When Aiken was 11 years old, he overheard his parents arguing in the night. Gunshots ensued and young Conrad found their bodies: one murder and one suicide. Conrad ran down the street to the police station on the corner. After this traumatic event, Aiken was sent to live with relatives in Massachusetts. However, 50 years later Aiken returned to Savannah and took up residence in the house next door, explaining that, his parents' tragic deaths notwithstanding, he had remembered the neighborhood fondly.

A contemporary and close friend of famed modernist poet T.S. Eliot, Aiken himself was a writer of some renown. His work was known for its lush imagery, and his contemporaries admired the flow of his language, which reflected his interest in stream of consciousness, a description of the music of thought and of life. Stream of consciousness was, in Aiken's day, a new way of looking at human psychology, developed by Sigmund Freud, and, in both prose and poetry, Aiken explored the constant change of a person's existence. For his part, Freud admired Aiken's writing and kept a copy of "Blue Voyage" in his reception area.

Aiken's volume "Selected Poems" took the Pulitzer Prize in 1930. Two decades later, his "Collected Poems" won the National Book Award and 1969 brought the National Medal of Literature. Despite the international accolades, however, his birthplace was always close to Aiken's heart and, later in life, he commented, "In a way, I never stopped writing about Savannah."

Indeed, in such works as "Ushant," which is autobiographical fiction, and his poem, "The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones," Aiken paid tribute to his native city: "The house in Broad Street," (current-day Oglethorpe), "red brick, with nine rooms/the weedgrown graveyard with its row of tombs/the jail from which imprisoned faces grinned/at stiff palmettos flashing in the wind. ..."

The graveyard refers to Colonial Cemetery, situated across the street from Mary Marshall Row. This was a popular place for Savannah children to play, as it was poorly tended and full of hiding places and fascinating relics from the city's past, and here Conrad and his father would shoot Roman candles on Christmas Eve. On the eastern edge of the cemetery was the old city jail, at the front of which was the police station to which young Conrad fled the night of his parents' deaths.

Aiken served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1950 to 1952 and he is widely recognized as one of the most musical of America's modernist poets. When he died in 1973, he was buried in Bonaventure Cemetery. His monument is a simple marble bench inscribed with the legend "Cosmos Mariner, Destination Unknown," a fitting tribute for a man who sought to elucidate the world's mysteries through the life of the mind.

Many thanks to Robert Edgerly, whose Hauntings Tour Inc. walking tours leave Chippewa Square Tuesdays-Saturdays. (921) 234-9255.