Mary Marshall opened her hotel on Broughton Street in 1851, the same year the railroad was reshaping Savannah and doubling its population. She was already one of the city’s most successful property developers — born during the last year of the American Revolution, she outlived the Yellow Fever epidemics that struck the city in the mid-1800s and watched as her hotel was converted into an emergency hospital during those outbreaks. Then came the Civil War. In December 1864, General Sherman marched into Savannah and his troops occupied the Marshall House, using it as a Union hospital until the end of the war. The rooms that had welcomed guests became operating rooms and recovery wards. What was found in the building’s walls and floors when the hotel underwent its 1999 restoration is now displayed in cabinets on the second and third floors — and guests are invited to look.
The Marshall House closed in 1957 after 106 years of operation. The upper floors sat abandoned. In 1998, a full restoration began: original staircases, wood floors, fireplaces, brick walls, claw foot tubs from 1880, the iron veranda reproduced from the original. It reopened in 1999 as Savannah’s oldest hotel. During the restoration, artifacts were recovered from the structure that had not been examined since the hospital years. Those artifacts are behind glass on the second and third floors. What they are and what they suggest about what happened in those rooms is something the hotel lets its guests discover for themselves.
The Marshall House is at 123 East Broughton Street in Savannah’s historic district, operating year-round as a hotel with dining and weekly history talks in the lobby led by local historians. It is a short walk from Forsyth Park and most of the city’s major squares. Check in, visit the second floor, look at what the restoration found, and draw your own conclusions. Savannah has always been a city that keeps its histories close.
Story Source: marshallhouse.com
Address: 123 East Broughton Street, Savannah, GA 31401
Accessibility Rating: Open to All — Freely accessible to the public with no advance requirement. Includes hotels, restaurants, bars, and public historic sites where visitors may walk in without prior booking.
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What Others Have Experienced
Around midnight our first night, we kept hearing what sounded like children running and people talking loudly in the hallway. But every time I checked, no one was there. The sounds came and went until we finally fell asleep.
— from hauntedplaces.org
On the first night, my door handle jiggled as though someone was trying to get in. Looking under the door, there were no shadows — no feet at all. The second night I woke to a man’s voice saying hello, right there inside the room. No one had come anywhere near our door.
— from hauntedplaces.org
My wife insisted something had been at our hotel room door in the middle of the night. I can’t say I heard it myself, but I can’t honestly say she was wrong either.
— from TripAdvisor
My wife had been wanting to stay at a genuinely haunted hotel, and Room 414 did not let us down. What happened there was equal parts unsettling and oddly fascinating.
— from TripAdvisor
