It's been quite the adventure. One that I never planned for but one that keeps pulling me back in time after time.
It started with a trip to Savannah, one of the most beautiful cities I've ever
That's me on the Ghost Tour that started it all!
When I visited in 2017, my husband and I did a ghost tour and heard the story of sixteen-year-old, Irish, indentured servant, Alice Riley. The way the story goes, she arrived in a shipwreck, was assigned to a lecherous master; and when he showed up dead, she was accused of the murder and became the first woman hanged in the state of George. (though in full disclosure there are lots of twists and turns along the way! If you’d like to read the whole story, sign up for my newsletter here and I’ll send you a copy.)
Her story wouldn’t leave me alone. On the plane home I pestered my husband with questions.
How many sixteen-year-old girls are murderers?
What would make a sixteen-year-old girl get on a boat, by herself, to go to a new country?
The murder happened shortly after she arrived. What could possibly have happened in that time to make her angry enough to kill a man?
Would a girl have strangled someone to death with a necktie? It doesn’t seem like the murder weapon she’d choose, assuming she did it?
What was it like to be sixteen, a girl and Irish in a colony full of English who had just spent a hundred years at war with Ireland back home?
When I got home, I headed right to my friend Google to see what he had to say. Many times over the last three hundred years people have resurrected the story, sometimes with new twists, sometimes just repeating the same old stories.
But I had the advantage of a whole new age of this thing called the internet. Over the last ten to fifteen years archives of writing by the original colonists of Savannah have been uploaded. Man, these people liked to write. They journaled, sent letters, and wrote articles in newspapers. I was able to dive in deeply to the words of the people who lived Alice’s story.
And boy, were there surprises.
Not only did I get the chance to experience what happened to Alice, I was dropped into the middle of one of the most fascinating social experiments in American history, which was Savannah itself.
Whoa now. I wasn’t expecting social experiments in 1734. Let me explain.
Georgia was a no mans land between the British colonies that ended in South Carolina, Spanish occupied Florida; and the French and Indian occupied west. A man named James Oglethorpe (who deserves a book all by himself cause he’s stupid interesting) asked the king to let him and some of his friends start a colony which would be for people down on their luck, because he wanted to prove a man could be greater than the circumstances he was born into.
Each man would get a house and land and all the supplies they needed to get started…for free.
Savannah would be the first city in Georgia and would be laid out based on the design of ancient Roman cities.
There were a couple of caveats…. No lawyers. No Catholics. He and his friends would rule like it was a small kingdom. Take a minute to let your imagination run wild and imagine all that could go right….and wrong.
But don’t let me get sidetracked.
I dove in and researched deep. It was my part time hobby around work and crazy family life for several years.
Then came 2020 and Covid….which for me brought the key to a treasure trove. Some of the online archives that were previously closed to the public opened their doors to everyone which gave me access to even better stuff.
You see…all along the way, I have been rooting for Alice. It’s a ghost story folks…so you know she dies…but I wanted her to live. She was so strong, so brave, and had so much to overcome even in the best of times. Trust me…I played out every scenario where she gets to secretly live and escape to a better life. I didn’t want to believe the ghost story was true and getting access to these new documents opened up all kinds of doors of new possibilities.
They gave me new insight into the cesspool of people and politics Alice got dropped into when she arrived in Savannah as a sixteen-year-old Irish indentured servant. These are insights no author of the Alice Riley story has ever had. I can’t wait to finish this novel so you too can experience the true story of Alice Riley.
There is so much more to share!
If you want to follow along, sign up for the newsletter and I’ll see you back here for updates as my journey continues.
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