Bonaventure Cemetery
Savannah, Georgia, United States
The 1846 Victorian garden cemetery on the Wilmington River whose oaks, statuary, and legends made it the Souths most storied burial ground.
Bonaventure began as a plantation, became a garden cemetery in 1846, and by the twentieth century was the most photographed and storied burial ground in the South: live oaks hung with Spanish moss over marble figures, family plots along the river bluffs, and a body of local legend collected by the Savannah Morning News and generations of guides. The Bird Girl statue, moved here and made famous by the book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, pulled worldwide visitors into what had been a local devotional landscape.
The genuine esoteric interest is twofold: the funerary symbolism corpus, from masonic emblems to mourning figures, and the living practice of visitation, photography, and story that Savannah keeps up around it. It is historic ground, not a haunting attraction, and it rewards being read that way.
Visiting
330 Bonaventure Rd, Thunderbolt/Savannah; open daily 8am-5pm; see the Bonaventure Cemetery site.
Photo: [Wikimedia Commons](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bonaventure_Cemetery,_Savannah,_GA,_US_(05).jpg), CC BY-SA.
Associated traditions & practices
Visitor stories