Alice Riley
Many storytellers will narrate a tale in Wright Square about Alice Riley, the first woman hanged in Georgia, in 1735. Some claim that she practiced witchcraft, and was hanged because she was a murderess and performed black magic. A common claim is that she cursed the city from the gallows, which these same storytellers often state was located in Wright Square. This supposed curse by Alice is given as a reason why no Spanish moss will grow in the trees near where she was hanged. The likely source of these stories of witchcraft is probably a case of mistaken identity, confusing Savannah’s Alice Riley with Charleston’s Lavinia Fisher, who was hanged in 1820 (Fisher did indeed have some colorful things to say from the scaffold, reputedly saying, “If you have a message for the Devil, give it to me, for I am about to meet him!”). The historical record shows that the witchcraft angle for Riley and the curse are fiction, and there is a logical explanation for the lack of Spanish moss as well, but Alice Riley’s tale is surprising in its own right. So how true is this story?
Wright Square, allegedly where Savannah’s gallows once stood.
The Murder
First, I’ll present the documented history, even though contemporary accounts disagree on some major points. We do know that Alice Riley was one of roughly forty Irish servants who landed in Savannah in December of 1733. Their ship had been bound for another port, but a storm forced them to land in Savannah instead. James Edward Oglethorpe, seeing his colony’s need for more settlers regardless of their financial situation, somewhat charitably bought the servants’ indentures for five pounds apiece. The city magistrates of Savannah placed Alice and a fellow named Richard White into the household of William Wise. Wise himself was an unsavory character, already having tried unsuccessfully to pass off a common London prostitute as his daughter in hopes of bringing her to Georgia. Wise had property out on Hutchinson Island, located across the Savannah River from present-day River Street. He tended the Trustee’s cattle, but was unable to perform his duties because of illness.
Presumably, Riley and White were placed with William Wise to help care for the livestock, but Wise had other ideas. He made it a habit to call for the servants placed in his care to bathe and groom him. He would lie with his head positioned off the bed so that White could comb his long hair (many accounts specifically note that he was quite vain about his plumage), while Riley bathed him. In March of 1734, the two Irish immigrants murdered him together, by Richard White twisting Wise’s neckerchief and helpful Alice dunking his head into the bucket of water. Many motives have been ascribed to their actions, but we simply do not know why they did this heinous act.
The two were caught and sentenced to hang, but Alice was found to be pregnant. The child is credited to White, but considering Wise’s previous actions with the streetwalker one must at least raise the possibility of the child belonging to the lecherous master.
What we definitely know today is that both were eventually executed. Alice, by all accounts, was hanged on January 19th, 1735. But there is disagreement as to which order they met their end. Richard White, after an unsuccessful escape attempt, was hanged sometime after his recapture (possibly immediately following). Alice’s death sentence was delayed until the child was born, but sources conflict as to whether they also delayed White’s execution at the same time. A letter written on January 20th, 1735 (the day after Alice was hanged) by early colonist Edward Jenkins to James Edward Oglethorpe lists Alice as being executed after White. It seems unlikely that Jenkins would be confused as to the order of their deaths, since he not only personally helped apprehend White after his escape and personally witnessed White’s execution, but was writing Oglethorpe the very day after Alice’s hanging. Despite this seemingly incontrovertible documentation, several other credible sources, such as Savannah in the Old South, by Walter J. Fraser Jr, reverse the order of their deaths.
Ultimately, the sequence of their hangings does not matter, because the end result is the same: all of our sources agree that in mid-January 1735, Alice Riley and Richard White were both hung by the neck until dead, for the crime of murder, despite steadfastly maintaining their innocence to the end. No evidence exists of Riley’s involvement in witchcraft, or of her cursing anyone or anything from the scaffold. Nonetheless, the hanging of Alice Riley and Richard White spawned a number of firsts: first murder in the colony of Georgia, and first execution in Georgia, both of a man and a woman. Alice Riley’s child did not survive, bringing the death toll for the whole sorry affair to four.
What about the Spanish moss not growing in part of Wright Square’s trees? The wind blows it down from the live oak trees close to the north side of the square, which is not uncommon in Savannah. Squares close to the Savannah River rarely have moss for this very reason: it tends to be more windy near the water, and the moss simply cannot hold on to the live oaks.
An Educated Guess Regarding the Gallows’ True Location
I hear the ‘Wright Square gallows’ story told a lot by tour guides. But I would like to point out a few problems I have with that particular piece of folklore. Pre-Revolutionary Savannah was (correctly) regarded as a grubby little border town by everyone who encountered it. The time period we are talking about, 1734-35, means that Savannah was barely a town at all: just a scattershot of less than seventy-five lowly wooden-frame houses clustered around five squares, with a total population of less than four hundred people. It is extremely unlikely that a town that small would have constructed in Wright Square a permanent gallows, meaning a raised wooden platform and crossbar.
The historical record shows us that capital crimes were rare with such a small population. My friend and fellow tour guide Kirk Hutchins, points out that “the construction of a gallows would have certain implications for a small community. Gallows were professional machines. They were usually constructed and operated by professional executioners. A place or region would need to have enough executions to make such profession viable. Then the executioner would travel a circuit. Gallows [during the period] usually were not permanent structures, but were built for the occasion. Savannah seems unlikely to have ever had a permanent structure standing in wait. Otherwise it would have been a terribly foreboding place indeed. A simple hanging tree would be foreboding enough.” Kirk is correct, but additional information regarding specifics pertaining Savannah’s exection practices were found in the archives. According to Harold E. Davis’ book The Fledgling Colony: Social and Cultural Life in Colonial Georgia, Savannah was such a small province during the Trustee period (1733- 1752) that City officials were forced to use other prisoners to be hangmen, in exchange for reduced sentences and/or a small fee. Imagine being jailed for drunkenness in 1734-era Savannah and securing your freedom by acting as executioner for a fellow inmate, and even getting paid for your trouble!
It is sometimes the uncomfortable job of history buffs to make logical assumptions when hard data is lacking. In the absence of new evidence revealing a permanent structure for the purpose of executions, I tend to agree with Kirk. A Savannah official in 1734 who theoretically proposed building a formal gallows structure would have probably had it pointed out to him by a logical cityfolk that the area near the jail was surrounded on the southern side by trees, any number of which would be well-suited to stringing up a convicted murderer, or in this case, a murderess. Or perhaps a temporary gallows was used, consisting of a small wooden frame and crossbar that could be taken down after the deed was done.
In fact, Davis’ Fledgling Colony cites just such a low-tech solution, stating: “Hanging was by strangulation. The condemned person climbed a ladder at the scaffold, had the rope put around his neck, and was turned [pushed] off the ladder.” No mention of a formal, permanent structure was made. A ladder could be set up beneath a convenient tree or temporary crossbar without the need for an elaborate scaffold. And the only reference to a ‘hanging’ location I could find was a mention of executions occurring on the South Common in the
1760’s (a slave belonging to Peter Tondee was put to death in that spot). The South Common, appropriately enough, is just south of Wright Square, and would have been full of trees during that period, since Chippewa Square did not exist until 1815.
A Modern-Day Sighting
Sometimes my life as a teller of ghost stories crosses over into my ‘normal’ life in interesting ways. For instance, I have a good friend with whom I go fishing on a regular basis, and we often cruise out to Wassaw Sound in his family’s boat. We’ll anchor right off the coast and fish for sharks or stingrays, just for the sheer epic battle of it all, because some of these leviathans of the deep are huge. Fighting a massive stingray to the surface and then releasing it, both you and the fish completely exhausted, might not sound like fun until you’ve tried it. But trust me, night fishing might be the best way to spend an evening near Tybee Island. You come away from the experience feeling positively Hemingway-esque. One evening, while waiting on our fickle fishes to decide that our bait was irresistible, this same friend congratulated me on my choice of career, since in his eyes, I was bilking money out of gullible tourists telling them lies about ghosts for a living. He was a lifelong Savannah resident, and somehow had never come into contact with anything even remotely paranormal. To say that this former Marine was a strong skeptic was putting it mildly. Anyway, I gently corrected him, and told him that I very much believed in ghosts. If I had been lying about my own experiences for the last decade-plus years, I explained, I doubted very much that I’d be able to look myself in the mirror. I got a strange look from him, like he suspected that I was having a laugh at his expense, but right about that time the sharks overcame their shyness and started attacking our bait, and we had a wonderful struggle reeling those gorgeous gray monsters to the surface. I quickly forgot about our chat about ghosts; the 45 minute epic battle I engaged in with an extremely agitated and impressively large shark probably was a contributing factor.
A couple of months later, this same friend and I were having a relaxing drink at one of our favorite watering holes downtown, when suddenly he looked around, lowered his voice, and said, “Hey, you remember our discussion that night on the boat about ghosts?” It was slow in coming back to me, but I said yes. “Well,” he continued, “I was driving my truck on Hutchinson Island the other night during that rainstorm. It was pouring down rain, when I saw this man and woman sort of huddled together, walking on the side of the road. I slowed down, and I noticed that they were both wearing costumes. I mean, my first thought was that there was a period movie being filmed nearby—they looked like extras who had wandered right off the set of the film The Patriot. I looked right at them as I passed, and they were as real looking as you or I. But when it dawned on me how weird it was that they were walking by themselves in a driving rainstorm in those outfits, I looked back in the rearview mirror at them. The man and the woman had vanished entirely. I mean, in an instant, they went from being so close I could see details of their clothes, to being completely gone.” He turned around in his seat to look for them, but they were nowhere to be seen. As he spoke, his arms has broken out in chills as he relived the moment of his brush with the paranormal in his memory. And so I told him the story of Alice Riley, who, as you recall, lived on Hutchinson Island with Richard White for months as their anger slowly heated to a boil against their unscrupulous master, William Wise. He slowly nodded, because the details matched up. One could argue that my friend imagined the entire incident, but why would he hallucinate exacting details of a story he didn’t even know?
Perhaps Alice Riley and Richard White do still occasionally roam the island where their wretched lot in life became too much for them to bear. One hopes that it is a happy moment that these spectres appear to be sharing, huddled together on a dark lonely road, before their short respective plunges off the gallows and into the history books.
Colonial Park Cemetery
201 East Oglethorpe Avenue
An often-quoted saying about Savannah is that it is a city built on its dead. It is true, by the way; we have a strange habit of placing streets, sidewalks, houses and other structures in areas where the ground is already occupied, so to speak. When I relate this fact, usually while my tour group and I are standing by the front gates of Colonial Park Cemetery at the beginning of our Haunted History Tour, someone in the crowd invariably asks the question: that’s not really true, is it? Usually before I answer, I make it a point to stare at the person’s feet for a pregnant pause, a smile gradually forming on my lips. Curiosity getting the better of them, their gaze inevitably shifts to the sidewalk they are standing on, and it is with a slow, creeping horror that they realize that they are quite literally desecrating the dead at that particular moment. Needless to say, I love my job as a tour guide in Savannah. In what other line of work can you give genuine thrills and chills simply by quoting the history books?
The cemetery, if you’ll pardon the pun, is a perfect embodiment of Savannah’s deep ties to tragedy. A walk through Colonial Park is to take a ‘Cliffs Notes’ tour of this city’s early history. In a Spanish moss-draped Southern Gothic city like this one, it’s only natural that we would have a prominent cemetery right in the center of town. Not only does this plot of hallowed ground contain many timeworn graves which provide mute commentary on the very thin line between mortality and the shadowy afterlife of our early colonists, but it also is a place where many people, myself included, have had genuine brushes with unexplainable phenomena.
The front gates of Colonial Park Cemetery, a burial ground which holds twelve thousand graves.
The Old Burying Ground
Colonial Park Cemetery, established by Christ Church in 1750, is Savannah’s oldest existing burial ground, but wasn’t the first in the city. As detailed in the chapter ’12 West Oglethorpe,’ the first cemetery was the area right off of Wright Square, bordered by York, Whitaker, Oglethorpe and Bull Streets, and was in use for the first seventeen years of the colony’s existence. The city, which was quickly expanding by the middle of the 18th century, saw a need for a larger funerary ground, so by 1750 they designated an area southeast of the existing city. At the time Colonial Park Cemetery was established, the area was a meadow-like field. No squares existed south of Oglethorpe Avenue during this early period, meaning that the townsfolk of Savannah literally paced out a rough area outside of town to bury their dead. As I describe in the chapter ‘432 Abercorn,’ there was also a space further south designated for African American burials, as well as a Potter’s Field for indigents and visitors to the city for whom no relatives could be reached to make funeral arrangements. I mention these facts because the surrounding landscape has changed so much over the years that it is difficult for the uninitiated to picture why Colonial Park has so many bodies buried outside of its confines. So the answer to the inevitable question: why Savannah would build on its dead? is that the parameters of the burial ground were poorly-defined in the early days, making it difficult for later urban planners to plot out streets and squares in the area without hitting pre-existing graves.
There are about seven hundred burial markers in Colonial Park Cemetery, and roughly twelve thousand graves. When I quote these numbers on tour, it always raises skeptical eyebrows, but the number is accurate. The dimensions of the cemetery used to be a good bit larger, but were pushed back in 1896 to accommodate the streets and sidewalks which border Colonial Park, even extending partway out into nearby Abercorn Street. In the 1960’s, workers doing some construction on that particular street began discovering human bodies. As a matter of fact, if you look down the brick sidewalk of the cemetery along Abercorn Street, you will notice a regular pattern of subtle depressions and humps within the walkway, reminiscent of gentle ocean swells. Many people (myself included) attribute this strange feature to the wooden coffins which are undoubtedly under the sidewalk, which have slowly collapsed under the weight of the bricks and earth over them.
There are other reason
s for this huge disparity between tombstones and body count, however, namely the large brick burial vaults, which are a major feature of Colonial Park. Most of the brick tombs have peaked, house-like roofs, and bookended, squared-off fronts and backs. These family vaults are sometimes erroneously thought of as above-ground burial vaults, but actually when explaining their function to tourists, I often make comparisons to root-cellars. Down near the grass you can usually observe an arched opening, marking the top of the former door which has long-since been bricked in. When Colonial Park was an active cemetery, there would have been a series of steps leading down into the family vault, and if you were to gain access you would find a series of shelves inside which would be the perfect size and shape for a body. Many of the corpses placed in the vault would simply be shrouded instead of placed in coffins. Over time, a combination of heat and natural decomposition would reduce the remains considerably, and the bones would then be moved to a large burial urn in the center of the tomb, and the shelf was then reused, if need be. This process would be repeated over and over again, meaning that the remains of the family would be stacked together inside the urn. This reinforces the idea that even in death, Savannah families are very close.
Haunted Savannah: America's Most Spectral City Page 15
