Nine places in Georgia are both documented filming locations and long-reported haunted sites: the Sorrel-Weed House, Mercer-Williams House, Bonaventure Cemetery and Moon River Brewing Company in Savannah; Central State Hospital in Milledgeville; Orna Villa in Oxford; the Travis-McDaniel House in Senoia; the Claremont House in Rome (the Stranger Things “Creel House”); and the Jekyll Island Club Resort. Four are open to the public, two are hotels or restaurants you can walk into, one requires a booked trolley tour, and three are private homes you can only see from the sidewalk.
I set a rule before writing this.
To make it to this list of haunted filming locations, a place has to clear both bars: a filming credit I could trace to the production, or a tourism office that actually names the building and a haunting story that comes from somewhere other than a ticket-selling ghost tour.
Here are the nine that survived.
1. Sorrel-Weed House, Savannah
You’ve seen it in: Forrest Gump (1994). The famous opening shot, the feather drifting over Savannah before it lands at the bus stop in Chippewa Square, was filmed from this house’s rooftop. You’ve looked at the world through this building’s point of view without ever knowing it.
Why it’s considered haunted: The house has been one of Savannah’s most investigated properties for decades, and the ghost story most often told here involves a woman named Molly, said to have been a servant who died in the carriage house.
Here’s the honest version, and it’s more interesting than the legend. Researchers have found no record of a Molly in any Sorrel family document. And the “human remains” long rumored to be buried behind the carriage house were excavated and identified as a household trash pit. The best-documented tragedy at the house is real but different: Matilda Sorrel, wife of owner Francis Sorrel, died in 1860 after a fall from an upper floor.
So what you get at the Sorrel-Weed House is a genuinely eerie 1840s mansion with a documented death, wrapped in a legend that the records don’t support. That tension is why you should go.
What else to know: Built between 1835 and 1840, designed by Charles B. Cluskey in a Greek Revival–Regency style. It was one of the first buildings in Georgia added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966.
Address: 6 W. Harris Street, Savannah, GA 31401. Access: Open to the public. Daytime architectural and history tours, plus after-dark paranormal tours in the basement and carriage house. Book ahead. The night tours sell out in October.
2. Mercer-Williams House, Savannah
You’ve seen it in: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997). Clint Eastwood filmed the party interiors inside the actual house. The scenes depicting the shooting itself were shot on a Warner Bros. set, not here.
Why it’s considered haunted: This is the one on the list where the deaths aren’t legend. In 1981, antiques dealer Jim Williams shot and killed Danny Hansford in the study on the ground floor, the case that the book and film are built around. And in 1969, before Williams owned the house, an 11-year-old boy named Tommy Downs fell from the roof while playing and was impaled on the iron fence along West Gordon Street.
Two violent deaths in one building, both in the public record. The house museum does not promote ghost stories and never has, which is part of why I trust the history more here than almost anywhere else in Savannah.
What else to know: Construction began in 1860 for General Hugh Mercer, designed by John S. Norris. The Civil War stopped the work, and it wasn’t finished until around 1868. Jim Williams bought and restored it in 1969.
Address: 429 Bull Street, on Monterey Square, Savannah, GA 31401. Access: Open for guided tours of the ground floor. The second floor is a private residence and is not included. Tickets at the carriage house entrance on Whitaker Street.
3. Bonaventure Cemetery, Savannah
You’ve seen it in: Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (1997), and this is the entry with the best story behind the story.
The statue on the book’s cover is called Bird Girl, and Savannah photographer Jack Leigh found her almost by accident. Random House hired him in 1993 to shoot a cover for an unpublished book by a writer named John Berendt. He spent two days walking Bonaventure before he came across her at the end of the second one, standing in the Trosdal family plot. He shot her at dusk and spent roughly ten hours in the darkroom. The image is titled Midnight.
For almost sixty years the statue, called “Little Wendy” by the family, stood over the plot without nobody noticing her at all.
Then the book sold four million copies, and thousands of people came looking for a stranger’s grave.
In 1997, the Trosdals took her out of the cemetery and moved her to the Telfair Academy at 121 Barnard Street for safekeeping.
So the most photographed statue in Savannah’s history is no longer in the cemetery people come to see her in. And when Warner Bros. filmed here, they couldn’t use her either. The Bird Girl in the movie is a fiberglass replica.
Why it’s considered haunted: Bonaventure’s reputation rests less on a single legend than on the place itself. 100 acres of live oaks, Spanish moss, and nineteenth-century statuary on a bluff over the Wilmington River, built on the grounds of a former plantation. Visitors have reported hearing children laughing near the Gracie Watson monument, the marble figure of a six-year-old who died of pneumonia in 1889, for well over a century.
Address: 330 Bonaventure Road, Savannah, GA 31404. Access: Open to the public daily, 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. It is still an active cemetery, so please be mindful and respectful. Be quiet, stay on the lanes, and don’t climb on anything. The Bonaventure Historical Society runs free guided tours on some weekends.
4. Moon River Brewing Company, Savannah
You’ve seen it in: Ghost Adventures, Season 2, Episode 7, on the Travel Channel, an episode titled for the building itself.
I debated including a paranormal show as a screen credit. I’m including it because the credit is specific and checkable, and because this is the only place on the list where you can sit down with a beer in the room where the documented killing happened.
Why it’s considered haunted: The building opened in 1821 as the City Hotel, Savannah’s first. Its history is genuinely brutal. In 1832, a man named Philip Minis fatally shot James Jones Stark in the hotel’s bar. The hotel stayed open through the 1854 yellow fever epidemic when nearly every other public house in the city closed its doors, which means a great many people died inside these walls. It closed in 1864, just before Sherman reached Savannah, and spent most of the twentieth century empty or half-renovated.
Staff reports here are consistent and specific rather than atmospheric: bottles leaving shelves, being touched on the stairs, the unfinished upper floors.
What else to know: Designed by William Jay, the architect behind several of Savannah’s finest Regency buildings. Moon River took the building over in 1999.
Address: 21 W. Bay Street, Savannah, GA 31401. Access: It’s a working brewpub. Walk in, no ticket, no tour required. Ask a bartender about the upstairs.
5. Central State Hospital, Milledgeville
You’ve seen it in: Two productions, both using specific named buildings.
The Walking Dead used the Walker Building in its Season 5 opening credits. The Originals filmed Season 1, Episode 14 here in 2014, using the Jones Building.
Why it’s considered haunted: Of everything on this list, this is the one that doesn’t need a legend.
Central State opened in 1842 and grew into the largest mental institution in the world, holding more than 12,000 patients at its peak in the 1960s. Much of the campus sits abandoned today: dozens of empty buildings, broken windows, trees pushing through pavement.
You don’t need a ghost story for this to be the most unsettling place in Georgia. You need the actual history, which is worse.
Address: The campus is along Broad Street, Milledgeville, GA 31062. Access: The buildings are closed and trespassing is enforced. The legitimate way to explore is from the sidewalks or by getting tickets for the Central State Hospital Campus Trolley Tour: the second Saturday of most months at 11:30 a.m., $30 per person, two hours, led by a former hospital employee. It departs from the Milledgeville Visitor Information Center at 200 W. Hancock Street. Call 478-452-4687 to confirm the date and reserve, because the schedule shifts and it fills up in October. The Central State Hospital Museum and its Seeking Asylum exhibit are separate and worth the stop.
6. Orna Villa, Oxford
You’ve seen it in: The Vampire Diaries. The house served as the fraternity party location where the iconic dancing scene of Elena & Damon took place.
Why it’s considered haunted: The ghost here has a name and a reason. Alexander Means, the Emory College president who lived in the house, had a son named Tobe who wanted to be a doctor while his father wanted him to enter the ministry. Tobe is said to have paced the back porch for hours arguing with himself over it. Residents since have reported hearing pacing footsteps on that porch.
(You’ll see the name spelled “Toby” in a lot of places, including an earlier version of this article. The historical spelling is Tobe.)
What else to know: Built in 1825, which makes it the oldest house in Oxford, older than Emory College itself, which was founded here in 1836. It served as a Civil War hospital. Added to the National Register in 1973 as the Alexander Means House.
Address: 1008 N. Emory Street, Oxford, GA 30054. Access: Private residence. View it from the public sidewalk only. Do not go up the driveway, do not photograph through windows, do not knock. People live here.
7. Travis-McDaniel House, Senoia
You’ve seen it in: The Conjuring: The Devil Made Me Do It (2021). This is the house in the opening sequence portraying the exorcism of young David Glatzel, the scene that sets the entire film in motion. It’s the first thing you see in the movie.
It also appeared in Fried Green Tomatoes (1991), which tells you something about how long Senoia has been quietly feeding the film industry.
Why it’s considered haunted: Be careful with this one, and I’d rather say so than sell you something. The Conjuring case it portrays, the Glatzel possession and the Arne Cheyenne Johnson murder trial, happened in Brookfield, Connecticut, not Georgia. The house in Senoia is a filming location, not the site of the events.
What Senoia has instead is a town so dense with early-twentieth-century houses that productions have used it continuously for thirty-five years, and a local reputation for the usual small-Southern-town hauntings that come with buildings that old. Go for the film history. The chill is the association, and honestly, standing in front of a house whose face opens one of the most frightening sequences in modern horror is enough.
Address: 204 Bridge Street, at the corner of Travis and Bridge, Senoia, GA 30276. Access: Private residence. Street view only. Senoia’s downtown is two blocks away and worth an afternoon. The Walking Dead “Woodbury” streetscape is here too.
8. Claremont House, Rome
You’ve seen it in: Stranger Things, Season 4. This is the Creel House. Victor Creel’s home, where Vecna’s story begins, and arguably the most recognizable haunted house on television in the last decade.
Why it’s considered haunted: Local ghost stories about the Claremont House long predate Stranger Things, which is why it clears the rule. The 1880s Second Empire mansion has been a private home, a bed and breakfast, and a private home again, and reports from various owners and guests over the decades are the usual catalog: footsteps on the stairs, doors, cold spots.
But the real reason it works on screen is that the location scouts found a building that already looks like the idea of a haunted house.
Address: 906 E. 2nd Avenue, Rome, GA 30161. Access: Private property. Admire it from the public sidewalk only. This one gets traffic now, and the owners did not sign up for it. Stay on the sidewalk, keep your voice down, don’t block the street, and don’t step onto the lawn for a better angle.
Fun Fact: Rome itself is one of the best filming locations in North Georgia.
9. Jekyll Island Club Resort, Jekyll Island
You’ve seen it in: The Legend of Bagger Vance (2000). Two scenes were shot at the resort: a dance sequence on the riverfront lawn and an interior scene at the bar near the Grand Dining Room. You can order a drink in that bar.
Jekyll Island has been worked hard by productions: Glory filmed its Fort Wagner assault on what is now called Glory Beach, X-Men: First Class used the Clam Creek Fishing Pier, and The Walking Dead shot at Driftwood Beach, but the Club is the only one on the island that also comes with a ghost.
Why it’s considered haunted: From 1886 to 1942, this was the most exclusive club in America — Morgan, Rockefeller, Pulitzer, Vanderbilt, a membership that reportedly controlled a sixth of the world’s wealth. The story told here is that J.P. Morgan still turns up on a third-story balcony at the Sans Souci building, watching the Jekyll River and smoking a cigar. Early-morning guests report the smell of cigar smoke with nobody around.
It’s a gentle haunting, as these go. Fitting for the clientele.
Address: 371 Riverview Drive, Jekyll Island, GA 31527. Access: It’s an operating hotel. You can book a room, eat in the Grand Dining Room, or walk the grounds and the Historic District, which is open to the public. The Jekyll Island Mosaic Museum runs a Historic District tram tour that covers the club cottages.
Where to Stay
Three of these you can sleep in or next door to, which makes the trip easy to build around:
- Jekyll Island Club Resort: stay in the haunted one. The Sans Souci building is where the Morgan story lives.
- Savannah’s Historic District: four of the nine are within a mile of each other here. Anything near Bay, Bull, or Harris Street puts you within walking distance from three of them.
- Milledgeville: the trolley tour leaves from downtown, so stay in the historic district and you can walk to the Visitor Center.
How to Actually Road Trip This
They don’t form a loop, so pick a cluster rather than trying to chain all nine.
The Savannah weekend (four locations, all walkable): Sorrel-Weed, Mercer-Williams, and Moon River are inside the Historic District within a mile of each other. Bonaventure is a ten-minute drive east. You can do these, along with my other suggestions for things to do in Savannah.
The coast add-on: Jekyll Island is about ninety minutes south of Savannah. Easy two-night extension.
The metro Atlanta day (two locations): Oxford and Senoia are both about an hour from downtown Atlanta, in opposite directions, Oxford east, Senoia southwest. Doable in one long day if you start early; better as two half-days with Covington’s MySquarealls square added to the Oxford leg.
Middle Georgia: Milledgeville is its own trip and schedule-locked to the trolley tour. Build the day around it.
North Georgia: Rome is a stand-alone, about ninety minutes northwest of Atlanta, and pairs well with Adairsville, Cave Spring, and the rest of the small towns up there.
Famous On Screen, Not Actually Haunted, and Still Worth the Drive
Two places come up constantly in searches like this one. Both have real, traceable filming credits. Neither has a haunting story I could source to anything. They don’t belong on the list above, but they absolutely belong on your trip.
The Twelve Oaks, Covington
Built in 1836 as a Greek Revival townhouse for Judge John Harris, renamed “The Cedars” in the 1880s and then “Whitehall” in 1903 when Covington Mills owner Nathaniel Turner added the colonnade, the second-floor porch, and the third floor with dormers that give it the face you recognize now.
You’ve seen it in: The Vampire Diaries. Most famously as the 1864 Lockwood Mansion in the flashback episodes. Covington has hosted more than 90 film and TV productions, and this house has been in a good share of them. Before any of that, Margaret Mitchell used it as her model for Ashley Wilkes’s home in Gone with the Wind. The fictional Twelve Oaks is named after this house, not the reverse.
On the haunting: I found none. Not in the Newton County Chamber’s history of the house, not in Vanishing Georgia’s architectural record, not on its own tourism listing. People call a stay here “hauntingly beautiful,” which is a compliment to the architecture and not a ghost story. I’d rather tell you that than invent one.
Why go anyway: It’s a beautiful, 11,000-square-foot antebellum mansion on the National Register with eight guest rooms where you can actually spend the night. If you’re doing Oxford and Covington in a day, this is where you stay that night.
Address: 2176 Monticello Street SW, Covington, GA 30014. Access: Operating bed and breakfast. Book directly. Mystic Falls Tours covers the other Covington locations, including the Lockwood Mansion interiors.
The Whitlock Inn, Marietta
You’ve seen it in: Netflix’s The Haunting of Hill House, standing in for the Harris Funeral Home exteriors.
On the haunting: Nothing substantial, and I looked hard, because the irony would have been perfect. The building doesn’t appear on Explore Georgia’s own list of the most haunted places in Marietta. A filming location for a ghost story is not a haunted place.
Why go anyway: It’s a restored 1900 Victorian in a walkable square, and it’s a two-minute walk from the Kennesaw House, which is the genuinely haunted building in Marietta, currently the Marietta Museum of History, with accounts of hundreds of ghosts and a well-documented third-floor sighting. The Kennesaw House has simply never been in anything. Between them, you get both halves, just not in the same building.
Address: 57 Whitlock Avenue, Marietta, GA 30064 (Kennesaw House: 1 Depot Street). Access: The Whitlock is an event venue, so public access depends on what’s booked. The Marietta Museum of History is open to the public.
FAQs
Hey, I’m Yanitza 👋 Certified travel advisor, U.S. destination specialist, and hidden-gem hunter with over 8 years of experience helping travelers explore deeper and travel slower. I specialize in crafting authentic, stress-free adventures from small towns to scenic hikes and scuba dives. I’m a firm believer that the best stories happen when you venture beyond tourist hotspots. When I’m not planning getaways or writing travel guides, I’ll probably be home rewatching The Vampire Diaries like it’s my job and daydreaming about future adventures in Spain.