The Pirates' House

Pirates, Ghosts, Parking, and the Problem With Blackbeard

I went to The Pirates' House in Savannah knowing the place had been around long enough to accumulate the usual things old American buildings collect: history, folklore, exaggeration and, eventually, a famous dead person who probably wasn't there.

Old buildings can become liars if you give them enough time. Not malicious liars, just something similar to the old man at the end of the bar whose original story was probably interesting enough before two hundred years of retelling added a pirate, a murder, a tunnel and a ghost.

And if the building happens to be near the ocean, Blackbeard eventually stops by.

The Pirates' House has had almost three centuries to work with, so naturally there are pirates, ghosts, kidnapped sailors and a tunnel. Then there is Blackbeard, which presents a problem.

Why?

Because Blackbeard was dead.

We'll get to him. I had to park first.

Can You Just Walk Into The Pirates' House?

Yes, and despite the name nobody asked me to produce a cutlass, a letter of marque or a map to buried treasure.

The Pirates' House is still, after all, a restaurant. Walk-ins are accepted and reservations aren't required, although reservations are one of those small inventions that keep civilization from collapsing.

If you're going for dinner on a Friday or Saturday, during a holiday, or anytime Savannah is particularly full of people walking around with drinks in plastic cups, I'd make one. Otherwise you may end up eating somewhere considerably less interesting while staring across town at the place you actually wanted to go.

Lunch is easier, and having been inside the place I actually think there is something to seeing it during the day. Ghosts get all the publicity in buildings like this, but the woodwork deserves a chance too.

Where Do You Park?

This is the kind of question historic travel articles love to skip, even though it becomes extremely important when you're the person actually standing there.

The Pirates' House has on-site parking at its East Broad Street location, which matters because Savannah is beautiful, historic and was designed during a period when nobody anticipated the Chevrolet Suburban or Ford F-150.

If that lot is full, you're left with street parking, garages and however far you're willing to walk. This gets considerably less charming during Savannah's warmer and more humid months. You can arrive at one of America's historic treasures feeling like you need another shower.

That's why I think this stuff belongs in an On the Ground piece.

Historic travel writing will happily tell you that Lafayette once stood beneath a balcony while neglecting to tell you that you may spend twenty minutes circling the block beneath it looking for somewhere to leave your car.

The past matters. When I'm actually visiting somewhere, though, parking occasionally matters more.

Which Part of The Pirates' House Is Actually Old?

This was the question I was more interested in once I got inside because The Pirates' House gets messy very quickly if you start asking what actually dates to what.

The oldest part of the complex is the Herb House, dating to around 1734, which we can all agree is genuinely old. Georgia-colony old.

It did not begin as a pirate tavern.

The Herb House was associated with Trustees' Garden, an agricultural experiment established during Savannah's earliest years, and it was used by the garden's caretaker. If you're trying to market a historic restaurant, "agricultural experiment and gardener's house" admittedly has less sizzle than pirates.

But standing in a place like this, I care about that distinction because the real thing is already interesting enough.

The hand-hewn beams in the Herb House are among the pieces that let you look around and say, all right, this part really does go back to the 1730s. The inn and tavern story comes later, around 1753, when Savannah was developing as a port and sailors were moving through the city.

1753 still qualifies as old in my book.

It just isn't 1734.

The Pirates' House I visited is not one untouched tavern that opened its doors in 1734 and has been pouring rum continuously ever since. Most old places don't work that way in my experience. Buildings expand, renovations happen, businesses change and owners die. Somebody eventually installs fluorescent or LED lighting and immediately regrets it.

I'm still trying to find a replacement for my old bar soulmate, Lafitte's Blacksmith Shop, largely because places like that understand that sometimes the best lighting technology available is apparently a candle.

By 1945, The Pirates' House property had deteriorated badly enough that demolition was a real possibility. To me, this is where the story becomes much more interesting, because now we're getting into the reason I started Still Open America in the first place.

It survived because people decided it should.

Mary Hillyer is credited in the property's history with helping lead the effort to preserve and restore it instead of letting it disappear. Blackbeard probably sells more T-shirts, but if you actually care about why you're still able to walk through this place today, Hillyer is the better story.

The modern restaurant opened in 1953, so no, The Pirates' House hasn't been sitting perfectly frozen since 1734.

I think the truth is better than that anyway.

There really is a structure here dating to around 1734. There really was later maritime and tavern activity associated with the site. There have also been centuries of changes, neglect, rescue, restoration and adaptation between then and the plate of fried chicken that eventually arrives at somebody's table.

That isn't a weakness in the history.

That's how it survived.

Now, Back to Blackbeard

Blackbeard is irresistible.

His real name may have been Edward Teach, or Thatch depending on the source, and over the last three centuries the guy has somehow managed to drink in an extraordinary number of American taverns.

That may be the only thing Blackbeard and I have in common. I'm alive, he's dead and I don't have a beard, but apparently we both enjoy taverns.

There is one difference.

I actually drank at The Pirates' House.

Blackbeard didn't.

He died in 1718. Savannah itself wasn't founded until 1733. The Herb House dates to around 1734, and the inn and tavern association comes later still, around 1753.

So by the time the Herb House existed, Blackbeard had been dead for roughly sixteen years.

That creates what I would call a scheduling conflict.

Unless Blackbeard possessed talents considerably more impressive than piracy, he wasn't drinking here.

I was.

Scoreboard: Me 1, Blackbeard 0.

This should settle the matter, but legends are difficult to evict once they move in, so it probably won't.

Blackbeard absolutely belongs to the wider maritime history and folklore of the region. His activities touched the southeastern coast, his name became embedded in Georgia coastal memory and there is even a Blackbeard Island off the Georgia coast.

But there is a considerable distance between saying Blackbeard is part of Georgia coastal history and saying Blackbeard sat in this particular building drinking rum.

I couldn't find strong documentary evidence for the second one.

Strangely enough, that makes the story more interesting to me, because you can almost watch the mythology assemble itself over generations. You start with a real colonial building associated with sailors. Sailors become pirates. The pirates eventually need a famous pirate.

And there stands Blackbeard.

Conveniently dead and unavailable for comment.

What About the Tunnel?

There is always a tunnel.

I've spent enough time researching historic American bars, inns and hotels that I'm starting to suspect there is a second transportation system beneath the entire United States.

Maybe there is. I'm not particularly into conspiracies.

Or maybe I am.

Either way, these tunnels were apparently reserved for pirates, bootleggers, smugglers, escaped prisoners, kidnappers and ghosts. Nobody seems to have had the foresight to use one for easier parking.

At The Pirates' House, the enduring story is that sailors were drugged or otherwise incapacitated, carried through an underground tunnel toward the river and forced aboard ships.

Shanghaiing.

I love the story.

Unfortunately for us—and fortunately for all the fictional sailors being hauled underground—it being a great story does not automatically mean it happened here.

Versions of it appear in restaurant histories, Savannah tourism material, local reporting and ghost-tour storytelling. Like I said, once a legend moves in, getting it back out is difficult.

What I want to know is whether there is the kind of evidence that changes the sentence from "people have long said this happened" to "this happened."

That means looking for things like contemporary court records, named victims, police accounts, shipping records or eyewitness testimony connected specifically to the property.

That's where things get thin.

A tunnel can exist without anyone being kidnapped in it. A sailor can disappear without a tunnel. And people can repeat the same story for a hundred years without making it one percent more factual.

History has annoying rules like that, especially when you're trying to sell a Pirate's Margarita.

Is The Pirates' House Haunted?

I went into this one with a bias I should admit.

I believe in this stuff.

I also refuse to call something a fact simply because I believe it.

Those two things can coexist.

The Pirates' House has accumulated plenty of ghost stories: apparitions, shadow figures, unexplained sounds and, my personal least favorite, a mysterious boy.

Child ghosts creep me out.

Then there is Captain Flint.

Flint accomplished something particularly impressive even by Savannah ghost standards: he managed to become a ghost without ever going through the inconvenience of being alive.

Captain Flint is fictional. He comes from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

That hasn't stopped him from joining the paranormal population of The Pirates' House, and I find that genuinely fascinating.

Think about what had to happen.

A fictional pirate became associated with a real historic place. People repeated the association until repetition became tradition, and eventually people began looking for the ghost of somebody who had only ever existed in the imagination of a famous author.

Human beings are very good at this.

That does not mean I think the ghost stories are worthless, and it doesn't necessarily mean every unexplained experience somebody reports here is untrue. I actually think folklore becomes part of the history of a place once enough generations have carried it with them.

If Savannah residents, employees, tourists and ghost guides have spent decades telling stories about figures moving through these rooms, those stories are now part of the cultural life of the building. When you're there, that history of people believing things about the place becomes part of what you're experiencing too.

I just don't confuse that with proving a ghost.

If somebody reports seeing an apparition, then I can document that somebody reported seeing an apparition. A legend can be a real legend without the event behind it being proven. A documented death is different from a ghost story, especially when the supposed dead person was never alive in the first place.

Captain Flint remains fictional.

As far as I can tell, he is taking the news well.

So, Is The Pirates' House Worth Seeing?

For me, 100 percent yes.

Just not because Blackbeard drank there.

We've established that he didn't.

What I liked more was seeing what happens when a building survives long enough for documented history, folklore, tourism, commerce and memory to pile on top of one another. Once I started separating those layers, the real story underneath was interesting enough without the extra pirates.

A piece of Savannah dating to around 1734 is still standing. The property survived changing uses, neglect and the threat of demolition. It survived because people, including Mary Hillyer, decided that losing it would be worse than saving it, and because of that decision I was able to walk through the place almost three centuries after the earliest part of it was built.

That's the part I keep coming back to.

Some of the stories inside The Pirates' House are documented. Some are plausible. Some can't be proven. Some are folklore, and at least one involves a pirate who had already been dead for sixteen years.

Meanwhile the building outlasted all of them.

We seem to have this strange tendency to believe that three centuries of ordinary human life isn't dramatic enough, so we add ghosts and pirates. But think about everything a place has to survive just to remain standing and useful for that long. People worked there, drank there, argued there, made money, lost money, repaired walls, neglected walls, told stories and believed stories. At one point the whole aging place came close enough to disappearing that somebody had to look at it and decide it was worth saving.

Then another generation came through.

And then another.

Eventually I did too.

I ate, drank, looked around, tried to separate what I was actually seeing from what I had been told, and went home wanting to know which stories survived because they were true and which survived simply because they were good stories.

That's what I want from these places.

The Pirates' House is still here.

That's the story.