Marshall House

The hotel's medical file has two entries. It served as a hospital during the yellow fever epidemics that savaged the city at mid-century — the outbreaks of the 1850s and 1876 among the deadliest — and after Sherman's army took Savannah on December 21, 1864, it spent the occupation months as a Union hospital, the surgical floor downstairs, until war's end. The second entry is the one that explains the first discovery: limbs went under the floorboards in the ordinary course of frontier-era surgery, and stayed.

Mary Marshall herself is the file's marvel: born in 1783, dead in 1877 at ninety-three — she outlived her husband, her hotel's first era, and the war that turned her building into a ward. Her estate leased the property and collected its rents until 1914. The hotel carried on through the century's turn, then spent decades closed or diminished — the ground floor kept its shops while the upper floors went dark — until the restoration that produced the floorboard discovery and reopened the building as a boutique hotel, its artifacts built into the operation: photographs, memorabilia, and an 1830s portrait of Mary Marshall watching over the reception desk.

The discovery's paperwork closed quickly — a coroner's jurisdiction runs to the recently dead, and the surgeons responsible for these had been beyond subpoena for over a century — but the marketing absorbed it just as fast. The floorboard bones went into the tour script, which is how a sealed surgical floor became a brochure line inside a decade.

The reports are remarkably consistent for the genre: children running and playing in the halls late at night — filed repeatedly by guests who checked the corridor and found it empty — faucets that turn themselves on, unexplained voices, and figures identified with the hospital years. One guest account preserved in the file describes a companion unable to sleep in the Mary Marshall Suite for the sound of children in the hall, in a hotel locked for the night and holding exactly three guests.

The city's own tourism copy calls them "some of Savannah's friendliest ghosts," which is the file's preferred register: this is a haunted hotel whose marketing acknowledges the hauntings without surrendering the ledger.

The Marshall House still takes guests on Broughton Street, holds a weekly history talk in the lobby, and keeps its documentation where the archive likes it — in photographs and registers — while the bones stay where the surgeons left them. The file's closing observation: most haunted hotels assert a legend; this one, at least once, excavated it.