THE FORSYTH ESTATE MYSTERY: The Forgotten Woman, The Hidden Children, and the Darkest Secret in Savannah’s History (1841)

The story began, as so many Southern ghost stories do, with a house. A magnificent house with white columns, expansive gardens, and polished verandas that spoke of old money and older sins.

But the story of Forsyth Estate is not folklore and it is not a ghost story told to tourists on late-night Savannah tours.

It is a real historical case, pieced together from ledgers, hidden journals, unearthed graves, church letters, and an underground chamber discovered more than a century after the events occurred.

At the center of it stands a woman whose name was never meant to survive: Elellanena Bowmont, an enslaved woman purchased in 1835, whose life and the lives of her four children were erased, concealed, and rewritten by the man who owned her, who also fathered all of those children.

In the winter of 1835, Forsyth Estate stood just three miles east of Savannah’s historic district, a symbol of Southern opulence. The plantation owner, Thomas Harrington, had recently lost his wife to consumption.

Records indicate that for weeks he visited the slave market, inspecting young women with an intensity that concerned neighbors. When he purchased Elellanena, 22 years old with exceptional domestic skills, people later suggested the reason had nothing to do with housekeeping.

What happened next was quietly recorded in scattered ledgers and passed down through oral histories for nearly 200 years.

Within months of her arrival, Elellanena was promoted from field labor to household service, a rare assignment that placed her under Harrington’s direct supervision.

By late 1836, plantation records show expenses for items not typically provided to enslaved women, such as fine fabric, leather shoes, and even a silver locket, a receipt of which was found decades later inside Harrington’s personal Bible.

A cook from a nearby plantation testified years later through her grandson’s oral history that everyone in the big houses knew. She was not treated like the others and was set apart.

In spring 1837, Elellanena became pregnant. She gave birth on November 18 to a daughter whom Harrington named Caroline after his mother.

This was highly unusual because children born to enslaved mothers were rarely acknowledged by their white fathers, let alone given names from the paternal family line.

Harrington documented the birth in his journal, writing tenderly about the child’s eyes. But Caroline lived only eight months. She died of fever in July 1838 and was buried not with the enslaved community beyond the north field but in a small grave beneath an oak tree in the garden.

A visiting merchant’s wife described seeing the young mother kneeling at the gravesite, completely still as if emptied of life. Harrington watched but said nothing.

Within months, Elellanena was pregnant again. Her son, James, was born in May 1839. He too died before his first birthday and was buried beneath the oak tree.

The third pregnancy followed, then the fourth. Each birth followed an increasingly disturbing pattern: privileged treatment, secrecy, no record in the plantation ledger, private baptisms conducted in the house, and immediate burial in the garden instead of the enslaved cemetery. No infant survived more than a few months.

Medical records later revealed that the plantation physician began visiting the estate more frequently after the second child’s death.

In his journals, preserved after his death in 1872, he described the delicate situation in the Harrington household and mentioned administering laudanum for nerves. His notes suggest that each child was born alive but frail, with illnesses he could not identify.

After the death of the third child in August 1841, everything collapsed.

Three days after the burial, Harrington left for Savannah. When he returned unexpectedly that evening, something occurred that was never fully documented.

His journal read: “Matters at home in disarray. Elellanena confined to her quarters. Situation requires careful management.”

Within days, Elellanena disappeared from the estate.

A search party was sent. She was found alive in an abandoned hunting cabin four miles from the main house. The overseer’s log stated she was unharmed but unwell in mind and she was returned to the house under watch.

From that moment on, Elellanena was imprisoned. Records show her original room was emptied and she was relocated to a locked third-floor chamber with boarded windows.

The physician visited twice weekly. His notes from this period mention hallucinations, refusal to eat, and statements that she heard the children calling from beneath the oak.

Dr. Thorne wrote that she was sedated regularly.

On October 12, 1841, Harrington’s journal contains a single cryptic line: “It is finished. May God have mercy on us all.” The next day, the third-floor room was emptied and cleaned. Elellanena vanished from all records after that date.

Savannah’s archives contain no death certificate. The plantation records make no mention of her again. Her existence appears to have been deliberately erased from official documents.

But history has a way of resurfacing.

After the Civil War, the estate fell into ruin. In 1872, when a lumber company purchased the land and cut down the garden’s massive oak tree against Harrington’s explicit instructions, workers discovered something horrifying: four sets of small remains.

They expected three, the known children. But there were four, the last belonging to a newborn whose existence had never been recorded.

This discovery might have faded into obscurity if not for the death of Dr. Thorne. Among his papers was an envelope labeled confidential. Inside was a note dated October 11, 1841:

“EB delivered of stillborn male infant during night. Already wrapped for burial when I arrived. Patient in weakened condition. Recommended removal to hospital but owner refused. Fear the outcome is predetermined.”

The doctor never explained who wrapped the infant or why the burial took place secretly at night.

The trail went cold.

In 1969, a University of Georgia graduate student researching enslaved women discovered a bill of sale dated October 13, 1841, one day after Elellanena’s disappearance. A domestic woman, aged 28, in delicate health, was sold by Harrington to a plantation owner in Louisiana.

Shipping records from Savannah list an unnamed woman who died at sea two days later aboard the Carolina Star.

One historian believes this was Elellanena.

But the story does not end there.

In 2012, ground-penetrating radar surveys detected a buried chamber beneath the former estate. Inside a decayed chest were four cloth dolls, a knitted baby cap, a prayer sheet, and, most astonishingly, Elellanena’s own journal, preserved enough to be partially legible.

Entries revealed her agony, her grief, and in the final months, her chilling clarity:

“The third has returned to the stars. The fourth grows inside me. I know what I must do. There are gentler doorways to the next world than those this place provides. My grandmother taught me how to find them. May they forgive me.”

This line has divided historians for more than a decade. Some insist she meant spiritual doorways. Others believe she confessed, in code, to ending her children’s lives to spare them a life of slavery.

A letter found behind a church wall strengthens the latter theory. Written by an assistant minister who helped arrange her transport from Savannah, it reads:

“She spoke of the children sleeping beneath the oak. ‘I sang to them as they passed,’ she said. Whether this was mercy or crime, God alone may judge.”

Did she kill the children? Did Harrington? Were they buried naturally or by force? The truth died with them.

But the memory did not.

In 1992, a small historical marker was erected on the shopping center parking lot that now occupies the land. It mentions only the estate, not Elellanena or the children.

In 2015, a Harrington descendant funded a new memorial. A bronze sculpture now stands where the oak tree once grew, a woman gazing upward, arms empty yet lifted as if releasing something unseen.

Four stone markers curve in a semicircle before her, representing the four lost children.

Visitors, often anonymously, leave white roses at its base.

Locals claim that on humid August nights, around the anniversaries of the children’s deaths, a woman in period clothing is seen walking through the garden, pausing at each symbolic grave before disappearing into the air.

Whether these sightings are supernatural or emotional echoes, they reflect an undeniable truth: some stories refuse to stay buried.

Elellanena Bowmont, a woman stripped of name, autonomy, and humanity in official records, now lives on through the fragments she left behind, her journals, carvings, herbs, letters, and the devotion she carried to her children.

Forsyth Estate was built to erase her.

History has restored her.