Savannah's only white Christmas featured this ghostlike Santa sighting

It may not rival the ghostly encounters of Ebenezer Scrooge, but a mysterious tale from Savannah’s only known white Christmas is an apt addition to the city’s haunted history.

Kristin Lee’s account from Christmas Eve of 1989 is second-hand, but her source’s reputation was impeccable and the evidence compelling.

Her late husband, Larry Lee, would revisit his story every holiday season for a quarter-century until his death in 2015. And he was rarely at a loss for an audience.

Larry worked for the U.S. Department of Justice for more than 24 years, rising through the ranks to become assistant U.S. attorney for the Southeastern District of Georgia.

After moving to Savannah in 1983, he became a preservation force to be reckoned with as president of the Savannah Downtown Neighborhood Association (DNA), chairman of the Historic Savannah Foundation and influential member of the city’s Historic District Ordinance Review Committee.

But Larry was just as passionate about people, according to a tribute from DNA leaders published in the Morning News after his death in 2015.

“Two guiding passions motivated Larry's volunteer service: Protect Savannah's historic environment and support Savannah's less fortunate citizens,” Melinda Allen, then-president, and Henry Reed, past president of DNA, wrote. “He fought hard for these causes but always as a true gentleman. Larry had no personal enemies, only issues to resolve. And resolve them he did.”

But most of those advocacy efforts would come after Larry’s haunting holiday experience in 1989.

Savannah has only had 1 white Christmas. Do you remember the historic day?

Photos: 61 degrees in Savannah with a 100 percent chance of snowy Christmas festival fun

'Some fool grabbed his camera'

More than 3 inches of snow had fallen in Savannah Dec. 22 and 23, ensuring what would be the city’s only white Christmas on record and setting the stage for Larry’s tale, which Kristin recalls him telling every holiday season from the time they were married in 2000.

“We always loved that story,” she said in the living room of the East Perry Street home she shares with her now-husband, Randy Hobbs, and their dogs, Maisey and Barney. “He grew up in Charleston and Atlanta before moving here, so he was just a Southern storyteller.”

In the wee hours of Christmas morning in 1989, with his children all snug in their beds and presents under the tree, Lee slipped into the cold night air to experience the quiet majesty.

“Some fool grabbed his camera and went out at 2 a.m. to get the pictures before footprints or rising temps ruined it all,” he recalled in a Facebook post a year before he died.

He headed from his home on Gordon Street to Whitefield Square where he snapped a shot of the signature gazebo, strung with white Christmas lights, festooned with red ribbons and framed by snow.

‘I swear, no one was around!’

The instant gratification of digital cameras was still years away, so Larry had to wait until the film was developed to view his work.

When he got his first glance at the print, something unexpected struck him.

Illuminated by surrounding post lights, the figure of what appeared to be man with a nest of snow-white hair and matching beard and sporting a bright-red coat looked as though he was seated on the right side of the gazebo. The man’s hands rested on the bench beside him, as if he’d decided to take in the serene scene while on a brief break from his appointed rounds.

Larry was mystified.

“He’d say, ‘I just wanted to take a picture of the gazebo in the snow, and I swear, no one was around!’” Kristen remembers him insisting. “’I swear up and down no one was around. And then we got the pictures developed, and there was Santa.’”

The photo, and Larry’s account of the mystery, became a Christmas tradition in the Lee household. Kristin said she continued to hang the framed image every holiday season in its traditional place on the foyer wall of the home she and Larry moved into not long after they were married.

“Actually, last year, I left it out all year,” she added. “It really is a good picture.”

As for the humanlike figure – whose gauzy appearance adds to the photo’s ghostly feel – Larry focused on the visible evidence like the lawyer he was and left assumptions of supernatural influence to others, Kristin recalled.

"He never really tried to explain it," she noted. "He just kind of believed that strange things happen in Savannah."

Hobbs, her current husband, concurred.

"Stranger (stuff) than that has gone on," he concluded.

Kristin followed up with an email update Monday morning.

"You might be interested to know that the night after you and (photographer) Richard (Burkhart) were here, the framed picture fell off the wall, and the frame broke up into pieces," she wrote. "The glass didn't break, and the photo wasn't harmed. It's now back in another frame."

John Deem covers climate change and the environment in coastal Georgia. He can be reached at jdeem@gannett.com.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah's only white Christmas featured a ghostly Santa sighting