HauntBound archive · catalog record
Reported phenomena, as catalogued
Built on the site of Savannah's 1890 grand hotel—demolished and rebuilt in 1968—where guests report flickering lights, TVs switching on, and apparitions in period clothing.
15 E Liberty St, Savannah, GA 31401
Research updated August 2026
Age
All Ages
Cost
$$$$
Hotel room rates; no separate charge for paranormal access
Access
Wheelchair OK
Full-service hotel with elevator access throughout
Equipment
Photos OK
Est. 1890 · Site of the original 1890 Hotel DeSoto · Four U.S. Presidents as guests · Historic Hotels of America member
The DeSoto's address at 15 East Liberty Street, overlooking Madison Square, has hosted a major hotel for more than 130 years under two entirely different structures. The first Hotel DeSoto was designed by Boston architect William Gibbons Preston and opened in 1890. Preston gave it 300 rooms with elaborate terracotta detailing and asymmetrical floor plans that distinguished it architecturally from more utilitarian competitors.
For seven decades, the hotel functioned as a social center for Savannah's civic life. Four presidents passed through—William McKinley, William Taft, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Hoover—alongside figures from entertainment and culture including Gregory Peck and Katharine Hepburn. By the 1960s, the building had aged past economical repair. The original DeSoto closed in 1965 and was demolished.
The current structure opened in 1968 as the DeSoto Hilton, built on the same footprint as the original. It was rebranded as The DeSoto following a $9.4 million renovation completed in 2017, when it joined the National Trust for Historic Preservation's Historic Hotels of America program. Sotherly Hotels acquired it as part of their historic property portfolio.
The building changed hands and names, but its position on Madison Square—one of Savannah's twenty-two original squares—kept it embedded in the city's identity. Guests arriving today occupy a 1968 building on land where Savannah's social elite gathered for generations.
Sources
The paranormal reputation of The DeSoto is gentler than most of Savannah's haunted hotels—a city with no shortage of dark history and a large ghost tourism industry. The reports that circulate focus on environmental disturbances rather than full apparitions: lights that flicker without electrical explanation, televisions that activate in empty rooms, the occasional figure in clothing from another era glimpsed in corridors.
The logical difficulty with the haunting is the building itself. The current DeSoto is a 1968 structure; the 1890 original that gave the address its prestige was entirely demolished before the new hotel was built. Whether a ghost attached to a place rather than a structure can survive demolition is a question that ghost lore doesn't resolve neatly. Local tradition treats the land as haunted regardless, carrying the presence forward through the address.
Savannah ghost tours include the DeSoto in their circuits, positioning it as a site where the city's layered history leaves residue. The hotel's decades of hosting politicians, celebrities, and ordinary travelers who lived through wartime, the Depression, and the mid-century South give the property a weight of accumulated human experience that local guides draw on.
Reports are well enough documented in traveler accounts and Savannah ghost tour documentation to warrant the site's haunted hotel classification, though the activity described is at the low end of intensity for the genre.
Hotel guests report unexplained activity throughout the property, including flickering lights, televisions activating on their own, and apparitions described as wearing period clothing. The current building opened in 1968 on the footprint of the 1890 DeSoto Hotel, which operated for 75 years before demolition.
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