Sorrel–Weed House

The tour narrative is easy to state: Francis Sorrel was involved with Molly, a sixteen-year-old enslaved woman; his wife Matilda found out and threw herself from an upper storey; Molly was found hanged in the carriage house a fortnight later and buried under its basement floor. Tiya Miles built the first chapter of Tales from the Haunted South (2015), "Molly and Matilda: Old Savannah Specters", around this house precisely because that story is sold to visitors. Her finding, which English Wikipedia repeats, is that no record in the Sorrel family papers mentions an enslaved woman named Molly. Take the four load-bearing claims in turn. Matilda Sorrel's death is real and it is dated, but it did not happen in this house. By March 1860 the Sorrels had sold the house to Henry D. Weed and were living in the townhouse they had built on the next lot. Charles C. Jones Jr., a friend who rented an office from Sorrel, wrote to his mother on the day she died — 27 March 1860 — in a letter printed in The Children of Pride (Yale University Press, 1972) and quoted here from Westfield's transcription, that Mrs Sorrel, "probably in a fit of lunacy, sprang from the second- or third- story window of her residence on Harris Street, next door to the house which was the family mansion for so many years, falling upon the pavement of the yard, and by the concussion terminating her life". His mother answered two days later that she had heard Mrs Sorrel "was subject to great mental depressions". The Laurel Grove interment register gives concussion as the cause. The city's press gave none: the only notice the Savannah Daily Morning News carried was a funeral invitation on 28 March 1860, asking the friends of Mr Francis Sorrel to attend "this afternoon at half past three o'clock, from the residence, Madison Square" — no cause, no suicide, nothing. Two months before she died Matilda was still an active board member of the city's Female Asylum. Molly is thinner still. Westfield went to the federal slave manifests and found a Molly owned by Francis Sorrel: a woman of twenty-eight, described as "black", shipped from Savannah to New York aboard the Augusta in 1857, with no record of her return. That is a real person and it is worth saying so — but she is twenty-eight in 1857, not sixteen in 1860, and she had been sent north three years before the events the tour narrates. A second Molly in the manifests, aged twenty-two, belonged to Charles Green, the Sorrels' neighbour on Madison Square. Westfield's own verdict is that the manifest is "far from proving the tragic oral tradition". English Wikipedia also cites a 2025 study of urban slavery for a far stronger statement about how Molly died; that page has not been read here, and the statement is not repeated. The carriage house is the clearest failure. Excavation of the depression in its basement floor, carried out in February and March 2017 by Armstrong State University students under Laura Seifert and reported by Westfield, found a long, narrow rubbish pit with a terminus post quem of 1880 — coal, slag, animal bone, corroded hardware, ceramics — and no human remains and nothing to read as an African-American subfloor pit. Worse for the story, the building itself does not appear on maps considered reliable for 1853 or 1871; detached buildings are on the back of the lot by 1888. Westfield's conclusion is blunt: the existence of the building cannot be verified before 1888, which makes enslaved people living in it in 1860 an impossibility. Finally, the reputation. The house is routinely credited with a long local fame for being haunted, and that is the claim measurement kills. The earliest capture of the house's own website, 22 October 2003, sells architecture: Cluskey, Moxley Sorrel, the 1779 siege, the columns stripped of fifteen coats of paint. The words ghost and haunted do not appear in it once. In the captures of 2004 and 2005 they appear in the search-engine keywords and in lines listing ghost and haunted tours among the things the house sells, next to antiques, weddings and bed-and-breakfast packages; not one of them says that this house is haunted, and Molly and Matilda are named nowhere. Then TAPS filmed the house for the Sci Fi Channel's Ghost Hunters Halloween special of 31 October 2005, and by the capture of 3 April 2006 the whole site is built on it. The owner's homepage states that Jason Hawes and Grant Wilson named the house "the most haunted house in the history of the TAPS ghost investigations", and advertises the trolley tour that had begun calling on 1 March 2006. The fame is datable, it is recent, and the parties who sold it were the broadcaster and the owner. The paper trail behind this page deserves the same scrutiny. The English Wikipedia article was created on 30 March 2006 by an account called Cincinnatus7, and cincinnatus7 was the handle of the contact e-mail address the house published for its owner on its own website that year; the photograph on this page was uploaded to Wikipedia by the same account on 30 May 2006. Molly and Matilda were not in that article at all until 26 November 2020, and the enslaved woman was introduced there as Sorrel's "mistress". On 14 May 2023 an anonymous editor added the line "Ghost adventures should also investigate this place" to the middle of the architecture section, where it still sits. The 1954 state marker, for its part, mentions an enslaved person exactly once, and in the idiom of its decade: "a faithful slave" who saved the future owner of this house when he was a boy in Saint-Domingue. It says nothing about a haunting. Nor does the claim that the house was "the first" or "one of the first two" homes in Georgia named a State Landmark hold still: the house's own site said "the first... in 1953" in 2003 and says "the first" today, Wikipedia says one of the first two in 1954, and what is documented is that the Georgia Historical Commission erected its marker in 1954. None of this makes the subject smaller, and the archaeologist who did the digging says so herself: whether or not this particular story happened, the sexual coercion of enslaved women by the men who owned them was ordinary in the antebellum South, and she points to the two thousand people recorded as mixed-race in Savannah in 1860 as one measure of it. What the record will not carry is the saleable version — a named girl of sixteen, a fortnight, a rope, a grave under a floor. The women it does carry are the ones no tour names: Nancy, Judy, Diana, Lidia, Mary and Molly on the coastwise manifests; Minda, sold in October 1827 for three hundred dollars; Leah and Betsey Stephens and Leah and Elizabeth Williams in the Register of Free Persons of Color; and the woman the family called Old Nanny, still drawing payments from Sorrel's estate fifteen years after his death.