Sorrel-Weed House

The verified file runs differently. Sorrel's first wife, Lucinda, died before the house was built; he then married her sister Matilda, who did die young, though the death records, diaries, and letters the house has reviewed give no support to the scandal-driven leap the tours describe. The carriage house where Molly allegedly hanged appears on no map of the period — it was likely built in the 1870s, under the second owner, a decade after the legend requires it. Henry D. Weed bought the property in 1859 and his family held it to 1914. Francis Sorrel's son Moxley grew up here and became, by general assessment, the best staff officer in the Confederate army, wounded three times on Longstreet's staff. The house itself, paint analysis shows, originally wore a startling bright orange stucco.

For the tour version to work, the record has to be rearranged: Matilda's documented death must become a suicide, the affair must be supplied, and Molly — for whom no census, inventory, or sale record has surfaced — must be invented or rediscovered, depending on who is telling. The story also needs the carriage house to exist before it was built. None of this has slowed the legend; if anything, the gaps are its architecture. The house's own staff, in contact with living Sorrel descendants, now preface the tale with the caveat that it is a tale.

Reports filed from the property follow the legend's floor plan: voices and cold spots in the main house, an oppressive presence in the carriage house, figures on the upper floors. Television filed first and loudest — TAPS chose the house for its live 2005 Halloween investigation, the broadcast that put Savannah's haunted-house industry on the national circuit, and the carriage house has been a fixture of paranormal programming since. Every report is anecdotal; the house sells tickets on them nightly.

What remains is a house that holds both of its histories honestly unequal: a documented merchant's mansion of real architectural distinction — briefly famous again as the establishing shot of Forrest Gump — and a ghost story whose power is precisely that it cannot be checked. The record gives the Sorrels; the legend gives Matilda and Molly. The tour gives you twenty minutes of the second and, if you ask, a warning about the first.