Good and Evil at Midnight

In Savannah, you don’t need to say the full title. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil is known here simply as “The Book” — and more than thirty years after it was published, its shadow still falls across Monterey Square.

John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, published in 1994, chronicles a cast of gloriously eccentric personalities in and around Savannah. Voodoo, murder, and debauchery wind through its pages, and each turn takes you deeper into the city’s strange, elegant underbelly. But at the heart of it all sits one house, one man, and one death that Savannah has never quite stopped talking about.

“The Book” That Changed Savannah

When Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil hit shelves in January 1994, no one — least of all its first-time author — expected what came next. The book went on to spend a remarkable 216 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, one of the longest runs in the list’s history, and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It did for Savannah what few books have ever done for a city: it turned the whole place into a destination.

In 1997, director Clint Eastwood brought the story to the screen, with Kevin Spacey as Jim Williams, Jude Law as Danny Hansford, and John Cusack as the Berendt-inspired narrator. Filming took place right on Monterey Square, and several real Savannahians appeared as themselves — including the unforgettable Lady Chablis. Suddenly the public wanted to know: is Savannah really like the book depicts it? Come see for yourself on one of our Savannah ghost tours, and you may decide the truth is stranger still.

Jim Williams and the Mercer House

The catalyst for the whole story is Jim Williams: an antiques dealer, historic preservationist, and self-made millionaire who arrived from a small Georgia town and rose to the top of Savannah society. He was famous for his charm, his wit, and the lavish Christmas parties he threw for the city’s elite.

In 1969, Williams bought a home that suited his ambitions perfectly. The grand Italianate mansion on Monterey Square had been designed by architect John Norris and begun around 1860 for General Hugh Weedon Mercer, the great-grandfather of the legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer. (Contrary to popular belief, neither General Mercer nor Johnny Mercer ever actually lived there — construction was interrupted by the Civil War and the house wasn’t finished until about 1868.) By the time Williams acquired it, the house had sat vacant for years, having last been used by the Shriners as their Alee Temple. Williams poured himself into an extraordinary restoration, transforming it into one of the most celebrated private homes in the South.

The Killing of Danny Hansford

Williams employed a young man named Danny Hansford as an assistant. Hansford, 21, was also Williams’ occasional lover — a volatile, troubled young man known for sudden, violent rages. Their relationship was turbulent, and in the early hours of May 2, 1981, it ended in gunfire inside the Mercer House.

Williams called police to report that he had shot and killed Hansford, and he maintained from the beginning that it was self-defense: that Hansford, in a rage, had fired at him first, and that he had shot back to save his own life. Prosecutors saw it differently, arguing that the physical evidence pointed to a scene that had been staged after the fact. A jury would ultimately have to decide — four times over.

What followed became one of the most extraordinary legal sagas in Georgia history. Jim Williams was tried four separate times for the same crime, the only person in the state ever to face that distinction. The earlier trials produced convictions that were overturned on appeal, and, eventually, a mistrial. Finally, after the case was moved to Augusta on a change of venue — away from the Savannah jury pool — Williams was acquitted in May 1989. The jury reportedly needed only about an hour. After eight years, he was a free man, and he returned at once to the Mercer House.

Minerva and the Root Doctors

Jim Williams was a firm believer in the old Lowcountry traditions of hoodoo, the folk magic rooted in Gullah Geechee and West African practice. Through his ordeal, he quietly called on the services of a root worker the book immortalized as Minerva — based on a real woman, Valerie Fennell Aiken Boles.

Boles was connected to the most famous root doctor the region ever produced, the legendary Dr. Buzzard of the Beaufort, South Carolina area. She was said to perform her most important work at his graveside. As the story goes, the half-hour before midnight was set aside for working good magic, and the half-hour after midnight for the darker kind — for settling scores. Some in Savannah still wonder whether that midnight work played any part in the verdict that finally set Jim Williams free.

The Curse of the Mercer House?

Here is where the story turns from courtroom drama to something harder to explain. On January 14, 1990 — just six months after his acquittal — Jim Williams died suddenly inside the Mercer House. He was 59, and the cause was given as heart failure. He was found on the floor of the study, by most accounts near the very spot where Danny Hansford had died nine years earlier.

He died in the same room, near the same spot, where it all began.

Was it simply a heart worn down by eight years of trials? Or was it something else — the settling of an old account, or a curse woven into the walls of the house itself? Savannah has never agreed on an answer.

And the tale runs deeper than even the book. The Mercer House has drawn legends of tragedy for generations, some documented and many disputed by the family and by historians — including the oft-repeated story of a young boy said to have fallen to his death from the roof. What’s certain is that this grand house on Monterey Square, now a museum on its ground floor, holds more history and more sorrow than any single book could contain. So what really happened at the Mercer House? Come walk Savannah with us after dark, and we’ll tell you everything we know — and everything we can’t explain.