They say artists are tortured souls. This is certainly the case with Conrad Aiken, American poet, author and playwright.
Family Background
Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Conrad Aiken was born in 1889, the eldest of four children born to wealthy parents Dr. and Mrs. William Ford Aiken. The family lived in this beautiful house at 228 East Oglethorpe Avenue in Savannah, Georgia. Sadly, the childhood of Conrad and his three siblings was not a happy one. Their parents argued constantly, and tension in the home was the norm.
Anna Potter Aiken was a charming and beautiful socialite, and as such loved to spend money on all the finer things in life. Dr. Aiken, a respected eye surgeon and inventor, suffered from mental illness. Today he may have been diagnosed with paranoid personality disorder, but back then he went undiagnosed. Continually anxious about being institutionalized by one family member or another, when asked the simply question, “How are you?” Dr. Aiken would invariably reply, “For an answer to the question, I have to refer you to my lawyer.”
The Tragic Day
In February of 1901, 11-year-old Conrad was filled with anxiety as he listened from his room as his parents argued about money. Unexpectedly he heard his father’s loud voice count, “One. Two. Three.” Next came Conrad’s mother’s piercing scream as a resounding gunshot went off, and then another. Conrad quietly tiptoed from his bedroom into his parents’ dark room to find both their lifeless bodies sprawled on the floor in blood. His father had murdered Conrad’s mother, then took his own life by a shot to the brain. Both were only age 36. The young boy immediately ran to the police station for help. In later years, he wrote, “After the desultory early-morning quarrel, came the half-stifled scream, and the sound of his father’s voice counting three, and the two loud pistol shots and he tiptoed into the dark room, where the two bodies lay motionless, and apart, and, finding them dead, found himself possessed of them forever.”
Conrad’s Adult Life
Conrad went on to live a successful yet haunted life. Like he wrote, although his parents were forever gone, they eternally possessed him. Multiple marriages and his own mental illness intertwined with his great prominence in the literary scene. While he wrote dreamlike, sometimes nightmarish poetry, Conrad also served proudly as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress and poet laureate for the state of Georgia.
Twelve years before his death in 1973, the poet was offered the opportunity to live in his parents’ old house at 228 East Oglethorpe Street free of charge. Drawn to his old home, but repulsed at the same time, he chose instead to purchase the house next door at number 230.
In his senior years, Conrad spent a significant amount of time in Savannah’s Bonaventure Cemetery where his parents are buried. He even had a marble bench built next to their graves which would later serve as his own tombstone.
Hauntings
Another doctor purchased the Aiken home at number 228 after Conrad Aiken’s death. He believed it to be haunted, seeing orbs and hearing countless strange noises, so he agreed to a paranormal investigation. An infrared video indicated more than 50 orbs, and a digital voice recording captured a male voice whispering, “Do you want to know what I know?” Investigators were led to the conclusion that the spirits of the Aiken parents are still living in the home as if nothing ever happened, and the home is considered one of the most haunted houses in Savannah, Georgia,
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