After Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil Read Online Free

collapsed. Some believed that a sailor who once lived in the house had committed suicide by hanging himself in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Jim later recalled that when the house was moved, there was an old crypt on the lot underneath the house, but no one thought to investigate it then. By the time Jim thought of checking out the crypt, it had already been covered up.
     
    As time went on, Jim’s charismatic personality, expertise in antiques and dedication to furthering the preservation of homes in the historic district earned him a growing number of friends in Savannah’s old-money class. He was also making inroads with influential bankers like Mills B. Lane Jr. Lane was the head of Citizens and Southern National Bank, the largest bank in the South, and a major force in Georgia politics. When Lane returned from Atlanta to live in Savannah, the city of his birth, Jim sold him a lot across the street from his house on St. Julien. Good neighbors and friends for years, they used to walk around the neighborhood drinking wine and talking about the restoration of downtown Savannah.
     
    Eventually, Jim sold the Hampton Lillibridge house, despite its notoriety, or perhaps because of it. Subsequent owners of the house have reported a number of strange events, like hearing inexplicable music or furniture moved around in empty rooms on the floor above, but the ghostly events did not have the frequency or intensity that had existed when Jim owned it. Most of the unusual happenings were experienced by people who did not live in the house.
     

Chapter 6: The Gods Smiled
     
    Until the mid-1960s, things were lean for Jim. The profit margins on sales of restorations and antiques were insufficient for Jim’s driving ambition. He would take his earnings and put small down payments on a number of properties, hoping that he would be able to eventually be able to earn enough to buy them outright or get enough in loans to secure them.
     
    At one point, Jim scrounged up an extra $5,000 to buy Cabbage Island, just below Wilmington Island in Wassau Sound on the Georgia coast, where he where he and his friends could drink, fish and party. Little did he know what this dubious piece of vacation real estate would do for his fortunes. Cabbage Island is a large marsh island with very little land mass and is virtually under six feet of water at high tide.
     
    In
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil
, John Berendt suggests that Jim’s purchase of the island was an example of his business cunning, because he made a small fortune selling the island to Kerr McGee, who wanted to develop the large phosphate deposits on the island. Kerr McGee bought the island from Jim in 1966 for $660,000. According to Joe Goodman, the island was strictly a party place and he never mentioned anything to his friend about phosphates or any other intrinsic value of the island.
     
    According to Tonya D. Clayton of the National Audubon Society, in 1968, Kerr McGee also purchased nearby Little Tybee Island for the same purpose as Cabbage Island two years earlier. When Kerr McGee petitioned the state for a permit to strip mine phosphates from deposits 40 feet below the marsh surfaces, there was a public outcry and the state passed a law protecting all Georgia tidal marshes from strip mining.
     
    Jim’s sudden treasure was a watershed moment in his career. It was an enormous jumpstart to his ability to invest in important properties, lavish restorations, high-value antiques, and collectable treasures. Now he had the means to go over to Europe several times a year and purchase British and European antiques at excellent prices that he could mark up substantially when he sold them to customers in the U.S. He would attend auctions at Christie’s, Sotheby’s and other auction houses to buy for commercial purposes, as well as for his personal collection of Fabergé.
     
    Jim explained to Joe, who now worked for Jim doing odd jobs, how he was able to get such valuable antiques