up in the South that I hear all these stories. He came through and brutalized people that really had nothing to do with the war. They were just citizens. You can read a lot of William Faulkner books, like The Unvanquished talks about how aggressive the Union troops were to people. Women and children who were just, at this point, women and children really didn't have any rights anyway. It didn't matter the race you were. It didn't matter your socioeconomic background. If you were a woman or a child during the Civil War, you were beholden to your husband or your father. So, to take out any aggression on the women and the children in the South was just rude and was not good. I mean, Sherman, in my opinion, was a total psychopath. And I mean, to be so disrespectful to graves into the lives that were buried in this cemetery, I don't know anybody in my personal life who would ever venture into a cemetery, regardless of where it was, whether it was in their own home country or another country, or a country that maybe was in conflict with the United States. I don't know anybody who would be disrespectful to the bodies that were buried in the cemetery. And for those Union troops to pull up those tombstones, Lord have mercy. That is some heavy karma that you were building up for yourself. So, sometimes I don't know if maybe the dark spirit they think is Renee is actually maybe some confused people that know their place of rest have been tampered with. Who knows? And by the way, I have ancestors that fought for both the South, the Confederate, and the North, the Union. So, don't come at me with that me being from the South and all. I do have ancestors that are from Philadelphia, the Stafford line, and they were Union soldiers in the Civil War. So, I got both people here. Now, with all this conflict, all this grand history in Colonial Park Cemetery, again, Renee is our most famous ghost. And as I said, there's no paperwork to really put back to this story. However, he is the spirit that people see the most. I've never seen him myself. I know people who have seen him and he is, according to them, a giant spirit. My question is, and I've said this before, why hasn't anybody gone there and tried to move him over? If he is confused, if anybody in that cemetery is confused, regardless of whether it's Renee or a person mad because of what happened to their burial plot during the Civil War, or whether it's a child that died of yellow fever and doesn't know it's dead, why the hell hasn't somebody gone in there and tried to move them over to the other side? It's one thing if a spirit is hanging around because it's decided to hang around. It's another thing entirely if the spirit is there because it's trapped. Or maybe, just maybe, because of all the people that are stuck in that cemetery. Just maybe, that's why the Gullah people of Savannah use the cemetery to do most of their magic. Maybe they are the ones taking on the responsibility to help move these citizens of Yorne over to the other side. And the more that this group of people, the Gullah, the Gheechi, the more they come up in our stories, the more I want to emphasize that these, this group of people, they're not the Hollywood idea of voodoo. Yes, of course, in any faith, they're going to be people that use the faith for negative. Again, midnight to twelve thirty, that's for evil. But there's also a side of this faith that is used for the positive. They use the elements of nature to assist. I love the Gullah people. I love the fact that there is connection to all this root work from the low country. And I choose to believe that that is probably why this cemetery is used a lot. A, there's a lot of energy there. And B, there's an opportunity to help your fellow man. All right, guys, thanks for sitting through another story. I've gotten a lot of inquiries about the Gullah and the Gheechi people. And I will say that even in the south, there are different pockets of culture. I think most people are aware of that. Any place you go, you're going to have an overall culture, then you're going to have little subcultures. And even though I grew up in western Georgia, yes, my family was very much a low country family. And I do have a couple of ideas. I do actually work with a two, a Baba, an African priest and a female as well. I adore them. They are fantastic. And I do plan on bringing them onto the channel to talk more about what this form of faith looks like, especially in modern times. And the more you guys want to know about this, the more I will show that side of the low country. I think, again, as I said a long, many videos back most of the time when we think of this type of stuff, we do think of New Orleans. And New Orleans is the wicked sister of the South, Charleston, the beautiful sister, Savannah, the dirty sister, or the ugly sister. But that this culture is also very, very, very much alive in the low country of South Carolina and Georgia. We just don't make a market off of it like New Orleans does. No offense. I mean, you can do what you want with your own with your own city. And I don't think it, I think Midnight in the Garden of Good Evil is what kind of exposed this side of the low country as well to a greater audience. But if that's something you guys do want to know more about as I've been getting questions, I will be more than happy to do some more stories on that. So anyway, thank you guys again. Thank you to Josh McKay as always for doing our music. Thank you to Todd Roderick for being our editor and I will talk to you guys soon. Bye.