MOON RIVER BREWING COMPANY
Brewery — Savannah, Georgia
Status: Operating · Access: Open to public · est. 1821
Dossier: https://haunthunt.com/place/moon-river-brewing-company-savannah-georgia/

Savannah’s first hotel, now a brewery with a basement poltergeist.

A brewery in Savannah, Georgia, built in 1821, Moon River Brewing Company is filed here for what the record attaches to it. Savannah’s first hotel, now a brewery with a basement poltergeist. HauntHunt files it with haunted places, dark history and hauntings. The dossier holds 2 reported claims, 1 legend and 1 documented fact, with the verified spine filed separately from the lore. It still pours.

On August 10, 1832, a feud that had been simmering since spring ended in the bar of Savannah's City Hotel when Dr. Philip Minis raised a pistol and shot James Jones Stark dead. The quarrel had begun months earlier at a tavern called Luddington's, where Stark had publicly called Minis a coward; the killing at 21 West Bay Street became one of antebellum Georgia's more noted trials, and Minis walked out acquitted.
The building that hosted the shooting had already made its name. Built between 1819 and 1821 for Charleston merchant Eleazer Early to a design by William Jay, the City Hotel was Savannah's first hotel — thirty-three rooms, exclusive of the bar — and for its first decades the most distinguished address in the city. It now pours beer as the Moon River Brewing Company, which is, depending on which register you consult, either a brewpub with a ghost problem or a ghost problem with a brewpub.

THE DOCUMENTED RECORD
The guest register of the City Hotel reads like a tour of the early republic: the Marquis de Lafayette on his 1825 progress through the South, General Winfield Scott, William Henry Harrison, the first three commodores of the U.S. Navy, and John James Audubon, who lodged six months trying to sell his wildlife engravings. The building also housed Savannah's first post office and a branch of the Bank of the United States. The last hotel guest checked out in 1864, just ahead of Sherman's arrival; the building then cycled through lumber and coal warehousing and an office-supply firm until Hurricane David stripped its roof in 1979. It stood empty until a 1995 renovation, and Moon River Brewing — named for Savannah native Johnny Mercer's song — has occupied it since 1999.

WHAT THE TOURS CLAIM
Ghost-tour literature adds a second history on top of the record. It holds that the upper floors served as hospital space during Savannah's yellow fever epidemics and that hundreds, many of them children, died there — a claim repeated so often it has hardened into fact on the tour circuit, though the documentation for the building's hospital use is thin. The basement, meanwhile, is said to answer to a presence the staff call Toby, and the upper floors to something less polite: patrons and employees report being pushed, and the push is usually signed, in the retelling, to James Stark, the man shot in the bar in 1832.

WHAT WITNESSES FILED
The reports follow the building's own geography. In the cellar, staff file thrown bottles, moving shadows, and the pool-hall territory of Toby; on the upper floors, closed to diners, employees describe aggressive cold spots and shoving; at the bar, glasses and silverware reportedly leave flat surfaces unassisted. Television has filed its own register: TAPS investigated for a Ghost Hunters Halloween special in 2005, Ghost Adventures locked down in 2009, and BuzzFeed Unsolved arrived in 2018 — each claiming activity, none producing anything a ledger would call evidence.

WHAT REMAINS
What is documented is the building itself — a four-story Georgian survivor with a basement older than the Republic's infancy and a documented homicide in its bar. What is claimed is considerably more: a feud that never checked out, a cellar presence with a name, and a stack of dead fever patients the record cannot quite produce. The file keeps both registers separate, the way the building keeps its basement: present, dark, and not formally on the tour.

FILED CLAIMS — 2 on record, reported not verified
· [Anecdotal] poltergeist claim: Staff report bottles thrown in the cellar and an aggressive presence on the upper floors. Moon River Brewing Company, a brewery in Savannah, Georgia, keeps the story on the menu alongside everything else it serves. Witness accounts, no evidence file: the claim is anecdotal and stays that way. Nothing here would make headlines alone; together the reports make a pattern.
  source: Moon River Brewing Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_River_Brewing_Company)
· [Media reported] haunting reputation: Savannah ghost tours routinely bill it among the city’s most haunted buildings. The brewery's reports are the kind old establishments accumulate — footsteps after close, presences in empty rooms. The press reported it; the reporting is documented, the phenomenon isn't. The report is preserved in sources like 'Moon River Brewing Company'. It's the kind of claim that outlives debunkings — too many witnesses, too few explanations.
  source: Moon River Brewing Company (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_River_Brewing_Company)

HISTORY — 1 documented facts
· [1821] Built in 1821 as the City Hotel—Savannah’s first—later a lumber warehouse and battery-supply shop before the brewery. The brewery's documented history in Savannah, Georgia is the record the rest of the file stands on. This belongs to the verified spine of the entry, the layer everything else is measured against. Sources including 'Moon River Brewing Company' carry the record. It anchors the timeline the rest of the file hangs from.

SOURCES — 3 cited
· Moon River Brewing Company — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_River_Brewing_Company
· Ghost Hunters — Wikipedia
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_Hunters_(TV_series)
· Moon River Brewing — official site — Moon River Brewing Company
  https://www.moonriverbrewing.com/

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