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Flagpole; Magazine
October 16, 1991
Ghost Fry by John Seawright
Frank Sanders’ Necktie Party
If you’re ever going to Toccoa or I-85 on Highway 106,
slowdown about a mile past the Franklin county courthouse
in Carnesville where the road forks just before the Inter
state. Look to the right and you’ll see the place where
William Tyre Franklin Sanders, one of Georgia’s first mass
murderers, was lynched on December 20,1886. The place
is still known as Sanders Tree, a patch of woods at the time
of the hanging, now an open field.
Sanders was born near Walhalla, South Carolina in
1864. He was a small pale man with black hair, a steeply
sloping forehead and a face whose two sides appeared to
belong to two different people. Sanders came from a
respectable family — his father was a preacher and a
postmaster. He married at 18, didn’t get along with his wife
and cut her throat from ear to ear. She survived and he
spent eleven months in the South Carolina penitentiary.
After his release he drifted through Tennessee and north
west Georgia working as a farm laborer. He returned to his
old haunts and fell into his old ways, stabbing one man,
axing another and finally gouging out his cousin's eyes with
his thumbs. His thumbplay attracted the authorities’ atten
tion and Sanders crossed the river to Hartwell, Georgia
where he was arrested and held until word came to turn him
loose provided he would stay out of South Carolina. Free
again, he headed up the road to Carnesville where he was
arrested in March 1886 for using obscene language in the
presence of females and fined fifty dollars. Unable to pay
the fine — about four month’s wages for a laborer — he was
about to be sent to the chain gang when John Swilling, a
prosperous farmer, "paid him out," paying the fine in return
for Sanders' services as an indentured farmhand, a com
mon practice at the time.
For months Frank Sanders worked in the cotton fields
and lived in Swilling’s house, taking his meals with Swilling,
his wife and the children, ages six, four and one. On
December 15 John Swilling went to town and sold the
year’s cotton crop. That evening around the fire he talked
about how much money he had made and mentioned that
he had the cash with him. Around midnight Sanders, armed
with an axe, went into the family’s bedroom in search of the
money. Swilling woke up, called out and got an axe in his
head by way of reply. Sanders then split Mrs. Swilling’s
head and, ignoring the baby between the corpses, went to
the trundle bed and killed the two older children. He then
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soaked the beds with kerosene, set fire to them and
returned to his room till the flames spread. Shoeless and
coatless, he ran to rouse the neighbors who immediately
grew suspicious on finding that the entire family had died
in their beds. Sanders disappeared but was found near
daybreak two miles away, claiming to be carrying the sad
By April ghosts were being sighted
nearly every night around Sanders Tree
news to the Swilling’s relatives. A doctor was summoned to
the scene and identified blood on the axe. The coroner
hastily assembled a coroner’s jury which grilled Sanders
and got a mocking, flippant confession which almost re
sulted in a lynching on the spot. The sheriff escorted his
prisoner to the jail followed closely by an angry crowd of
about fifty’ men. Sanders made it safely to jail where he
remained for four days in good spirits, chatting with report
ers about his criminal career.
Late Sunday night an orderly crowd of more than a
hundred citizens of Franklin county gathered on the court
house square. A committee of four was sent to the bailiff’s
house to request the Keys to the jail. Inside the tail the
citizens met their sheriff, listened to him deliver a short
homily on the rule of law and the right to jury trial, then went
about their business. Frank Sanders, hands tied behind his
back, was taken on horseback to the crossroads where the
noose was put on and two preachers prayed for his soul. As
the citizens bowed their heads in prayer a gun was fired, the
horse bolted and Frank Sanders was kicking the frosty air.
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Bad as Sanders’ death was, he had been spared a
worse fate. The citizen’s committee had originally voted to
chain him to a stump surrounded by fence rails and slowly
roast him to death. Their resolution was thwarted when a
local doctor reported that he had already paid Sanders five
dollars in advance for his cadaver. Sanders had sent the
money to his father and the doctor had made arrangements
to cook down the body for a nice office skeleton. Though the
gentlemen of Carnesville may have had their doubts about
due process, they were united in their respect for the
sacntity of contracts and private property. The doctor was
able to take receipt of his practically undamaged goods
with only a grudging sigh from his townsmen.
By April ghosts were being sighted nearly every night
around Sanders Tree. Among the apparitions were a large
crowd of children who danced wildly with lights in their
hands; a six-foot spectre, half man, half calf, with three
burning eyes; and, for the more literarily minded, a head
less figure mounted on a ghostly mule who pursued pas-
sersby with a swinging rope. Eighteen months after the
murders a ghost was seen in broad daylight near the
Swilling farm, though the newspaper account didn’t make
the connection: The same doctor who had come to the
murder scene was in his buggy with his servant when they
saw a woman in white with a black hat and bodice rush in
front of the horse. The servant pulled the reins, the woman
came alongside the buggy and, when the doctor spoke,
disappeared.
Six years after the lynching Sanders' ghost almost came
back to haunt Sheriff J.C. McCarter (who had not been
sheriff at the time of the lynching). McCarter was a Populist
running for re-election in a tough race against a Democrat
Both parties were wooing black voters. The editor of the
local Democratic paper in an open letter to black voters
asked them to ask Sheriff McCarter if he was in favor of
lynching. The sheriff replied: “Now, as to lynching.. .1 never
was in but one and the editor's father was with me..." The
subject was never raised again.
The Swilling family is buried in a common grave at
Confidence United Methodist Church just north of Avalon,
Georgia on Highway 17 halfway between Toccoa and
Lavonia; Frank Sanders' earthly remains are probably still
in Carnesville, resting quietly in somebody’s attic.
Copyright 1991, by John Seawrigh
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