17 Hundred 90 Inn

The western section went up around 1822 as a duplex built by Steele White; the smaller eastern section was built by the Powers family in 1888. The assembled property operates today as an inn, restaurant and tavern at the corner of Lincoln and East York streets, within the Savannah Historic District, with a three-story guesthouse across the street. It has been featured on television ghost programming — a season-two episode of My Ghost Story — which is how an inn’s lore becomes an inn’s inventory.

Against the Anna legend, researchers have filed a rebuttal from the public record: the 1920 census lists an Anne Powers alive in Savannah at age 78, married to Patrick Powers, then 82 — a wife who plainly did not leap from a third-floor window in the early 1800s over a sailor who had gone to sea.

As the inn tells it, Anna was a bride of an arranged marriage who fell in love with a sailor in the early 1800s — a servant or barmaid in other versions. When his ship left its mooring and started down the Savannah River, she threw herself from a third-floor window onto the brick courtyard below. A rival version holds that she was pushed — by the husband-to-be who had paid her passage to Savannah, or by another woman who loved the same sailor. The legend has always carried both endings.

The reports in the file divide by floor. Room 204, which the inn bills as its most haunted room, draws accounts of jewelry and clothing moved, covers tugged, guests nudged in the night — a presence described as friendly but insistent on being noticed. The published guest comments for 204 run to pages, mixing gratitude, disappointment and instrumentation (“K2 meters only work on chair,” one entry reports). Downstairs, a boy called Thaddeus is reported in the tavern, and the kitchen keeps a third spirit credited with clanging pots to test whether new cooks respect the house.

When exactly the story was first recorded is unclear — Savannah ghost lore rarely keeps citations — but by the late twentieth century the inn was telling it on its own materials, and Visit Savannah’s retelling gives Anna the full ballad treatment: moon, stars, all the contents of the sky promised. The Powers name on an actual deed is presumably where the legend sourced its surname; a house this old needs only the vacancy.

The inn keeps a guest log of Anna encounters, and the legend keeps its room number — 204, up two flights — which is more precision than most founding ghosts receive. Whether Anna existed as described is contested; what is documented is that the reports have accumulated for decades, and that the 1820 fire left standing exactly the floor she is said to have fallen toward.