First African Baptist Church
First African Baptist Church, organized in 1773 and constituted in 1777, is widely regarded as the oldest continuously active Black congregation in North America, its present brick sanctuary completed in 1859 by free and enslaved African Americans who made the bricks themselves. Beneath the lower-level floor hides a cramped four-foot crawlspace that sheltered freedom seekers on the Underground Railroad, ventilated by holes drilled in a diamond-and-cross pattern read as a BaKongo cosmogram, an African prayer symbol for birth, life, death, and rebirth.
Those who linger near the subfloor speak of footsteps and faint voices rising from the dark. Local lore holds that the spirits of those who hid below never fully left, and at least one church guide has admitted being too uneasy to descend alone.
📍 23 Montgomery Street, Savannah, GA 31401, Savannah, GA · Get directions