Mercer-Williams House

Visitors and staff at the Mercer-Williams House describe a chilling presence in the study and elsewhere in the house, tied by most tellers to the night in 1981 when Jim Williams shot and killed his 21-year-old assistant, Danny Hansford, there; ghost-tour accounts add strange shadows, odd photographs and the feeling of being watched from the windows, and a boy, Tommy Downs, is said to have fallen to his death from the roof in 1969. Williams was tried four times for murder before being acquitted, and the case became the anchor of John Berendt's bestselling book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and its film adaptation. Construction on this Italianate mansion on Monterey Square began in 1860 for the family of General Hugh Mercer but was delayed by the Civil War, finishing in 1868. Williams, an antiques dealer and preservationist, later restored the house and died in it in 1990. It is now a museum owned by his sister.