FORT MORRIS AND SUNBURY Site — Midway, Georgia Status: Operating · Access: Open to public Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/fort-morris-and-sunbury-midway-georgia/ The "Come and take it!" fort—and the burned town of Sunbury. A site in Midway, Georgia, Fort Morris and Sunbury is filed here for what the record attaches to it. The "Come and take it!" fort—and the burned town of Sunbury. HauntHunt files it with the Revolutionary War, dark history and local folklore. The presences in its file go unnamed: the sunbury dead, the record says. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 2 legends and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. The site is open to visitors. On November 25, 1778, Colonel Lewis Fuser landed five hundred British regulars at Sunbury, backed by armed vessels in the Medway River, and demanded the immediate surrender of the earthwork guarding the town. Colonel John McIntosh held it with fewer than two hundred men — 127 Continentals, militia, and citizens of Sunbury itself. His written reply ran three words: 'Come and take it.' Fuser counted the odds and withdrew south. The British came back in January. Under a heavier force commanded by General Augustin Prevost, and with Major Joseph Lane now holding the fort against orders to evacuate, the garrison endured a short, heavy bombardment before surrendering on January 9, 1779 — 159 Continentals and 45 militia marched out as prisoners. The refusal survives in the record; so does the outcome. THE DOCUMENTED RECORD The bluff had been fortified before — locals raised a hundred-yard-square work in 1756 against Creek attacks in the French and Indian War era, and Governor Henry Ellis counted an eight-gun battery there before it fell into disrepair by 1762. The Continental Congress authorized the new fort in 1776 to shield Sunbury, a port laid out in 1758 on the Savannah model that had grown into Georgia's second-busiest harbor. The work was an irregular quadrangle of earth — parapet, moat, a parade of roughly an acre, more than twenty-five pieces of ordnance — and it took its name from Captain Thomas Morris, whose artillery company first garrisoned it, after British correspondence addressed itself to him by mistake. The British renamed the captured work Fort George and held it until abandoning it in 1782; rebuilt for the War of 1812 under the on-the-nose name Fort Defiance, it saw no second siege. THE TOWN THAT VANISHED Sunbury did not long outlive its fort. In its prime the town held a church, an academy, a market square, and wharves loading rice and indigo for a port that genuinely rivaled Savannah. It burned during the war years, its families drifted inland, and what remained was finished by the hurricane of 1824. Of Georgia's second city, the town plan survives on paper; on the ground there is a cemetery in the marsh grass — the dead of a port that once handled a colony's exports, now the town's only remaining residents. Local memory has always treated the site as haunted ground in the municipal sense — a town that no longer exists, its churchyard full and its streets grass. The paranormal register filed for Fort Morris is modest by archive standards: visitors and site interpreters speak more of absence than apparition, of the oddity of standing on a second city's earthworks with no city attached. The ground does the rest: salt marsh, river bend, and a parapet that has outlasted every town and garrison it was built to save. WHAT REMAINS The file's spine is the defiance — the three-word answer history kept, and the January morning the answer ran out. Excavations in 1940 recovered guns from the ruins; the surviving earthworks, some seventy acres administered as a state historic site, are the only Revolutionary-era fortification of their kind left in Georgia. Whether the garrison's dead keep the ramparts is not a question the earthworks answer. What the ground demonstrably keeps is the outline of the refusal — parapet, moat, and a cemetery where Sunbury files its only remaining residents. FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified · [Local folklore] apparition: Reported figures at the fort and the townsite. The reports at Fort Morris and Sunbury are the site's second history — unofficial, unverified, and stubbornly retold. The claim is neighborhood knowledge — retold locally, verified nowhere. The figure remains the site's most-repeated sighting. It remains the site's standing claim. source: Fort Morris / Sunbury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Morris) · [Documented legend] named ghost legend: The dead are said to linger. The lore files them collectively as the Sunbury dead. The site in Midway, Georgia gives the account a documented setting: real place, real history, unresolved reports. The account has a collector's pedigree — written down as legend, which is the most honest status it can hold. Sources including 'Fort Morris / Sunbury' keep the claim in circulation. A ghost with a name outlasts a ghost without one; the reports keep it employed. source: Fort Morris / Sunbury (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Morris) HISTORY — 1 documented facts · The 1778 stand and Sunbury’s burning are documented. Fort Morris and Sunbury's past is on record — the entry belongs to the verified layer beneath whatever lore attaches. It's verified history: the dossier's load-bearing detail. The record appears in 'Fort Morris / Sunbury'. It's the sort of fact that gives the haunting reports their context. SOURCES — 1 cited · Fort Morris / Sunbury — Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Morris — HauntHunt is a research archive. Claims are filed as reported — documented where sources exist, marked as folklore or unverified where they do not. Methodology: https://haunthunt.com/methodology/ · Corrections: https://haunthunt.com/report/