Bonaventure Cemetery

I was not able to...

The Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah is, like, the most amazingly beautiful cemetery I've ever been to, and we just couldn't go because of the weather.

I didn't wanna be soaked out there.

And, um, there is a beautiful witchcraft shop in Savannah called Conjure 912.

Ooh.

And [laughs] it is the Bonaventure Cemetery, which has been on my bucket list forever.

[gentle music] Welcome to Cemetery Tripping, where I will feature a different cemetery in each episode that I hope you will seek out and enjoy as much as I do.

As an avataphophile, or lover of tombstones, I spend a lot of time in the local New England area in the beautiful and historic cemeteries we have here.

The stones here are like no others, and I have literally thousands of pictures of the intricate and symbolic carvings found on them.

You can see my pictures on Facebook by doing a search for Cemetery Tripping.

I'm here at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia.

I'm very excited because this cemetery has been on my bucket list forever.

The benches also reminded me of Conrad Aiken, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and man of letters who retired to Savannah, where he had been born.

He often sat by his parents' grave in Bonaventure Cemetery, at least in part for the view of the harbor and of the arriving and departing merchantmen.

He once saw a ship with an intriguing name heading down to the sea.

He did some research at the Port Authority, where he confirmed the ship's name and looked up her destination.

In Savannah, Georgia, the most popular common statue that you'll find in a garden or in a yard or maybe even in a home is called Bird Girl.

Bird Girl is a small statue from Bonaventure Cemetery that, uh, was designed as a young woman, and in each hand is a small bowl that was intended for birdseed.

And this was used on the front cover of the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

So s- somehow everyone needed their own mini statue version of it, and I've seen a few here in Atlanta and other places around the country.

It did not.

But, but we did go visit the famous Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, um, which was so cool.

[laughs]

What is...

Uh, but it was, uh, it sa- this part sounds made up, but it really is the truth.

We were at Bonaventure Cemetery at the grave site of Johnny Mercer, right?

That's in Savannah.

The legendary-

Nearly a thousand people queue up outside for a chance to meet them and to see their undying love carved into stone for themselves each year.

Savannah's Bonaventure Cemetery is known for its lush scenery and striking monuments to the dead.

Yet there is one particular headstone that stops visitors in their tracks.

Surrounded by a long iron fence, sitting pensively with her right hand resting on a tree stump, is the statue of a little girl.

Other staff members refused to go into the basement due to the ominous sound of low moaning and clanking metal.

Wheels Watson, in a final tribute to his daughter, hired sculptor John Walls to carve a life-sized monument of Gracie, using a photograph as a reference.

The finished work became the marker of her grave in Bonaventure Cemetery.

It's said to be eerily accurate, all the way down to the shape of her mouth.

It was not of COVID, but it was during COVID.

And so we had a small ceremony outdoors in Bonaventure Cemetery, one of the kind of classic cemeteries of the cemetery movement, the rural cemetery movement of the 1900s.

And we went there and so we, my father, had a very difficult end of life.

At one point, with never depressed a minute in his life, a civic activist would stop strangers and give them tips on how to tour Savannah, Georgia, and would be stopped by strangers in airports to say, because he just looked so friendly.