Bonaventure Cemetery Tour Night

The cemetery that draws visitors from across the world began as a plantation dinner party. In 1802, fire swept the Tattnall house at Bonaventure; the guests, so the account goes, carried the table outdoors and finished the meal while the walls burned. The Tattnall family burial ground survived. In 1846 Peter Wiltberger bought the bluff and opened Evergreen Cemetery; the City of Savannah purchased it in 1907 and restored the older name. Its reputation is partly literary. John Berendt's 1994 book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil placed Sylvia Shaw Judson's Bird Girl statue on its cover, and the small bronze figure drew such crowds that it was moved to the Telfair Academy for protection. Conrad Aiken, the Pulitzer-winning poet, lies here beneath a granite bench inscribed as an invitation to sit. Johnny Mercer, lyricist of "Moon River," is buried in a family plot a short walk away. Gracie Watson, who died of pneumonia in 1889 at six years old, is marked by a life-sized marble portrait carved from a photograph. Demand for a bonaventure cemetery tour night has grown alongside that reputation, though the municipal gates follow civic hours rather than theatrical ones. The design matters as much as the names. Bonaventure is a rural cemetery in the nineteenth-century manner, laid out as a landscape garden with curving lanes, sectioned lots and planted avenues rather than a grid of stones. Live oaks planted by the Tattnalls form the central corridors; Spanish moss, an epiphyte rather than a parasite, hangs from their limbs and softens every sightline. Victorian funerary sculpture is dense here: draped urns, broken columns, clasped hands, inverted torches, each a legible symbol to the mourners who commissioned it. Confederate dead, yellow fever victims and Savannah's Jewish and Catholic sections sit within the same boundary walls. The site was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2001, and the Bonaventure Historical Society has catalogued its monuments since 1993. That archival work underpins most interpretive content, including the narration used on a savannah cemetery tour and on the bonaventure cemetery tour night tours that operators run around the published schedule. Admission to the grounds costs 0 USD; guided interpretation is what visitors pay for. The stone, meanwhile, keeps weathering — marble dissolving slowly in coastal rain, granite holding its edges, the oaks adding another ring each year above both.