First African Baptist Church
Organized in 1773 and constituted in 1777, First African Baptist Church is widely regarded as the oldest continuously active Black congregation in North America, its present brick sanctuary completed in 1859 by the hands of free and enslaved African Americans who made the bricks themselves. Beneath the lower-level floor lies a cramped four-foot crawlspace that sheltered freedom seekers along 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 that subfloor speak of footsteps and faint voices rising from the dark, odd sounds that recall the haunted tunnels of the nearby Pirates' House. 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. Here the cosmogram is said to keep watch, a circle drawn to appease the ancestral dead.
📍 23 Montgomery Street, Savannah, GA 31401, Savannah, GA · Get directions