100 Places Every Woman Should Go

• Known to her friends as Daisy, Juliette Gordon Low was an eccentric who lost much of her hearing to ear infections, one caused by an errant grain of rice thrown at her own wedding. She moved to Europe where she became impassioned with youth activism, eventually returning to the United States to found the Girl Scouts of America. She died of breast cancer and was buried in her Girl Scout uniform; 50 million young women have since joined her legacy. Visit her childhood home on 10 East Oglethorpe Avenue, now a shrine for troops.

• Born in Savannah in 1925, Flannery O’Connor was—in her own words—a “pigeon-toed only child with a receding chin and a you-leave-me-alone-or-I’ll-bite-you complex.” The author of such classics as A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge, she won the prestigious O. Henry Award for Best Short Story three times before dying of lupus at age thirty-nine. Her three-story childhood home at 207 East Charlton Street on Lafayette Square has since become a literary center offering seminars, readings, and films that celebrate not only her work but that of all Southern writers.

• Some blame the Civil War, which ravaged much of the state and piled up corpses in the process; others say the culprit is the Treaty of New Echota, which sent tens of thousands of Native Americans on a “Trail of Tears” from Georgia to Oklahoma. Whatever the reason, Georgia is fraught with ghosts—and in Savannah, they make themselves known. There’s Alice Riley, a servant indentured to a cruel man named Mr. Wise. Alice was washing his hair in a bucket one morning when his wandering hands got too frisky, and she drowned him. Her husband was promptly hung for the crime, but because she was pregnant, Alice got sentenced to a jail cell in the southwest corner of Wright Square for eight months until the baby was born and adopted. Then it was her turn. Deeming it improper to keep a woman’s body hanging the customary three days, the authorities doubled the height of the scaffold so the trees would hide her. “To this day, no Spanish moss grows in those old oaks, as Alice is up there, looking for her baby,” says Robert Edgerly, who gives late night Savannah tours.

Then there’s Anna Powers, who at age fourteen flung herself from the roof of the 17 Hundred 90 hotel on President Street rather than marry an old man. She remains a poltergeist in room 204, slamming drawers, lifting the bed off the floor and crashing it down, turning the shower on and off, flushing the toilet, and making prank calls. “You answer it and hear a woman sobbing,” says Edgerly. Couples in particular have reported sightings in the hotel, although Anna tends to leave businessmen at peace.