The first thing visitors notice at Wormsloe isn't the history. It's the tunnel. A mile and a half of live oaks arches over the entrance road off Skidaway Road, their branches draped in Spanish moss and knit together so tightly overhead that the light turns green and dim. It is one of the most photographed stretches of road in the American South, and it is the gateway to a scavenger hunt that, every Saturday in October, sends families down the trails in search of a colonial founder who has, in the event's cheerful phrasing, lost all of his Noble Bones.
"Where's Noble Bones? A Bone-Chilling Scavenger Hunt" runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturdays throughout October, beginning October 3, 2026, at Wormsloe State Historic Site. Admission is $3.25 to $12, and there is no reserved seating, no timed entry, no ticket window drama — you pay at the ranger station and you're off. The premise is simple and a little absurd in the best way: follow clues, find the skeletons, and if you find them all, you get a treat.
The mechanics, according to event listings, are modern. Participants start at the site's museum, where two QR codes wait. Scanning them delivers instructions and the first clue, which sets off a chain of discovery — each skeleton in the sequence conceals the next QR code and the next clue, drawing hunters deeper into the property. One family's account of the hunt describes the trail leading them to the most fitting possible resting place for a skeleton in October: the Noble family cemetery. The event is dog-friendly, with leashed pets welcome on the trails, though not inside buildings.
The name is the joke, and it's a good one. Noble Jones — the "Noble" of "Noble Bones" — was a real person, and the site is essentially his. Born in 1702, Jones was a carpenter who sailed from England in 1733 with James Oglethorpe and the first group of Georgia colonists. He survived the brutal early years of the colony — hunger, disease, and the constant threat of Spanish attack — and went on to wear an improbable number of hats: doctor, constable, Indian agent, Royal Councilor, and surveyor. He laid out the towns of Augusta and New Ebenezer. He also commanded a company of marines charged with defending the Georgia coast, and it was in that military role that Wormsloe was born.
In 1736 Jones obtained a grant of 500 acres on the Isle of Hope, a peninsula about ten miles southeast of Savannah, and built a fortified residence there. He used tabby — a concrete-like mixture of limestone, sand, and oyster shells — to construct the fortifications around 1740, and the surviving tabby ruin is among the oldest standing structures in Savannah. The name Wormsloe came from a place in England: the Wormslow (or Wormelow) Hundred in Herefordshire, echoing Jones's origins. In 1756 King George II formally granted Jones ownership of the estate, and in the 1750s he used a small corps of enslaved people to work the land, cultivating cotton, grains, vegetables, fruits, and mulberry trees. Jones died in 1775, at the very beginning of the American Revolution, and was buried at Wormsloe.
What makes the site unusual is what happened next. For nearly six decades after Jones's death, his descendants made only limited use of the estate — but they never let it go. Wormsloe is the oldest of Georgia's tidewater estates and has remained in the same family since the mid-1730s, passing through a remarkable sequence of uses: military stronghold, plantation, country residence, farm, tourist attraction, and finally historic site. The state of Georgia acquired most of the property in 1973, and Wormsloe opened to the public as a state historic site in 1979. The family home, built around 1830, still stands but remains private, occupied by Jones's descendants and not visible from the public grounds.
The oak avenue itself is not colonial. It was planted much later, in the 1890s, by Wymberley Jones De Renne, a descendant who returned to Wormsloe in 1893 and expanded the gardens. Roughly 400 live oaks went into the ground — one account ties the planting to 1891 and to the birth of his son, Wymberley Wormsloe De Renne — and they now form the allée that defines every visitor's first impression of the place.
That layered history is exactly what the scavenger hunt is built to move people through. The interpretive trail leads past the tabby ruins and along the marsh to the Colonial Life Area, where costumed demonstrators show off the tools and skills of 18th-century Georgia during special events. The museum holds artifacts unearthed on the property. The site's own framing is notably broad: its abundant cultural and natural resources, the park notes, have been shaped by the many inhabitants of the Isle of Hope across the centuries, including people of Native American, African, and European descent. A Halloween hunt that sends kids hunting for the scattered bones of a colonial founder is, in its goofy way, a tour of all of it.
The hunt is not a one-off. It has been running for years — a family's account of doing it dates back roughly six years — and it has become a fixture of Savannah's October calendar, appearing on seasonal roundups of things to do in the city alongside ghost tours and pumpkin patches. It also fits a particular niche: October in Savannah is famously spooky, but much of the seasonal programming is aimed at adults or built around scares. This is the opposite. It's a daylight, outdoors, all-ages activity on a property with real historical weight, priced so that a family can show up without planning ahead.
For anyone going, the practical notes are worth keeping in mind. The event runs rain or shine on Saturdays through October, so check conditions before setting out — the trails pass along marshland, and the site's own trail to Jones' Narrows, where the tabby ruins of the original house sit, has been known to close. Leashed dogs are welcome on the trails but not in buildings. And the reward for finding every skeleton is, per the listing, simply a treat — which, for a hunt built around a man who arrived in Georgia with nothing and ended up laying out towns and defending a coastline, feels about right.