Located on the back wall of the far east room there are a series of bolts in the wall, along with holes drilled into the very rock comprising the ballast stone wall. These bolts were once linked to chains binding slaves to the walls of the old structure. Even though the slave trade had technically been outlawed by 1798 in Georgia, and nationally by 1808, slave traders still had free reign importing negroes because of a disinterested legislature and indifferent inspectors.
One other sign points to illicit slaves being housed in this location: a bit of graffiti carved into the ballast stone construction. As one enters Kevin Barry’s on the ground floor entrance, one can view a large black stone making up part of the wall directly to the right of the door, under the lamp. One may need a lighter or a match to illuminate the carving for a proper viewing, but the sketch is truly worth the effort. The profile of a man is clearly visible, and he is wearing what appears to be either a wig or skullcap. According to the owner, Vic Powers, this is possibly a caricature of the slaver, or perhaps even the likeness of an already-purchased slave’s master. The handiwork of the image is quite good; although the artisan is untrained, the representation is undeniable.
One wonders at the thought process of the artist as he made this image so long ago. An uncertain fate clearly awaited him or her—was this an attempt at levity, or was there a more serious purpose in mind? Was the sketch completed? This is yet one more unexplained story in this, our wondrous yet strange Southern city.
Sorrel-Weed House
6 West Harris Street
On one edge of Madison Square sits one of the finest architectural efforts in Savannah, an amber-colored Greek Revival jewel tucked into a leafy green setting. This house has sparked strong feelings in many people all throughout its lifetime here in the Historic District. For instance, it is impossible not to have powerful sentiments about the man who commissioned the house’s construction, at least once you learn his history. The house’s renovation has proved contentious, which stirred an outpouring of public opinion and controversy in recent years. There is also a rift within the paranormal community between what actually occurred here historically versus what has long been reported as fact on ghost tours. It seems like everyone in town, from credentialed historians to civil rights activists, has a take on this particular house. There are facts and then there are factions, and I’ve been told a lot about both. The battle lines are still drawn around the Sorrel-Weed House, which could be an ironic turn of phrase, as you’ll see by the end of the chapter.
In a story where everyone has an opinion, it should be easy to ascertain the truth, right? The facts, though, proved elusive at first.
“...almost immediately strange things began to happen.”
The Legend
If you were to take a ghost tour, you might hear a variation of the following story:
The house we know today as the Sorrel-Weed House was built in the early 1840’s, and designed by noted architect Charles Cluskey. The house was built by Francis Sorrel, a wealthy plantation owner who was originally from the West Indies. He married well after he emigrated to the United States, pairing with a young woman named Lucinda Moxley. He was twenty-nine years old when they married; Lucinda was seventeen years of age, and from an extremely wealthy family which did business with Francis. Their marriage meant that Francis received one-seventh of Lucinda’s family estate as a dowry. They had three children together. Unfortunately, Lucinda died just five years into their marriage in 1827. The cause of her death was officially recorded as yellow fever, but there were whispers by many that foul play, suspected but never proven, was involved.
Two years later, Francis was joined in matrimony again, this time marrying his dead wife’s younger sister, twenty-three year old Matilda, in 1829. This marriage also netted Francis another seventh of the family estate. He and Matilda had eight children, of which five survived to adulthood. Easily the most famous of the children was Gilbert Moxley Sorrel, who served with distinction in the Civil War on General Longstreet’s staff. He has been called by many historians the finest staff officer in the Confederacy.
Francis’ shipping business grew exponentially during this time period, and he quickly rose to be one of the city’s most prominent and wealthy men. However, Francis did have his vices. He was known to have taken sexual liberties with many of his slaves, and had a long-ongoing affair with one young slave girl in particular named Molly. Supposedly, Francis arranged for Molly to have special quarters set up above the carriage house so that they could have their lover’s trysts in private. However, they were discovered one night by Matilda Sorrel. Enraged by her husband’s infidelity, Matilda committed suicide by leaping from the second story balcony of the house, bashing her head against the flagstone courtyard. A few weeks after this grisly death, the slave Molly was found in the carriage house hanging from a noose, in yet another alleged suicide on the grounds.
The suspicions many people already had about his first wife’s death, coupled with the quick succession of suicides of both his wife and lover, made many people doubt Mr. Sorrel’s trustworthiness. In fact, Francis had a deep secret which would have ruined his social standing in Savannah: he was actually part black. His mother had been a free woman of color (a mulatto, as a person of white and black lineage was then called), meaning that Francis was one-quarter black, or a quadroon. This would have destroyed his reputation, and seriously harmed his business. It was believed by many that he murdered his first wife to keep the secret, and married her sister to secure even more of her parent’s holdings in case the true story of his mixed blood descent came out.
Francis Sorrel’s reputation suffered greatly as a result of these succession of strange deaths: his two wives, and then his slave paramour. The house was sold to Henry Weed a few years later, mostly to recoup after a series of financial losses by Sorrel. Despite the sale, his fortunes nosedived and he died about ten years later, an embittered and shunned member of the Savannah social scene. The house passed through a series of owners, eventually becoming a dress shop in the latter portion of the 20th century.
In the late 1990’s, the house was bought by new ownership. Almost immediately, strange things began to happen. Disembodied voices were heard in all parts of the house, including screaming and what can only be described as ‘terrified begging’ from the carriage house. Strange lights were seen in the basement, and on several occasions, tenants of the carriage house moved out abruptly in the middle of the night.
In October of 2005, the Ghost Hunters television program filmed a special in the Sorrel-Weed House. The TAPS team (The Atlantic Paranormal Society) conducted an investigation, and encountered several unexplainable phenomena: handprints that could not be accounted for showing up walls via thermal imaging, and more disturbingly, EVP’s (electronic voice phenomenon, which is voices captured on tape) from within the carriage house, where a woman’s voice is screaming, “Get out, get out....help me… my God...my God!” A man’s voice can be heard with the woman’s, but his words are inaudible.
The house is now open for touring, and many guests report that they feel a choking sensation in the basement, or are otherwise overwhelmed by the conflicting spirits of Molly, Matilda, and Francis Sorrel.
How Much Of This Is True?
How much truth is contained in the above story? I have spent about half a decade unraveling the facts from the fantasies, an odd obsession which led to many hours in the Georgia Historical Society, examining tax documents and checking old newspapers on microfiche. What I can report is that while the legend gets a lot of the story right, the parts that it gets wrong are spectacular, and definitely alter the way we should view this story.
Any discussion of what occurred in the Sorrel-Weed House has to center around the man who built it, Francis Sorrel. He was born in the West Indies in the modern-day Dominican Republic city of Santo Domingo, in 1793. Born Mathurin-Francois Sorrel, he was forced to flee the island at
the age of eight due to a slave revolt. It is believed by many that the boy was saved from that country’s bloody civil war by sympathetic slaves who sheltered him during a time of massive social upheaval. It is true that Francis was of partial black ancestry, as the legend states. While he had no problems later in life passing as a full-blooded white man and thus hiding his true lineage, in this instance his so-called ‘mixed blood’ probably saved his life.
Sorrel’s early history is complicated. I am skipping most of it because it has little to do with the later events we’re examining, but I strongly urge those who are interested in gaining a deeper understanding to read The Sorrels in Savannah: Life on Madison Square and Beyond, by Carla Ramsey Weeks. But the legend does get much of Sorrel’s matrimonial history correct: the marriage to a younger woman (Lucinda), her premature death from yellow fever, and his subsequent marriage to her younger sister, Matilda. The speculation about Sorrel murdering his first wife is completely unsubstantiated, however.
He was an incredibly astute businessman, and was involved in many charitable works, including being one of the charter patrons of the Savannah Poor House and Hospital. This man did not resemble the wicked, scheming person described by the legend. But while it is not easy to paint Francis Sorrel as a villain, neither is it appropriate to make him out to be the hero of this particular tale. This one-quarter-black man was a slave owner himself, as well as an ardent supporter of the practice. No, the one word that kept coming to mind when I read about Francis was ‘survivor,’ a word that sprang up again when Sorrel met with Union General William T. Sherman, at the terminus of his fiery March to the Sea in 1864. The Savannah businessman was reported to have told the Union General that he believed that the Confederacy cause “hopeless.” I cannot help but wonder if that is truly what Sorrel believed, or if he was simply telling Sherman what he wanted to hear. Sorrel was nothing if not adaptable.
The Slave Affair
What about the crux of the story, the alleged affair between Francis and the slave girl, Molly? And how does it fit in with stories told about the Sorrel-Weed House? Well, no documentation has ever surfaced which proves that Molly was a real person. And the hanging? Tobias McGriff astutely points out in his 2012 book, Savannah Shadows: Tales From the Midnight Zombie Tour, that a Haitian slave seeking to end her own life via suicide would be unlikely to choose a noose, since it was seen as “a symbol of terror and degradation by white owners.” Colonial era slave-owning planters, much like some ’Jim Crow’ post-Civil War American Southern whites, used the noose as an emblem of intimidation and power.
While it is true that Matilda Sorrel died as the result of a fall from a second floor balcony on March 27th, 1860 (the date listed on her burial records at Laurel Grove Cemetery), there is no indication that she killed herself over her husband’s alleged (but never proven) infidelity. The only record we have of Matilda’s apparent suicide is in a compilation of Civil War-era letters later published in a book called Children of Pride. Charles Colcock, Jr. reports to his mother in a letter that Matilda Sorrel threw herself off of an upstairs porch “in a moment of lunacy… falling upon the pavement of the yard,” a fall which ended her life. His mother, Mary Jones, answers his letter and comments that she was aware that Mrs. Sorrel had been suffering from “great mental depression” for a long time. This sounds as if Matilda Sorrel’s mental instability is common knowledge.
Gilbert Moxley Sorrel, son of Francis and Matilda as well as a highly-decorated Confederate officer, did write about his mother’s death, at least indirectly, in his book, At the Right Hand of Longstreet: Recollections of a Confederate Staff Officer. Moxley, as he liked to be called, was considered to be the epitome of the Southern gentleman by nearly all who met the man. It is telling, therefore, that his only words on the subject of his mother in three hundred and fifteen pages was: “Death bereft my father of his wife in time’s flight.” It would be difficult to come up with a colder way of referring to one’s own mother, while still remaining polite, than this sentence. Also quite revealing is that the ten words Moxley devoted to this painful subject focused on his father’s loss, not his mother’s death. Apparently there were strained feelings, whether from he suicide itself or the earlier mentioned mental instability of Matilda. One would assume if there had truly been infidelity on his father’s part which prompted his mother to take her own life, wouldn’t it stand to reason that Moxley would be less focused on his father’s pain?
Francis Sorrel retired from business, but unlike the legend, maintained his wealth and social standing until his death on May 5th, 1870.
But isn’t the infidelity/suicide story at Sorrel-Weed at least plausible? you might be wondering at this point. The answer, stunningly, is no, it isn’t. The entire tale is rendered completely meaningless because of another date crucial to the story: June 14th, 1859, roughly nine months before Matilda’s suicide. Why is this date so important? Because that is the date that Francis Sorrel sold the house on the corner to Henry D. Weed for $23,000 (a little over half a million in today’s dollars), and moved his entire family next door into 12 West Harris Street. This means that the suicide happened next door at 12 West Harris, not at the Sorrel-Weed House! The story of the slave girl, the carriage house EVP, and the ‘Francis-Matilda-Molly ghost story’ angle still being told as fact at the Sorrel-Weed House are being represented as happening the wrong location entirely.
I have heard a few tour guides attempt to justify the legend’s validity by claiming that Francis Sorrel did in fact sell the house to Henry Weed in 1859, but due to an agreement between the two men, Sorrel and his wife continued to live in the home for a few months. If that assertion is true, that would mean that Matilda’s suicide could have plausibly occurred at the Sorrel-Weed House. The problem with this suggestion is that I have seen no documentation whatsoever to support this idea, such as a written record of rent being paid or other indications of Sorrel occupying the home into 1860. It seems unlikely, especially without proof stating otherwise, that someone who bought a mansion for a hefty sum would allow the seller to live on the premises for nine months. Weed and Sorrel were not related by blood, and Sorrel wasn’t suffering from any sort of financial hardship, even before the sale. In fact, a document exists which elegantly nixes this suggestion that the Sorrels could have continued to live at the Sorrel-Weed House after the purchase: the 1860 census, which quite correctly shows Francis living at 12 West Harris Street, not 6 West Harris. In the absence of proof stating otherwise, I feel it is safe to state unequivocally that Matilda Sorrel died at 12 West Harris Street, not the Sorrel-Weed House.
What Does This All Mean?
Now we know the folklore account of the Matilda Sorrel suicide and the slave Molly suicide/murder is wrong. The historical record conclusively proves that they lived at a different address when the only verifiable suicide, Matilda’s, took place in March of 1860. But there are still many paranormal things which have happened (and continue to happen) at this particular house, events which are difficult to explain away. For instance, there is the strange sensation of nausea and choking that many people feel in the basement. Those who consider themselves sensitive to psychic energy have described feeling panicked for no reason. Then there is the fact that people’s cameras and cellphone batteries, which were fully charged before the tour began, are sometimes found to be completely drained of energy by the end of the tour. One elderly gentleman who took my pub crawl the night after visiting the Sorrel-Weed House even claimed that while in the home, he suddenly began having trouble hearing the guide. Turned out, his hearing aid’s brand-new battery was completely drained. And, his wife further explained, they had to wait until morning to go get a new one so he could hear during their vacation. What sort of mean ghost picks on a grandpa? And why would people be experiencing strange happenings when the suicide happened elsewhere?
There is another, barely-explored theory, one which might explain the strange conflicted emotions many experien
ce in the house. A former guide who worked in the home, Bradley Dilling, declined to speculate on the true location of the suicide, but did offer up an intriguing idea: it is Bradley’s belief that the hauntings, which he personally experienced at the Sorrel-Weed House during his employment there, have little to do with Francis and Matilda Sorrel and everything to do with the plot of ground on which the building sits. Brad quite correctly reminded me that the southernmost point of the British horseshoe-shaped earthen fortifications during the Siege of Savannah during the Revolutionary War were located in what was later developed into Madison Square, very close to (and possibly sited on) the Sorrel-Weed House’s current location. In what was then the South Common (a meadow-like area full of scrubby juvenile oaks and pines) the French, Haitian and American troops essentially dashed themselves to pieces while trying to retake Savannah from the extremely well dug-in British and Scottish soldiers. This ill-conceived assault in October of 1779 was, according to many historians, the bloodiest hour of the entire American Revolution, with well over a thousand casualties recorded.
If the paranormal occurrences in the house are real, perhaps the cause has been misidentified. Guides who tell the erroneous ‘affair and suicide’ story because it contains tawdry thrills are omitting, either through ignorance or apathy, a great story which both literally and figuratively changed the landscape of Savannah.
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